DOCSLIB.ORG

Gender and the Rise of the Global Right

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Gender and the Rise of the Global Right Agnieszka Graff Ratna Kapur Suzanna Danuta Walters Introduction: Gender and the Rise of the Global Right ig feminist sigh. When we started thinking about this special issue, we B knew it was important. The warning signs of a global rightward turn were pretty obvious. But truth be told, it’s worse than we thought. Every- where you turn—even in locales thought safely social democratic if not so- cialist—some version of right-wing populist, xenophobic, demagogic conser- vatism seems to be on the rise, if not fully in place. And if you have any doubt about the way this rightward turn is anchored in and in many places moti- vated by antifeminist misogyny and toxic masculinity, consider the specter of Judith Butler, burned in effigy for advocating “gender ideology,” in Brazil (Jaschik 2017); the assassination of black, bisexual feminist activist Marielle Franco, following the impeachment of Brazilian president Dilma Roussef (Phillips 2018; see also Sosa, in this issue); the assassination of Gauri Lankesh, Indian journalist, feminist activist, and outspoken critic of the Hindu Right (Mondal 2017); or the women mowed down in Toronto by a man bent on revenge against women he imagined didn’t give him the time or the sex or the love he believed was his to have (Beauchamp 2018). In this special issue of Signs, the contributors address the complex and powerful relationship between gender and the rise of the global Right. Resis- tance to gender equality is not—as some left-wing commentators seem to believe—just one of many aspects of right-wing value systems, a “cultural” aspect of a phenomenon whose roots lie in economic developments and neo- liberalism. Rather, as the articles in this issue make evident, antagonism to- ward feminism is both a sentiment at the heart of the Right’s value system and a political strategy, a platform for organizing and for recruiting massive support. The new populist Right is a reaction to neoliberalism, yes. But it is also a new stage in the culture wars. Gender conservatism has in recent years become the lingua franca of an otherwise diverse global trend. It is what brings together right-wing activists from otherwise distant walks of life: be- lievers and nonbelievers, nationalists and universalists, populists who demon- ize global capital and traditional Reagan/Thatcher-style conservatives with a neocon love for the market. So, while the new global Right is by no means a unified political movement, there does exist a global antifeminism—a coun- [Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2019, vol. 44, no. 3] © 2019 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2019/4403-0001$10.00 This content downloaded from 140.233.002.214 on July 24, 2019 12:03:30 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 542 y Graff, Kapur, and Walters termovement to transnational feminism, an internally diverse global coalition to roll back gender equality. People who live thousands of miles apart and otherwise have little in common are now sharing the same videos on Reddit and 4Chan and signing the same petitions on platforms like CitizenGo: against gay marriage, against abortion rights, against “gender ideology,” against “political correctness.” Meanwhile, the leaders of this transnational antifem- inist (counter)culture are connected in organizations such as the World Con- gress of Families or the more recent Agenda Europe. The new cohesiveness on the Right has been brewing for some time, as we see in Catholic, Evangel- ical Protestant, and Muslim coalitions against the use of “gender” in human rights treaties (Scott 2013; see also Mary Anne Case and Elizabeth Corre- dor’s articles in this issue); in right-wing assaults on Muslims (particularly veiled women) throughout Europe and North America; and even in the use of gender to promote right-wing agendas, such as responses to violence against women that involve the expansion of the carceral state. Since the 1995 World Conference on Women in Beijing, and arguably before, right-wing forces have been collaborating in what Clifford Bob has called the “Baptist- burka network” (2012, 36; see also Buss and Herman 2001; Butler 2004).1 As evidenced by the contributions in this issue, the centrality of gender to right-wing movements and discourses is a complex transnational phenom- enon that manifests in countries as diverse as Argentina, Brazil, Germany, In- dia, Ireland, the Philippines, Russia, Turkey, and the United States. And while the term “global Right” may be contested, it is intended to capture the anti- feminist, antiminority positions that appear to be in ascendance in different geographical locations, including in liberal democracies. The global Right is political and ideological, and it lends momentum to—though it is by no means synonymous with—recent populist movements. Its politics are deployed in di- verse historical, economic, cultural, and religious contexts. It emerges as a mi- sogynist, racist, antifeminist attack in online social networks, such as the “Red Pill” phenomenon in the United States (see Dignam and Rohlinger); it is ar- ticulated in the antigender ideologies of the Vatican (see articles by Case and Corredor); and it is voiced in the conservative political opposition to, and take- down of, Brazil’s first female president (see Sosa). 1 This said, minorities, women, and queer persons have been mobilizing to claim these same tradition as their own. Muslim women have been breaking laws banning the veil to trigger court challenges in the European Court of Human rights. Muslim women were the drivers behind a constitutional court case striking down the practice of triple talaq (or irrevocable divorce) in In- dia while also opposing the Hindu Right’s efforts to criminalize and punish Muslim men who engage in the practice. Christian lesbians and gays in Uganda have been challenging American Evangelical Christian efforts to criminalize homosexuality there. This complexity also comes through in a number of the contributions in this issue. This content downloaded from 140.233.002.214 on July 24, 2019 12:03:30 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). S I G N S Spring 2019 y 543 While not all of those on the right are religious, it is certainly true that the religious Right has gone global with impressive impetus, maturing in terms of strategies, goals, and funding. In 2013, twenty US and European right- wing religious campaigners began pulling together an agenda of “achievable goals” (Datta 2018, 6). Agenda Europe, as this group calls itself, has since grown to include over one hundred organizations from thirty European countries. The network’s ideas, aims, and ambitions are those of religious ex- tremists, but explicitly religious language is strategically displaced by talk of rights and the seemingly neutral discourse of natural law (Datta 2018, 10). Agenda Europe’s plan includes not only overturning existing laws related to sexuality (LGBT rights) and reproduction (contraception, abortion, all as- sisted reproductive technologies) but also the right to divorce, the use of embryonic stem cells, euthanasia, and organ transplantation. Their strategy, which strongly resembles that of the US antichoice movement as described by Carol Mason in this issue, is to reframe the conflict using the strategies of their opponents. This involves positioning themselves as victims, “defenders of faith struggling against intolerant, cultural revolutionaries, the concept of discrimination and intolerance against Christians, or ‘Christianophobia’” (Datta 2018, 15). Among its strategic recommendations, Agenda Europe’s manifesto explicitly mentions “colonization of human rights”: that is, re- framing ultraconservative religious positions on sex and reproduction to sound like human rights language. The global dimension of this new wave of right-wing strategizing consists not only in the building of transnational networks but also in the way these networks choose their targets: with an ear for the local legal culture but an eye for the larger goals ahead. The global antigender Right imagines itself to be the rival of progressive forces in the United Nations and the European Union; thus, much of its strategy consists in repeating the steps by which fem- inism went international (and institutional) in the seventies and eighties and beyond. Elizabeth Corredor’s essay in this issue aptly discusses these dynam- ics through the lens of countermovement theory. Of course, it is not just religious fundamentalists who elected Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, or Donald Trump in the United States. The recent triumphs of the populist Right are not exclu- sively a religious phenomenon. Rather, they are an effect of remarkable con- fluence of various strands of the Right. Gender has been key to this process. In the United States, this plays out in a common conviction on the part of the angry white men of the alt-right, many of them atheist, that feminism is destroying humanity. The alt-right has found common cause with Chris- tian fundamentalists in different parts of the world and has mobilized fears and anxieties produced by neoliberal reforms (for an extended version of this This content downloaded from 140.233.002.214 on July 24, 2019 12:03:30 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 544 y Graff, Kapur, and Walters argument, see Korolczuk and Graff 2018). Antifeminism is where Milo Yian- nopoulos can meet Pope Francis. In other words, cynical followers of the alt- right can have a gay leader, and Catholics can have a relatively progressive pope, but there is one place where these trends converge: they see feminism as an enemy.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • 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
    [Show full text]
  • Full Spectrum of Selves in Modern Chinese Literature: from Lu Xun to Xiao Hong
    UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Full Spectrum of Selves in Modern Chinese Literature: From Lu Xun to Xiao Hong Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5022k8qv Author Ho, Felicia Jiawen Publication Date 2012 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Full Spectrum of Selves in Modern Chinese Literature: From Lu Xun to Xiao Hong A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in East Asian Languages and Cultures by Felicia Jiawen Ho 2012 © Copyright by Felicia Jiawen Ho 2012 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Full Spectrum of Selves in Modern Chinese Literature: From Lu Xun to Xiao Hong by Felicia Jiawen Ho Doctor of Philosophy in East Asian Languages and Cultures University of California, Los Angeles, 2012 Professor Shu-mei Shih, Chair Despite postcolonial theory’s rejection of legacies of Western imperial dominance and cultural hierarchy, the superiority of Euro-American notions of subjectivity remains a persistent theme in third world cross-cultural literary analysis. Interpretations of the Chinese May Fourth era often reduce the period to one of wholesale westernization and cultural self- repudiation. Euro-American notions of the self often reify ideologies of individuality, individualism, rationalism, evolution, and a “self-versus-society” dichotomy, viewing such positions as universal and applicable for judging decolonizing others. To interrogate this assumption, I examine the writing of Lu Xun and Xiao Hong, two May Fourth writers whose fictional characters present innovative, integrated, heterogeneous selves that transcend Western ii critical models. This “full spectrum of selves” sustains contradicting pulls of identity—the mental (the rational, the individual), the bodily (the survivalist, the affective), the cerebral (the moral), the social (the relational, the organismic), as well as the spiritual and the cosmic.
    [Show full text]
  • Beyond Life and Death Images of Exceptional Women and Chinese Modernity Wei Hu University of South Carolina
    University of South Carolina Scholar Commons Theses and Dissertations 2017 Beyond Life And Death Images Of Exceptional Women And Chinese Modernity Wei Hu University of South Carolina Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd Part of the Comparative Literature Commons Recommended Citation Hu, W.(2017). Beyond Life And Death Images Of Exceptional Women And Chinese Modernity. (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/4370 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you by Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. BEYOND LIFE AND DEATH IMAGES OF EXCEPTIONAL WOMEN AND CHINESE MODERNITY by Wei Hu Bachelor of Arts Beijing Language and Culture University, 2002 Master of Laws Beijing Language and Culture University, 2005 Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature College of Arts and Sciences University of South Carolina 2017 Accepted by: Michael Gibbs Hill, Major Professor Alexander Jamieson Beecroft, Committee Member Krista Jane Van Fleit, Committee Member Amanda S. Wangwright, Committee Member Cheryl L. Addy, Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School © Copyright by Wei Hu, 2017 All Rights Reserved. ii DEDICATION To My parents, Hu Quanlin and Liu Meilian iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS During my graduate studies at the University of South Carolina and the preparation of my dissertation, I have received enormous help from many people. The list below is far from being complete. First of all, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my academic advisor, Dr.
    [Show full text]
  • Download Issue
    Volume 13, Number 2: Fall/Winter 2015-16 Asia Pacific Perspectives Volume 13, Number 2 • Fall/Winter 2015-16 Center for Asia Pacific Studies Dr. Melissa Dale Dr. Leslie A.Woodhouse E d i t o r , E xe u t i ve D i r e ct o r A ssi st a t M a a i n g E d i t o r Editorial Board: Ezra Vogel, P r o f sso r E m e r i t u Ha a r d U n i ve r si t y Thomas Gold, P r o f sso r , U C B e r ke l e y Margaret Kuo, A ssi st a t P r o f sso r , C S U L o n g B e a h Rachel Rinaldo, A ssi st a t P r o f sso r , U n i ve r si t o f V i r g i n i a John Nelson, P r o f sso r , U n i ve r si t o f S a F r a ci sco CONTENTS Editor’s Introduction D r. e ia a e Articles Small Things of Great Importance: Toy Advertising in Chiang, 1910s-1930s D r. a entina oretti The Grapes of Happiness: Selling Sun-Maid Raisins to the Chinese in the 1920s-’30s Ceci e Ar an 4 9 Haafu Identities in Japanese Advertising D r. aori ori ant 3 Think Piece Why Aren’t Chinese Buying Chinese Brands? The Notion of Chinese Nationalism in the Discourse of Chinese Consumerism T ina an 1 0 2 Archival Survey On the State of the Chinese Advertising Archive D r.
    [Show full text]
  • The Politics of Gender and the Making of Kemalist Feminist Activism in Contemporary Turkey (1946–2011)
    THE POLITICS OF GENDER AND THE MAKING OF KEMALIST FEMINIST ACTIVISM IN CONTEMPORARY TURKEY (1946–2011) By Selin Çağatay Submitted to Central European University Department of Gender Studies In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Supervisor: Prof. Susan Zimmermann CEU eTD Collection Budapest, Hungary 2017 Copyright Notice This dissertation contains no materials accepted for any other degrees in any other institutions. The dissertation contains no materials previously written and/or published by another person, except where appropriate acknowledgment is made in the form of bibliographical reference. CEU eTD Collection i Abstract The aim of this dissertation is to contribute to the understanding of the relationship between women's activism and the politics of gender by investigating Kemalist feminism in Turkey as a case study. The dissertation offers a political history of Kemalist feminism that enables an insight into the intertwined relationship between women's activism and the politics of gender. It focuses on the class, national/ethnic, and cultural/religious dynamics of and their implications for Kemalist feminist politics. In so doing, it situates Kemalist feminist activism within the politics of gender in Turkey; that is, it analyzes the relationship between Kemalist feminist activism and other actors in gender politics, such as the state, transnational governance, political parties, civil society organizations, and feminist, Islamist, and Kurdish women's activisms. The analysis of Kemalist feminist activism provided in this dissertation draws on a methodological-conceptual framework that can be summarized as follows. Activism provides the ground for women to become actors of the politics of gender.
    [Show full text]
  • LGBT Rights, Homonationalisms, Europeanization and Post
    Old Ties and New Binds: LGBT Rights, Homonationalisms, Europeanization and Post- War Legacies in Serbia Dissertation Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Sonnet D’Amour Gabbard, B.A., M.A. Graduate Program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies The Ohio State University 2017 Dissertation Committee: Jennifer Anne Suchland, Advisor Christine Keating Shannon Winnubst Copyrighted by Sonnet D’Amour Gabbard 2017 Abstract My dissertation examines the historic links between the anti-war activists in Serbia with the current efforts and work for LGBT justice and rights. As an interdisciplinary scholar, my work integrates a variety of epistemologies across disciplines by putting anti-war and LGBT activists experience in Serbia into conversation with one another to address unique vulnerabilities. Drawing from transnational feminist and queer critiques of governance, (homo)nationalism, and transnational sexuality studies, I consider how new non- heterosexual identity politics—with roots in anti-war activism—have surfaced in Serbia since the Kosovo War. I argue that it is at the intersection of anti-war and LGBT organizing that new and conflicting identity politics have emerged, in part as a reaction to a pro-war hyper-nationalism and neoliberal globalization. ii Dedication I write this in memory of Jill Benderly, who taught me to be unapologetically me and to fight until my last breath for justice and peace. I love you. I miss you. iii Acknowledgments When I think about the scores of people, creatures, and plant life that have helped me arrive at this journey I am overwhelmed with emotion and humility.
    [Show full text]
  • Interrogating Practices of Gender, Religion And
    Exchanges : the Warwick Research Journal Interrogating Practices of Gender, Religion and Nationalism in the Representation of Muslim Women in Bollywood: Contexts of Change, Sites of Continuity Nazia Hussein *, Saba Hussain Department of Sociology, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK *Correspondence: [email protected] Abstract Through a discourse analysis of four commercially successful Bollywood films between 2012-2013, this paper investigates Bollywood’s role in creation of hierarchical identities in the Indian society wherein Muslims occupy the position of the inferior ‘other’ to the superior Hindu ‘self’. Focusing on Muslim heroines, the paper demonstrates that the selected narratives attempt to move away from the older binary identity narratives of Muslim women such as nation vs. religion and hyper- sexualised courtesan vs. subservient veiled women, towards identity narratives borne out of Muslim women’s choice of education, career and life partner, political participation, and embodied practices. However, in comparison to signs of change the sites of continuity are strongly Peer review: This article embedded in the religious-nationalistic meta-narrative that drives the has been subject to a paradigms of Indian femininity/ womanhood. To conclude, the nature of double blind peer review process the recent deployment of Muslim heroines in Bollywood reinforce the hierarchy between the genders (male-female), between the communities (Hindu-Muslim) and between nations (India- Pakistan). © Copyright: The Authors. This article is Keywords:
    [Show full text]
  • Myths of Hakkō Ichiu: Nationalism, Liminality, and Gender
    Myths of Hakko Ichiu: Nationalism, Liminality, and Gender in Official Ceremonies of Modern Japan Item Type text; Electronic Dissertation Authors Teshima, Taeko Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 01/10/2021 21:55:25 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/194943 MYTHS OF HAKKŌ ICHIU: NATIONALISM, LIMINALITY, AND GENDER IN OFFICIAL CEREMONIES OF MODERN JAPAN by Taeko Teshima ______________________ Copyright © Taeko Teshima 2006 A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the GRADUATE PROGRAM IN COMPARATIVE CULTURAL AND LITERARY STUDIES In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For a Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In the Graduate College THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA 2 0 0 6 2 THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA GRADUATE COLLEGE As members of the Dissertation Committee, we certify that we have read the dissertation prepared by Taeko Teshima entitled Myths of Hakkō Ichiu: Nationalism, Liminality, and Gender in Official Ceremonies of Modern Japan and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy _________________________________________________Date: 6/06/06 Barbara A. Babcock _________________________________________________Date: 6/06/06 Philip Gabriel _________________________________________________Date: 6/06/06 Susan Hardy Aiken Final approval and acceptance of this dissertation is contingent upon the candidate’s submission of the final copies of the dissertation to the Graduate College. I hereby certify that I have read this dissertation prepared under my direction and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement.
    [Show full text]
  • Nation, Gender and Representations of (In)Securities in Indian Politics Runa Das
    Nation, Gender and Representations of (In)Securities in Indian Politics Runa Das To cite this version: Runa Das. Nation, Gender and Representations of (In)Securities in Indian Politics. Euro- pean Journal of Women’s Studies, SAGE Publications (UK and US), 2008, 15 (3), pp.203-221. 10.1177/1350506808091504. hal-00571330 HAL Id: hal-00571330 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00571330 Submitted on 1 Mar 2011 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Nation, Gender and Representations of (In)Securities in Indian Politics Secular-Modernity and Hindutva Ideology Runa Das UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA, DULUTH ABSTRACT This article examines the relationship between gender, nations and nationalisms vis-a-vis the Indian state’s nationalist identity and perceptions of (in)security. It explores how the postcolonial Indian state’s project of nation-build- ing – reflective of a western secular-modern identity (under the Congress Party) and a Hindutva-dominated identity (under the BJP) – incorporates gender, with continu- ities and discontinuities, to articulate divergent forms of nationalist/communalist identities, ‘cartographic anxieties’ and nuclear (in)securities. The article contends that with the recent rise of the Hindu-Right BJP, guided by Hindutva ideology, the nature of representing the Indian nation, its women and (in)securities has changed from a geopolitical to a cultural perception – thereby necessitating a rereading of the Indian nation, nationalism, gender and its perceptions of (in)security.
    [Show full text]
  • Kalki's Avatars
    KALKI’S AVATARS: WRITING NATION, HISTORY, REGION, AND CULTURE IN THE TAMIL PUBLIC SPHERE DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Akhila Ramnarayan. M.A. ****** The Ohio State University 2006 Approved by Dissertation Committee: Professor Chadwick Allen, Adviser Adviser Professor Debra Moddelmog, Adviser Professor James Phelan Adviser English Graduate Program ABSTRACT Challenging the English-only bias in postcolonial theory and literary criticism, this dissertation investigates the role of the twentieth-century Tamil historical romance in the formation of Indian and Tamil identity in the colonial period. I argue that Tamil Indian writer-nationalist Kalki Ra. Krsnamurti’s (1899-1954) 1944 Civakamiyin Capatam (Civakami’s Vow)—chronicling the ill-fated wartime romance of Pallava king Narasimhavarman (630-668 CE) and fictional court dancer Civakami against the backdrop of the seventh-century Pallava-Chalukya wars—exemplifies a distinct genre of interventionist literature in the Indian subcontinent. In Kalki’s hands, the vernacular novel became a means by which to infiltrate the colonial imaginary and, at the same time, to envision a Tamil India untainted by colonial presence. Charting the generic transformation of the historical romance in the Tamil instance, my study provides 1) a refutation of the inflationary and overweening claims made in postcolonial studies about South Asian nationalism, 2) a questioning of naïve binaries such as local and global, cosmopolitan and vernacular, universal and particular, traditional and modern, in examining the colonial/postcolonial transaction, and 3) a case for a less grandiose and more carefully historicized account of bourgeois nationalism than has previously been provided by postcolonial critics, accounting for its complicities with ii and resistances to discourses of nation, region, caste, and gender in the late colonial context.
    [Show full text]
  • State of Nationalism (Son): Nationalism and Gender
    State of Nationalism (SoN): Nationalism and Gender LORA KNIGHT Southern Virginia University The belated application of gender analysis to nationalism studies is captured in an oft-quoted statement by Anne McClintock: Nationalism [is] radically constitutive of people’s identities, through social contests that are […] always gendered. But, if the invented nature of nationalism has found wide theoretical currency, explorations of the gendering of the national imaginary have been conspicuously paltry.1 Until the 1970s, nationalism studies were almost exclusively about men: male intellectuals and politicians who defined the nation for the public, and male revolutionaries or soldiers who attained and protected the nation, often claiming full political citizenship in return for their services. However, the fact of their gender and the connection between national and masculine identities was hardly acknowledged, much less interrogated until the 1980s. Ironically, seeing men as men was largely the result of asking where the women were. Mirroring the development of gender studies more broadly, the first steps toward an explicitly gendered understanding of nations and nationalism was an outgrowth of the interest in women’s and sexuality studies created by the sexual revolution and the women’s liberation movements of the 1960s and Lora Knight, ‘State of Nationalism (SoN): Nationalism and Gender’, in: Studies on National Movements 6 (2020). Studies on National Movements 6 (2020) | State of Nationalism 1970s. Since the mid-1980s a growing recognition that the complexities of nationalism cannot be understood without an analysis of gender has been accompanied by an explosion of case studies from around the world. Nevertheless, much remains to be done in gendering the study of nations and in creating theoretical structures to organize new research in this area.
    [Show full text]
  • Women and Nationalism in South Africa
    T R A N S I T ION Position "NO LONGER IN A FUTURE HEAVEN": WOMEN AND NATIONALISM IN SOUTH AFRICA Anne McClintock All nationalisms are gendered, all are invented, and all are dangerous. Nations are not the natural flowering into time of the organic essence of a people, borne unscathed through the ages. Rather, as Ernest Gellner observes, nationalism "invents nations where they do not exist." Most modern nations, despite their appeal to an august and immemorial past, are for the most part very recent inventions. Benedict Anderson thus argues that nations are best understood as "imagined communities," systems of rep- resentations whereby people come to imagine a shared experience of identification with an extended community. Nonetheless, nations are not simply phantasmagoria of mind. The term "imagined" carries in its train connotations of fiction and make-believe, moonshine and chimera. The term "invented community," by contrast, refuses the conservative faith in essence and nature, while at the same time conveying more powerfully the implications of labor and creative ingenuity, technology and institutional power. Nations are elaborate social practicesenacted through time, laboriously fabricated through the media and the printing press, in schools, churches, the myriad forms of popular culture, in trade unions and funerals, protest marches and uprisings. Nationalism both invents and performs social difference, enacting it ritualistically in Olympic extravaganzas, mass rallies and military displays, flag waving and costumery, and becoming thereby constitutive of people's identities. The green, black, and gold flag of the African National Congress, or a Pal- estinian kafiyeh, may be bits of colored cloth, but there is nothing fictive about their power to conjure up the loyalties of life and death, or to provoke the state's expert machinery of wrath.
    [Show full text]