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Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism and the Family1 Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism and the Family1 Anne McClintock All nationalismsare gendered,all are invented,snd all are dangerous- dangerous,not in EricHobsbawm's sense as havingto be opposed,but in the sense of representing relations to political power and to the technologiesof violence.Nationalism, as ErnestGellner notes, invents nationswhere they donot exist, andmost modern nations, despite their appeal to an august and immemorialpast, are of recent invention (Gellner,1964). Benedict Anderson warns, however, that Gellnertends to assimilate 'invention'to 'falsity' rather than to 'imagining'and 'creation'.Anderson, by contrast,views nationsas 'imaginedcommuni- ties' in the sense that they are systems of cultural representation wherebypeople come to imagine a shared experienceof identification with an extendedcommunity (Anderson, 1991: 6). As such, nations are not simply phantasmagoriaof the mind, but are historicaland insti- tutional practices through which social differenceis invented and performed.Nationalism becomes, as a result, radicallyconstitutive of people'sidentities, throughsocial contests that are frequentlyviolent and always gendered.But if the invented nature of nationalismhas found wide theoreticalcurrency, explorations of the genderingof the nationalimaginary have been conspicuouslypaltry. All nations dependon powerfulconstructions of gender.Despite nationalisms'ideological investment in the idea of popular unity, nations have historicallyamounted to the sanctionedinstitutionaliz- ationof genderdifference. No nationin the worldgives womenand men the same accessto the rights and resourcesof the nation-state.Rather than expressingthe floweringinto time of the organic essence of a timeless people, nations are contested systems of cultural represen- tation that limit and legitimizepeoples' access to the resourcesof the nation-state.Yet with the notable exceptionof Frantz Fanon, male theorists have seldom felt moved to explore how nationalism is FemInIstReuiew No 44, Summer 1993 62 FeministReview implicatedin gender power.As a result, as CynthiaEnloe remarks, nationalismshave Ctypicallysprung from masculinized memory, mascu- linizedhumiliation and masculinizedhope' (Enloe, 1989: 44). GeorgeSantayana, for one, gives voice to a well-establishedmale view:COur nationalism is like ourrelationship to women:too implicated in our moral nature to be changed honourably,and too accidental to be worth changing'.Santayana's sentence could not be said by a woman, for his Cour'of national agency is male, and his male citizen stands in the same symbolicrelation to the nation as a man stands to a woman.Not only are the needs of the nationhere identified with the frustrationsand aspirationsof men, but the representationof male national power depends on the prior constructionof gender difference. For Gellner,the very definitionof nationhoodrests on the male recognitionof identity:CMen are of the same nation if and only if they recognizeeach other as beingfromthe samenation.' (Gellner, 1964) For Etienne Balibar, such recognitionaligns itself inevitably with the notionof a Crace'structured about the transmissionof male powerand property:CUltimately the nationmust align itself, spirituallyas well as physicallyor carnally,with the C4race",the C4patrimony"to be protected fromall degradation'(Balibar, 1991, my emphasis).Even Fanon, who at other momentsknew better, writes 'Thelook that the native turns on the settlertown is a lookof lust . to sit at the settler'stable, to sleep in the settler's bed, with his wife if possible. The colonizedman is an enviousman' (Fanon, 1963: 30). ForFanon, both colonizer and colonized are hereunthinkingly male, and the manichaeanagon of decolonization is wagedover the territorialityof female,domestic space. All too often in male nationalisms,gender differencebetween women and men serves to symbolicallydefine the limits of national differenceand power between men. Excludedfrom direct action as nationalcitizens, women are subsumedsymbolically into the national bodypolitic as its boundaryand metaphoric limit: CSingapore girl, you're a great way to fly.' Womenare typically construedas the symbolic bearers of the nation, but are denied any direct relation to national agency.As Elleke Boehmernotes in her fine essay, the Cmotherland'of male nationalismmay thus Cnotsignifbr C4home" and C4source"to women' (Boehmer,1991: 5). Boehmernotes that the male rolein the nationalist scenariois typicallyCmetonymic', that is, men are contiguouswith each other and with the national whole. Women,by contrast,appear cin a metaphoricor symbolic role' (Boehmer, 1991:6). In an important intervention,Nira Yuval-Davisand Floya Anthias thus identify five major ways in which women have been implicated in nationalism (Yuval-Davisand Anthias, 1989: 7): * as biologicalreproducers of the membersof nationalcollectivities * as reproducersof the boundariesof nationalgroups (through restric- tions on sexualor maritalrelations) * as activetransmitters and producersof the nationalculture Nationand Family 63 s as symbolicsignifiers of nationaldifference * as activeparticipants in nationalstruggles Nationalismis thus constitutedfrom the very beginningas a gendered discourse,and cannotbe understoodwithout a theoryof genderpower. Nonethe less, theoriesof nationalism reveal a doubledisavowal. If male theoristsare typicallyindifferent to the genderingof nations,feminist analyses of nationalismhave been lamentablyfew and far between. Whitefeminists, in particular,have been slowto recognizenationalism as a feminist issue. In much Western,socialist feminism, as Yuval- Davis andAnthias point out, <[i]ssuesof ethnicityand nationalityhave tendedto be ignored.' A feminist theory of nationalismmight be strategicallyfourfold: investigating the gendered formationof sanctioned male theories; bringinginto historicalvisibility women's active culturaland political participationin nationalformations; bringing nationalist institutions into criticalrelation with othersocial structures and institutions,while at the sametime payingscrupulous attention to the structuresof racial, ethnic and class power that continue to bedevil privilegedforms of temlmsm.^ * ^ The national family of man A paradoxlies at the heart of most national narratives.Nations are frequentlyfigured through the iconographyof familial and domestic space. The term Cnation'derives from Cnatio':to be born.We speak of nationsas Cmotherlands'and Cfatherlands'.Foreigners Cadopt' countries that are not their native homes,and are Cnaturalized'into the national family. We talk of the Family of Nations, of Chomelands'and Cnative' lands. In Britain, immigrationmatters are dealt with at the Home Office;in the United States, the Presidentand his wife are called the First Family. Winnie Mandelawas, until her recent fall from grace, honouredas SouthAfrica's CMother of the Nation'.In this way, nations are symbolicallyfigured as domestiogenealogies.Yet, at the same time, sincethe midnineteenth century in the West,Cthe family' itself has been figuredas the antithesisof history. The familytrope is importantin at least two ways.First, the family offers a Cnatural'figure for sanctioning social hierarchy within a putativeorganic unity of interests.Second, it offersa Cnatural'trope for figuringhistorical time. After 1859 and the adventof socialDarwinism, Britain'semergent national narrative took increasing shape around the image of the evolutionaryFamily of Man. The Cfamily'offered an indispensablemetaphoric figure by whichhierarchical (and, one might add,often contradictory) social distinctions could be shapedinto a single historicalgenesis narrative.Yet a curiousparadox emerges. The family as a metaphoroffered a single genesis narrativefor national history, while, at the same time, the family as an institutionbecame voided of history.As the nineteenthcentury drew on, the familyas an institution 64 FeministReview was figured as existing, by natural decree, beyond the commodity market,beyond politics, and beyondhistory proper.(Davidoff, L. and Hall, C, 1987)The familythus became,at one and the same time, both the organizingfigure for national history, as well as its antithesis. EdwardSaid has pointedto a transitionin the late Victorianupper middleclass froma cultureof'filiation' (familial relations) to a cultureof 'affiliation'(non-familial relations). Said arguesthat a perceivedcrisis in the late Victorianupper-middle-class family took on the aspect of a pervasive cultural affliction.The decay of filiation was, he argues, typicallyattended by a secondmoment - the turn to a compensatory orderof affiliation,which might variously be an institution,a vision, a credo,or a vocation.While retaining the powerfuldistinction between filiationand affiliation,I wish to complicatethe linear thrust of Said's story.In the courseof the nineteenthcentury, the socialfunction of the great service families (whichhad been invested in filiative rituals of patrilinealrank and subordination) became displaced on to the national bureaucracy.So, too, the filiativeimage ofthe familywas projectedon to emergingaffiliative institutions as their shadowy,naturalized form. Thus, I argue,the filiativeorder did not disappear:rather it flourished as a metaphoricafter-image, reinvented within the new ordersof the nation-state, the industrial bureaucracy,and imperial capitalism. Increasingly,filiation took an imperialshape, as the culturalinvention of the evolutionaryFamily of Manwas projectedboth on to the national metropolisand the colonialbureaucracy
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