Kościół, polityka, warunki życia – źródła irytacji homoseksualnych kobiet
The Church, politics, life conditions – sources of homosexual women’ irritation

Summary/Abstract: The issue of homosexual women’s functioning is more and more often raised in social sciences, however there is still a lack of some significant data showing in details each dimension of their lives. The construct of quality of life includes aspects that can be used to diagnose the situation of the interesting social group to a great extent. Within its components I organised the conceptual frame that was a point of reference to interviews; it evolved during the research development. Qualitative analysis and interpretation of empirical material that was collected by the method of individual cases and through observation, allowed me to categorize and to code the data; then the cases were simultaneously described (the method of continuous comparing). Presented data was collected for my master thesis titled ‘The quality of life of homosexual women— cases study’. The research question mentioned in the article: ‘which aspects of quality of life of the researched homosexual women arouse their irritation?’ was not included in the initial conceptual frame. It was stated when I noticed that such an emotional agitation occurs simultaneously among some of the women (eight interlocutors were researched) while speaking about certain interviewed problems. Researched women feel irritation when the following issues are brought up: life conditions in Poland, the national politics and their faith and religiosity. The last aspect is connected to two issues: the Church involvement in political and social life and the attitude of that institution towards nonheteronormative people. Researching the quality of life in a specific trend (comparatively-descriptive) requires the relation to data representing the population of Poland. S Such a comparison shows that homosexual women’s opinion referring to first three questions is analogous to the opinion of other residents of our country—their irritation has its basis in socio-political situation, it is not conditioned by the sexual orientation. The relation Church verus nonheteronormative people raises anger of my interlocutors as they are the members of the social group, in which a negative message of the mentioned institution is directed. The quality of life of homosexual women in the context of foregoing aspect is lower than of the other members of our society; in the connection to remaining questions it can be stated that the quality of life is on the same level. It seems that in this aspect and in the context of emotional agitation of nonheteronormative people, in the face of specific problems, there should be further research conducted. The results could contribute to the improvement of the quality of their functioning and to designing anti-homophobic and anti-discriminatory activities.

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