The Art of (not) Growing up. Sex and Sexuality Education – on Two Poems by Izabela Filipiak

Abstract

In Izabela Filipiak’s poems, the process of education is always initiated, guided and finished by a parent, therefore it is one-sided and imposed. It “impedes” the maturation of personality that is full, self-owned and independent from the parental one. The viewpoint adopted in the poems is the perspective of a girl who wants to rebel against the imposed identification with parental patterns of personality – also sexual patterns and heteroerotic identification. However, the main character concentrates on her educators’ needs and desires instead of “listening” to herself and her own needs. In this context, education and growing-up change into training and imprisonment in someone else’s perception of the self. If a child feels internal resistance against the imposed models, then this aspect of its biography becomes traumatic. Growing up does not become achieving fullness, but rather resembles molding Golem or Frankenstein, with the “monstrosity” of a person. The child grows up at the price of her (symbolic) death, forgetting about her own (meta-social) desires and needs. The relation with the parents is violation and violence that is named “love” in the described system. The rejection of their pedagogical goals becomes not only the parental failure, but also the failure of social order. Fearing anarchy, the girl resignedly subdues herself to pedagogical violence.