Nation-States, Nationalism, And Gender Research Paper

2. The Nation And The Ethnic Group

Nations emerged in the eighteenth century. Anderson (1991) in a widely influential work defines the nation as a cultural construction, as the dominant form of imagining political community in modern states. Constructed as limited in its membership and sovereign over its territory, the nation is imagined as a political community characterized by a deep, horizontal comradeship. The nation largely has been theorized as part of the public political sphere, in which women, from the point of view of nonfeminist scholars, have had only a marginal presence; hence, most influential male theorists of nationalism have ignored gender.

The notion of the nation is not to be conflated with that of the ethnic group. Following Weber (1978), an ethnic racial group is a subor transnational status group formed around a subjective belief in common descent and in similarities of a cultural and/or physical type. Most contemporary nation states are multiethnic racial. Despite this, many nationalisms have stressed the ethnically racially homogenous character of the imagined community, whether in terms of ‘shared blood’ or common linguistic and cultural heritage. This occurs when a particular ethnic racial group tries to seize or hold on to power, wealth, and privilege by defining the political community in ethnically racially exclusive terms. Historically, this has often been the case, leading many scholars to argue that there is a strong link between nationalism and ethnicism racism.

The image of horizontal comradeship among nationals has been key to legitimizing the power, wealth, and privilege of elites and making the inequalities of state societies less visible. One of the salient contradictions of nation states is that they are hierarchical societies which are imagined as political communities of equals. This contradiction is culturally mediated by national symbols that fuse emotional, sensory, and cognitive meanings and hence are able to induce powerful ideas, attitudes, feelings, and dispositions to action in nationals. These include the willingness to kill and die (as well as to bear children) for the nation.

3. Nations And Gender

The most powerful national symbols draw on the domain of the family and on tropes of common descent such as shared blood to create the structure of feeling that is nationalism. Membership in nations is most commonly obtained through birth; thus nation states actively regulate sexuality, reproduction, gender, and kinship. The nation cannot be theorized simply in relation to the public sphere; it must also be understood in relation to the domestic sphere. This insight has been at the core of the new scholarship on gender and nationalism, which emerged in the 1980s and burgeoned after 1995. Most of this research has focused on women.

3.1 Women As Biological And Cultural Reproducers Of The Nation

Nation states manage sexuality, birth rates, family forms, and property transmission in specifically gendered ways—through laws, through cultural norms and values, and even through violence. Women’s generative capacities, rights, and roles are regulated by nation states so as to produce suitably socialized citizens and workers. State interventions can range from the promotion of heterosexuality and of specific family forms, to forced sterilization, to the restriction of contraception and the banning of abortion, to material and other incentives to multiply or to limit fertility. The most well-known case of reproductive limitation is that of China’s ‘one child’ family policy. In China, where sons are preferred to daughters, females are the main object of abortion and infanticide. Ironically, the effects of the one-child policy include trafficking in women as well as children. Since the mid-1980s, Chinese newspapers have been reporting that organized rings of peddlers are abducting women from the poorer interior provinces and selling them as brides in the richer coastal areas; children have also been kidnapped and sold. In Japan, by contrast, the government and private companies are offering financial and other incentives to women to bear children as the low birth rate creates a concern for the future of the nation’s demographic profile and economy. In cases where ethnic racial exclusivism defines the national project, different reproductive policies are applied to women from ethnic racial majorities than to minorities. For example, government policy in Singapore during the 1980s encouraged upper and middle-class professional women of the dominant Chinese ethnicity to marry and bear children as a patriotic duty while working-class women of minority Malay and Indian origin were offered cash awards to restrict their childbearing. In welfare states characterized by public patriarchy—a taking over by the state of some of the functions of domestic patriarchy—poor women, often from ethnic racial minorities, are encouraged to limit childbearing; this has been the case in the US.

Biological and cultural reproduction cannot be separated. As the bearers of children, women have also been considered their main socializers, held responsible for the transmission of the ‘mother tongue’ as well as the continuity of nationalist values, symbols, and rituals. But the regulation of women’s fertility and maternity by nation states is not just about the quantity and ‘quality’ of the population or the enculturation of children. It is also about the maintenance of internal stratification, including the class system. Stratification in the public sphere depends on stratification in the domestic sphere and on the creation of differences between and among men and women. Guatemala’s class and race hierarchy, for instance, has been maintained through a system of stratified reproduction in which elite women of European descent bear children in legal monogamous unions with men of their own class and race, lower class ‘mixed’ Ladinas have extralegal liaisons with men of higher status and class position, while Mayan women marry men within their own communities. Maintaining internal stratification by privileging whiteness and cultural ties to Europe and North America in a country where Maya are numerically the majority has made nation building in Guatemala a fraught and violent process. From the point of view of the elite, the Maya can only be integrated into the nation through de-Indianization; this has entailed a series of policies ranging from outright genocide to the militarization of the countryside to forced resettlement. Yet Mayan women endeavor to cope collectively with the challenges of reproducing their communities in circumstances in which fear, as Green (1999) puts it, has become ‘a way of life.’

3.2 Women And Men As Symbols Of National Boundaries And Identity

The unity of the political community has been represented in gendered forms. Collective territory, collective identity, and womanhood are often conflated in nationalist discourses. As place of origin and source of being, the nation is often represented as a woman: Mother Russia, Mother India, La Patrie in France. However, the nation as active subject is most often gendered as male. In Mexico, for example, La Patria is represented as a Mother but El Pueblo (The People), the collective protagonist of the national, is masculine as are the founders of the nation, its Fathers. In some cases, such as that of Australia, the feminine is marginal to the representation of the nation altogether; Australia is imagined as a political community of virile mates. Likewise, the Greek nation is represented as a group of brothers related through the male line. In the case of Singapore under Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, the state constructed the nation not as a fraternity but as a patriarchy; the articulation of the traditional family with the modern state there has rendered natural an omnipotent government, a State Fatherhood. It would be important to know what difference, if any, iconographies of the nation as a fraternity versus a patriarchy make to the status of women.

Tropes of gender are often central to the construction of legitimate forms of authority in nation states. The redefinition of authority in the public sphere that was key to the nationalist project of Mexico’s nineteenth century liberals entailed a corresponding transformation of authority in the domestic sphere. The protection of women became linked to the liberal state’s project to build a nation founded on the principles of reason and modernity as well as to the defense of the Madre Patria symbolized by the feminine. Wife beating became a sign of backwardness and a criminal offense. Yet though reforms in Mexican law accorded women certain protections they also restricted their freedom in numerous ways, particularly if they were married.

The symbol of nation-as-woman puts real women in a double bind as they are simultaneously sacralized and profaned, honored and dishonored, protected and restricted. In order to position themselves in the international field, for instance, postcolonial nations have negotiated the contradictions between tradition and modernity, between sovereignty and westernization, by making women the symbols of a purportedly pure national tradition. Anticolonial Indian nationalists, for example, identified Indian subjectivity with a spirituality, which they considered the guarantee of India’s superiority to and independence from the West. As the symbols of this internal spirituality, women were to be protected from modernization so that they could transmit the nation’s spiritual essence and cultural heritage; this had a negative impact on women’s autonomy.

Women can also become the symbolic bearers of modernity. During the Turkish Revolution of 1917, the unveiling of women became an important symbol of Turkey as a modern nation state. The same effort marked the Shah of Iran’s project to build a modern nation; the subsequent fundamentalist revolution, by contrast, insisted on the reveiling of women as a symbol of the return to tradition.

3.3 Gender, Nationalist Violence, And Warfare

Scholars have found that an intimate relationship exists between warfare and nation building with distinct consequences for men and women. The equation of the bearing of arms with masculinity and citizenship is one factor determining the less than full inclusion of women in many nations. Most nation states and nationalisms actively promote a different relationship to violence for men and women. If the motherland is feminine, the state and its warriors as active agents are masculine. Boys and men are socialized for warfare through sports and military training and cultural constructions root masculinity in the moral and physical capacity to exercise force and take life in the name of the nation as the state deems fit. Women, by contrast, are linked symbolically to peace, and are restricted in their participation in the military though they have played key noncombatant roles as nurses, support personnel, and conduits for intelligence and arms. The gender division of labor in the military tends to be more rigid than in the civil labor market. Even in nation states such as Israel and the US where women have a greater role in the military, they still do not have parity with men.

Many nationalist discourses have relied on the trope of sacrifice in order to secure men and women’s gender specific cooperation in wars. Another key trope has been that of rape—of the nation as a vulnerable maternal body in danger of being violated by foreign men; in this sense, men are called to sacrifice themselves in war in order to protect women and children. The special burden of representation that women carry as symbols of the nation and bearers of national honor and identity can give women a limited protection from violence in some cases. For example, the Argentineian Madres de la Plaza de Mayo drew on the moral authority of the nation-as-mother to challenge the state’s campaign of terror against its citizens. But this special burden can also make women the victims of particular forms of sexualized violence such as rape, as demonstrated in warfare after the partition of India, within Guatemala, during the Mexican Revolution, during World War II, and most recently in the Balkans. Women’s bodies are often the terrains over which wars are fought—both symbolically and literally.

During periods of warfare, women and even men’s generativity can come more closely under state control. The Lebensborn program in Germany, for example, encouraged SS men to father as many children as possible with Aryan women they were not expected to marry; the resulting progeny were raised by the state. At the same time, a program of involuntary sterilization prevented those considered unfit from reproducing. In Serbia during the 1990s, a coercive pronatalism was linked to explicitly ethnonationalist warfare, generating feminist protest.

3.4 Nation States, Women, And The Labor Market

Through legislation as well as cultural institutions, nation states have shaped women’s involvement in the labor market. Policies restricting women’s labor market participation and tacitly supporting differential compensation along gender lines have been enacted, at one time or another, in most nations. Despite the gains that women have made in industrial nations, their earnings and employment opportunities still lag behind those of men; in developing countries gender discrimination in the labor market is more pronounced. On a world scale, women constitute a disproportionate share of the poor. In particular, households without an adult male earner are poor, so the rise of female-headed households has thrown more women and children into poverty. The causes of female poverty are often seen in terms of women’s individual characteristics. This fails to recognize that the rise of single motherhood, whatever its causes, has allowed men, collectively, to benefit from women’s reproductive labor without sharing in the costs of raising children. It also fails to recognize the role of labor market discrimination in women’s low earnings.

Nation states have not just limited women’s labor force participation; they have also encouraged it, albeit in highly restricted ways. This has often been the case in times of war as epitomized by the image of Rosie the Riveter during World War II in the United States. More recently, nation states have been promoting women’s employment in the global apparel, footwear, and electronics industries as key to national development. For example, in South Korea under President Kim, young, single women were encouraged to be ‘dutiful daughters’ by becoming part of the manufacturing labor force and accepting low wages and poor working conditions in the name of national development. In Mexico’s export processing zones, the hiring of women for work in apparel and electronics assembly plants is fueled by gender stereotypes which proclaim women to be more docile and to have more nimble fingers. In both these cases, nationalist rhetoric has promoted an image of working women allied with modernity that confers agency in name only.

3.5 Feminism And Nationalist Movements

Anticolonial and other nationalist movements have often construed subordination as emasculation; hence the redefinition of gender roles has been seen as central to the rebuilding of society. A debate exists in the literature as to whether nationalist movements have been supportive of or inimical to women’s interests. Following Jayawardena (1986) some argue that at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, feminist goals were compatible with those of anti-imperialist liberation movements in Asia. This position also highlights the fact that there have been many feminisms, including those without a Western origin. By contrast others argue that fundamentalist and ethnically exclusionary forms of nationalism are reinscribing new forms of patriarchy under the banner of tradition. A particularly clear instance of the range of positions is provided by the case of postcolonial Indian nationalism: while there are those who maintain that Gandhi’s concern with remasculinizing men led to a new subordination of women, others insist that Gandhi took over the women’s movement in India but gave it a new impetus by celebrating women’s strength. Work on the Nation of Islam in the US indicates that the emancipatory language of racial redemption draws on images of gender which construct an insurgent black masculinity at the expense of black women who are to give up action in the public sphere in order to become men’s help mates in the domestic sphere. This implies a constriction not an expansion of women’s citizenship.

3.6 Women As Citizens

Women have had a contradictory position in most nation states. On the one hand, they are symbols of the nation. On the other, they are often excluded or marginalized from the collective we of the body politic and endowed with less than full citizenship rights. While some scholars have argued that women were simply latecomers to citizenship rights, others have insisted that their exclusion was integral to a construction of state citizenship as ‘the rights of Man.’

Recent scholarship emphasizes that a nonsexist notion of citizenship can only be developed if citizenship is defined in relation to both the public and domestic spheres and considered to include not only political but also social and civic rights and duties. The need to move beyond the nation state as the unit of analysis and to examine the ways the global political economy is creating new contradictions has become more pressing; social rights which have been integral to national welfare states have come under threat in ways that disproportionately affect women and put into question the viability of nation based identities.

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