Feminist Review

Issue 44: Nationalisms and National Identities

The Feminist Review Collective, The Feminist Review Collective

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134864041
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

Feminist Review is the UK's leading feminist journal. It has a unique place in the women's movement internationally. This issue focusing on Nationalism and National Identities features articles by Nahid Yegeneh and Catherine Hall.

Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism and the Family¹

Anne McClintock

All nationalisms are gendered, all are invented, and all are dangerous—dangerous, not in Eric Hobsbawm's sense as having to be opposed, but in the sense of representing relations to political power and to the technologies of violence. Nationalism, as Ernest Gellner notes, invents nations where they do not exist, and most modern nations, despite their appeal to an august and immemorial past, are of recent invention (Gellner, 1964). Benedict Anderson warns, however, that Gellner tends to assimilate ‘invention’ to ‘falsity’ rather than to ‘imagining’ and ‘creation’. Anderson, by contrast, views nations as ‘imagined communities’ in the sense that they are systems of cultural representation whereby people come to imagine a shared experience of identification with an extended community (Anderson, 1991:6). As such, nations are not simply phantasmagoria of the mind, but are historical and institutional practices through which social difference is invented and performed. Nationalism becomes, as a result, radically constitutive of people's identities, through social contests that are frequently violent and 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.

All nations depend on powerful constructions of gender. Despite nationalisms' ideological investment in the idea of popular unity, nations have historically amounted to the sanctioned institutionalization of gender difference. No nation in the world gives women and men the same access to the rights and resources of the nation-state. Rather than expressing the flowering into time of the organic essence of a timeless people, nations are contested systems of cultural representation that limit and legitimize peoples' access to the resources of the nation-state. Yet with the notable exception of Frantz Fanon, male theorists have seldom felt moved to explore how nationalism is implicated in gender power. As a result, as Cynthia Enloe remarks, nationalisms have ‘typically sprung from masculinized memory, masculinized humiliation and masculinized hope’ (Enloe, 1989:44).

George Santayana, for one, gives voice to a well-established male view: ‘Our nationalism is like our relationship 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 ‘our’ of national agency is male, and his male citizen stands in the same symbolic relation to the nation as a man stands to a woman. Not only are the needs of the nation here identified with the frustrations and aspirations of men, but the representation of male national power depends on the prior construction of gender difference.

For Gellner, the very definition of nationhood rests on the male recognition of identity: ‘Men are of the same nation if and only if they recognize each other as being from the same nation.’ (Gellner, 1964) For Etienne Balibar, such recognition aligns itself inevitably with the notion of a ‘race’ structured about the transmission of male power and property: ‘Ultimately the nation must align itself, spiritually as well as physically or carnally, with the “race”, the “patrimony” to be protected from all degradation’ (Balibar, 1991, my emphasis). Even Fanon, who at other moments knew better, writes The look that the native turns on the settler town is a look of lust…to sit at the settler's table, to sleep in the settler's bed, with his wife if possible. The colonized man is an envious man’ (Fanon, 1963:30). For Fanon, both colonizer and colonized are here unthinkingly male, and the manichaean agon of decolonization is waged over the territoriality of female, domestic space.

All too often in male nationalisms, gender difference between women and men serves to symbolically define the limits of national difference and power between men. Excluded from direct action as national citizens, women are subsumed symbolically into the national body politic as its boundary and metaphoric limit: ‘Singapore girl, you’re a great way to fly.’ Women are typically construed as the symbolic bearers of the nation, but are denied any direct relation to national agency. As Elleke Boehmer notes in her fine essay, the ‘motherland’ of male nationalism may thus ‘not signify “home” and “source” to women’ (Boehmer, 1991:5). Boehmer notes that the male role in the nationalist scenario is typically ‘metonymic’, that is, men are contiguous with each other and with the national whole. Women, by contrast, appear ‘in a metaphoric or symbolic role’ (Boehmer, 1991:6). In an important intervention, Nira Yuval-Davis and Floya Anthias thus identify five major ways in which women have been implicated in nationalism (Yuval-Davis and Anthias, 1989:7):

• as biological reproducers of the members of national collectivities
• as reproducers of the boundaries of national groups (through restrictions on sexual or marital relations)
• as active transmitters and producers of the national culture
• as symbolic signifiers of national difference
• as active participants in national struggles

Nationalism is thus constituted from the very beginning as a gendered discourse, and cannot be understood without a theory of gender power. None the less, theories of nationalism reveal a double disavowal. If male theorists are typically indifferent to the gendering of nations, feminist analyses of nationalism have been lamentably few and far between. White feminists, in particular, have been slow to recognize nationalism as a feminist issue. In much Western, socialist feminism, as Yuval-Davis and Anthias point out, ‘[i]ssues of ethnicity and nationality have tended to be ignored.’

A feminist theory of nationalism might be strategically fourfold: investigating the gendered formation of sanctioned male theories; bringing into historical visibility women's active cultural and political participation in national formations; bringing nationalist institutions into critical relation with other social structures and institutions, while at the same time paying scrupulous attention to the structures of racial, ethnic and class power that continue to bedevil privileged forms of feminism.

The national family of man

A paradox lies at the heart of most national narratives. Nations are frequently figured through the iconography of familial and domestic space. The term ‘nation’ derives from ‘natio’: to be born. We speak of nations as ‘motherlands’ and ‘fatherlands’. Foreigners ‘adopt’ countries that are not their native homes, and are ‘naturalized’ into the national family. We talk of the Family of Nations, of ‘homelands’ and ‘native’ lands. In Britain, immigration matters are dealt with at the Home Office; in the United States, the President and his wife are called the First Family. Winnie Mandela was, until her recent fall from grace, honoured as South Africa's ‘Mother of the Nation’. In this way, nations are symbolically figured as domestic genealogies. Yet, at the same time, since the mid nineteenth century in the West, ‘the family’ itself has been figured as the antithesis of history.

The family trope is important in at least two ways. First, the family offers a ‘natural’ figure for sanctioning social hierarchy within a putative organic unity of interests. Second, it offers a ‘natural’ trope for figuring historical time. After 1859 and the advent of social Darwinism, Britain's emergent national narrative took increasing shape around the image of the evolutionary Family of Man. The ‘family’ offered an indispensable metaphoric figure by which hierarchical (and, one might add, often contradictory) social distinctions could be shaped into a single historical genesis narrative. Yet a curious paradox emerges. The family as a metaphor offered a single genesis narrative for national history, while, at the same time, the family as an institution became voided of history. As the nineteenth century drew on, the family as an institution was figured as existing, by natural decree, beyond the commodity market, beyond politics, and beyond history proper. (Davidoff, L. and Hall, C, 1987) The family thus became, at one and the same time, both the organizing figure for national history, as well as its antithesis.

Edward Said has pointed to a transition in the late Victorian upper middle class from a culture of ‘filiation’ (familial relations) to a culture of ‘affiliation’ (non-familial relations). Said argues that a perceived crisis in the late Victorian upper-middle-class family took on the aspect of a pervasive cultural affliction. The decay of filiation was, he argues, typically attended by a second moment— the turn to a compensatory order of affiliation, which might variously be an institution, a vision, a credo, or a vocation. While retaining the powerful distinction between filiation and affiliation, I wish to complicate the linear thrust of Said's story. In the course of the nineteenth century, the social function of the great service families (which had been invested in filiative rituals of patrilineal rank and subordination) became displaced on to the national bureaucracy. So, too, the filiative image of the family was projected on to emerging affiliative institutions as their shadowy, naturalized form. Thus, I argue, the filiative order did not disappear: rather it flourished as a metaphoric after-image, reinvented within the new orders of the nation-state, the industrial bureaucracy, and imperial capitalism. Increasingly, filiation took an imperial shape, as the cultural invention of the evolutionary Family of Man was projected both on to the national metropolis and the colonial bureaucracy as its natural, legitimizing shape.

The significance of the family trope was twofold. First, the family offered an indispensable figure for sanctioning social hierarchy within a putative organic unity of interests. Since the subordination of woman to man, and child to adult, was deemed a natural fact, other forms of social hierarchy could be depicted in familial terms to guarantee social difference as a category of nature. The family image was thus drawn on to figure hierarchy within unity as an ‘organic’ element of historical progress, and thereby became indispensable for legitimizing exclusion and hierarchy within non-familial (affiliative) social formations such as nationalism, liberal individualism and imperialism. The metaphoric depiction of social hierarchy as natural and familial—the ‘national family’, the global ‘family of nations’, the colony as a ‘family of black children ruled over by a white father’—thus depended on the prior naturalizing of the social subordination of women and children within the domestic sphere.

Secondly, the family offered an indispensable trope for figuring what was often violent, historical change as natural, organic time. Since children ‘naturally’ progress into adults, projecting the family image on to national and imperial ‘Progress’ enabled what was often murderously violent change to be legitimized as the progressive unfolding of natural decree. National or imperial intervention could be figured as an organic, non-revolutionary progression that naturally contained hierarchy within unity: paternal fathers ruling benignly over immature children. The evolutionary family thus captured, in one potent trope, the idea of social discontinuity (hierarchy through space) and temporal discontinuity (hierarchy across time) as a natural, organic continuity. The idea of the Family of Man became invaluable in its capacity to give state and imperial intervention the alibi of nature.

As Fanon eloquently describes it in ‘Algeria unveiled’, imperial intervention frequently took shape as a domestic rescue drama. ‘Around the family life of the Algerian, the occupier piled up a whole mass of judgements…thus attempting to confine the Algerian within a circle of guilt’ (Fanon, 1965:38). The dream of the ‘total domestication of Algerian society’ came to haunt colonial authority, and the domesticated, female body became the terrain over which the military contest was fought.

In modern Europe, citizenship is the legal representation of a person's relationship to the rights and resources of the nation-state. But the putatively universalist concept of national citizenship becomes unstable when seen from the position of women. In post-French Revolution Europe, women were not incorporated directly into the nation-state as citizens, but only indirectly through men, as dependent members of the family in private and public law. The Code Napoleon was the first modern statute to decree that the wife's nationality should follow her husband's, an example other European countries briskly followed. A woman's political relation to the nation was submerged as a social relation to a man through marriage. For women, citizenship in the nation was mediated by the marriage relation within the family.

The gendering of nation time

A number of critics have followed Tom Nairn in naming the nation ‘the modern Janus’ (Nairn, 1977). For Nairn, the nation takes shape as a contradictory figure of time: on...

Table of contents

• Cover
• CONTENTS
• Copyright
• Editorial
• Women, Nationalism and Islam in Contemporary Political Discourse in Iran
• Feminism, Citizenship and National Identity
• Remapping and Renaming: New Cartographies of Identity, Gender and Landscape in Ireland
• Rap Poem: Easter 1991
• Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism and the Family
• Women as Activists, Women as Symbols: A Study of the Indian Nationalist Movement
• Gender, Nationalisms and National Identities: Bellagio Symposium Report
• Culture or Citizenship? Notes from the ‘Gender and Colonialism’ Conference, Galway, Ireland, May 1992
• Reviews
• Letter
• Noticeboard
• BACK ISSUES