Gender Ironies of Nationalism

Sexing the Nation

Tamar Mayer, Tamar Mayer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781134715992
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

This book provides a unique social science reading on the construction of nation, gender and sexuality and on the interactions among them. It includes international case studies from Indonesia, Ireland, former Yugoslavia, Liberia, Sri Lanka, Australia, the USA, Turkey, China, India and the Caribbean.
The contributors offer both the masculine and feminine perspective, exposing how nations are comprised of sexed bodies, and exploring the gender ironies of nationalism and how sexuality plays a key role in nation building and in sustaining national identity.
The contributors conclude that control over access to the benefits of belonging to the nation is invariably gendered; nationalism becomes the language through which sexual control and repression is justified masculine prowess is expressed and exercised. Whilst it is men who claim the prerogatives of nation and nation building it is, for the most part, women who actually accept the obligation of nation and nation building.

1 Gender ironies of nationalism

Setting the stage

Tamar Mayer

The nation is a process of becoming

(Bauer 1996 [1924])

In his famous 1924 essay “The nation,” Otto Bauer asserted that “national character is changeable” (1996 [1924]: 40), and that the idea of nation is bound up with ego (1996 [1924]: 63). He suggested that “if someone slights the nation they slight me too…[F]or the nation is nowhere but in me and my kind” (ibid., emphasis added). The ideology which members of the community, those who are of the same kind, share—through which they identify with the nation and express their national loyalty—is what we call nationalism. Hence nationalism is the exercise of internal hegemony, the exclusive empowerment of those who share a sense of belonging to the same “imagined community” (Anderson 1991). This empowerment is clearly intertwined with what Bauer called “ego.” But what kind of ego is at stake in the case of the “nation”? The chapters in this volume argue that the national ego is intertwined with male and female ego, that it is inseparable from gender and sexuality. They further argue that nationalism becomes the language through which sexual control and repression (specifically, but not exclusively, of women and homosexuals) is justified, and masculine prowess is expressed and exercised.

Because nationalism, gender and sexuality are all socially and culturally constructed, they frequently play an important role in constructing one another—by invoking and helping to construct the “us” versus “them” distinction and the exclusion of the Other. The empowerment of one gender, one nation or one sexuality virtually always occurs at the expense and disempowerment of another. But because people have multiple identities, the interplay among nation, gender and sexuality often pressures people to negotiate their identities in complex ways.

The title of this book, Gender Ironies of Nationalism, is meant to convey the idea that the links between “gender” and “nation” tell us about some of the more profound ironies of modern social life. Despite its rhetoric of equality for all who partake in the “national project,” nation remains, like other feminized entities—emphatically, historically and globally—the property of men. At the same time, if it is gendered, nation remains—quite like gender and sexuality—a construction that speaks to the conflicted urges of human community. For both “nation” and “gender” help construct a fiction of “innateness” in the name of bonds whose fragile, endangered status is evidenced in the fierceness with which they are defended—and in the fierceness with which the role of the imagination in the construction of transcendent categories and the urge to reify those categories are both, at once, revealed and denied. The subtitle Sexing the Nation emphasizes, further, that when sexed bodies comprise the nation we can no longer think of the nation as sexless. Rather, by exploring the gender ironies of nationalism we expose the fact that sexuality plays a key role in nation-building and in sustaining national identity.

The chapters in this volume demonstrate the many complex intimacies between gender and nation and sexuality. They show, in particular, that control over access to the benefits of belonging to the nation is virtually always gendered; that through control over reproduction, sexuality and the means of representation the authority to define the nation lies mainly with men. Finally, these chapters emphatically establish the relationship between gender boundaries and the nation: for they demonstrate that while it is men who claim the prerogatives of nation and nation-building it is for the most part women who actually tend to accept the obligation of nation and nation-building.

Definitions

Two sets of categories—nation and state, and gender and sexuality—are the bare bones of each of the chapters in this volume. Although nation is not to state what gender is to sexuality—because nation could be conceived without state but gender and sexuality remain inevitably connected—there are parallels across these sets of categories: all of these categories are socially or culturally constructed in opposition (or sometimes in relationship which is not binary) to the Other, and all of them involve power relationships. But before we turn to discussion of how nation, state, gender and sexuality intersect globally, it is important to define and explore each of these categories separately. Although nation and state are often used interchangeably, they are emphatically not synonymous. A state is a sovereign political unit which has tangible boundaries, abides by international law and is recognized by the international community. But while it may have tangible characteristics (Connor 1972) and is always self-defined, a nation is not tangible.

A nation “is a soul, a spiritual principle” (Renan 1990:19), a “moral consciousness” (Renan 1990:20) which its members believe must be maintained at all times and at all costs. The nation is a glorified ethnic group whose members are often attached to a specific territory (Smith 1981, Connor 1978) over which they strive for sovereignty or at least the ability to manage their own affairs. Members of the nation believe in their common origins and in the uniqueness of their common history, and they hope for a shared destiny (Smith 1986). They amplify the past and keep memories of communal sufferings alive. They share national symbols like customs, language and religion, and are often blind to the fact that their national narrative is based on myths and on what Etienne Balibar (1991) calls “fictive ethnicity.”¹ Myth remains in fact essential to the life of the nation, for it is by embracing myths about the nation’s creation that members perpetuate not only national myths but also the nation itself.

The nation is sustained as well through both reactive and proactive measures. Nationalistic ideology can serve as “emotional glue” —by othering the nation when it occupies minority status (Calhoun 1997, Hechter 1975, Deutsch 1953) —and when there is no threat from outside or when threat does not appear imminent, through regular, even repetitive, exercises of solidarity which become accepted by members of the nation as “natural.” As many of the chapters here demonstrate, cultural, religious and political ceremonies—along with education (Chatterjee 1993, Anderson 1991, Hobsbawm 1990, Gellner 1983), exploitation of national media and museums and control of the national “moral code” —keep national consciousness alive and the nation “real.”

For the sake of maintaining parallels with the other set of categories discussed in this volume—gender and sexuality—and of better understanding the distinction between nation and state grounding the volume, it is important to develop here more fully some aspects of this complex relationship.² While a nation can live without a state, a state usually does not exist without a nation: we know of many stateless nations (some of whose national consciousness has been raised because of the state system).³ While there are many multinational states, there are no nation-less states.⁴ Furthermore, even though state is often perceived as the political extension of nation (Connor 1978), it must be viewed as a separate entity, because rarely do we find a pure nation-state that constructs a 100 percent fit between a nation and the state territory that it occupies. More often than not, instead, we find states which house many nations, leading to a hierarchy among these nations and creating a competition among them over control of resources and the exercise of power as a means to achieve national hegemony within the state.

As important as these discussions about the nation and the state are, they omit an essential discussion about gender and sexuality. Since the mid-1980s scholars have begun to demonstrate that we cannot understand nation and nationalism without understanding that gender and sexuality are integral to both.⁵ These scholars have shown that power, control and hegemony exist not only in the relationships between nation and state but also in the relationships between gender and sexuality, and between nation and state and gender and sexuality.

The distinction between gender and sexuality remains considerably less sharp and more complicated than the distinction between nation and state, because our understanding of these categories varies historically and geographically and because our definitions of them are still being debated. But for the sake of setting the stage for discussion and providing common language with which to read this volume I shall, nevertheless, offer some working definitions of these categories. First, what it means to be “male” or “female,” “masculine” or “feminine,” “man” or “woman” is inevitably, socially constructed—for culture gives gender and sexuality meanings that are particular to time and space, and provides the arena within which a given subject is positioned. Within this arena, gender serves as the cultural marker of biological sex (Vance 1984:9) and sexuality serves as the cultural marking of desire (Foucault 1978).

More specifically, gender is the “dichotomized social production and reproduction of male and female identities and behaviors” (Sedgwick 1990:27). Social re-production (re)produces gender through daily repetition of acts/performances—or what Judith Butler (1990) calls “performativity.” In other words, what we perform repeatedly—based on norms that predate us—is what we become, regardless of biological chromosomes. In this sense, gender is divorced from sex (biology) and, therefore, “masculinity” does not necessarily have to be the domain of a biological “male” or “femininity” the domain of the biological “female.” As the chapters by Derné, Mayer, Martin, Allen and Lewis in this volume illustrate, at this time in the life of the nation “masculine” and “feminine” identities do seem to be fixed, with “masculinity” the domain of (biological) men and “femininity” the domain of the (biological) females. But because nation, gender and sexuality are always in the process of becoming, because they evolve continuously, associating “masculinity” with men and “femininity” with women in a national context could eventually change if either the discourse of the nation or that of gender and sexuality changes. Dwyer (Chapter 2), Moran (Chapter 5), Povinelli (Chapter 7) and Ahmetbeyzade (Chapter 8) show that in Indonesia, Liberia, Australia and Turkey these identities have already begun to change.

Sexuality, too, is not fixed in time and space. It too is a cultural construction, which refers both to an individual’s sexed desire and to an individual’s sexed being, embracing ideas about “pleasure and physiology, fantasy and anatomy” (Bristow 1997:1, original emphasis). But without understanding that sexuality is also “a domain of restriction, repression,…danger…and agency” (Vance 1984:1) and is an “actively contested political and symbolic terrain in which groups struggle to implement sexual programs and alter sexual arrangements and ideologies” (Vance 1995:41), we cannot fully understand the importance of sexuality to gender and to nation. Like gender, sexuality (and, as the chapters in the volume show, also nation) is organized into systems of power “which reward and encourage some individuals and activities while punishing and suppressing others” (Rubin 1984:309). As the chapters in this volume amply demonstrate, throughout the contemporary world these power systems generally reward heterosexual males and often punish women and gays.

To complicate these definitions even more, we need to recognize that neither gender nor sexuality ought to be discussed in the singular. Rather, because both gender and sexuality vary geographically, across lines of age, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation and religion, and because both are articulated through a variety of positions, languages and institutions, we witness a multiplicity of gender identities and sexualities (see Lancaster and Leonardo 1997, McClintock et al. 1997, Duncan 1996, Berger et al. 1995, Brittan 1989, Vance 1984). Therefore neither gender nor sexuality is a “fixed” category: each is always implicated in the other; each is always ambivalent, always complicated, always a product of individual and institutional power.

Nation, gender, sexuality: liaison of/over bodies

The nation is comprised of sexed subjects whose “performativity” constructs not only their own gender identity but the identity of the entire nation as well. Through repetition of accepted norms and behaviors—control over reproduction, militarism and heroism, and heterosexuality—members help to construct the privileged nation; equally, the repetitive performance of these acts in the name of the nation helps to construct gender and sexuality. Moreover, because nation, gender and sexuality are all constructed in opposition, or at least in relation to, an(O)ther, they are all part of culturally constructed hierarchies, and all of them involve power. One nation, one gender and one particular sexuality is always favored by the social, political and cultural institutions which it helps to construct and which it benefits from—and thus each seeks to occupy the most favored position in the hierarchy (of nation, gender and sexuality); each tries to achieve hegemony; and each in the process becomes a contested territory, even the arena of battle among nations, genders and sexualities.

Until recently the literature on nationalism has been gender blind. But feminist scholarship’s identification of gender as a category of analysis has led to the exploration of the relationship among nation and gender/ sexuality. Feminist research has steadily revealed that men and women participate differently in the national project (Yuval-Davis 1997, McClintock 1995, Kondo 1990, Enloe 1989, Yuval-Davis and Anthias 1989, Jayawardena 1986).⁶ Much of this scholarship has focused on women’s marginality vis-à-vis the construction of nation, and as a result these discussions have, for the most part, neglected to analyze men as an equally constructed category.⁷ This imbalance has arisen, I believe, from Women’s Studies’ tendency until recently to concentrate on recovering women’s experience, without necessarily positioning it in the larger context of gender construction, and from the unmarked status of masculinity within the nation and in nationalist discourse. However, as gender and its connection to sexuality continue to be explored, scholarship about nationalism has come to involve, more explicitly, analysis of both men’s and women’s relationship to the construction of the nation and of the ways in which national discourse constructs man and woman.⁸ It is this discussion to which this volume contributes.

When we examine the intersections...