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Lecture notes

Lecture notes and Weekly Reading: Imagining Pakistan: Culture, Politics, Gender ()
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These notes are from the 1-term module 'Imagining Pakistan' This module aims to develop and foster a deeper understanding of Pakistan's popular culture. It will cover a wide range of themes including constructions of identity, representations of honour killing, contexts of piety and modernity, ...

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  • December 2, 2023
  • 19
  • 2021/2022
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Week 2 - Critical reflections on community, nation and gender


Anne McClintock. ‘Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism and the Family’, Feminist Review No. 44,
Summer 1993, pp.61-80



- Nationalism, as Ernest Gellner notes, invents nations where they do not exist,

- Benedict 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).

- 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. -- nations are contested systems of cultural representation that limit and
legitimize peoples' access to the resources of the nation-state.

- Nationalism + gender power – Cynthia Enloe states that nationalisms have “typically sprung
from masculinized memory, masculinized humiliation and masculinized hope” (Enloe, 1989:
44).

- Men talking of nation – “our nation” … the ‘our’ of national agency is male

- ^ needs of the nation are identified with those of men, and the representation of male
national power depends on the prior construction of gender difference

- Gellner sees the definition of nationhood as rested upon male recognition of identity.

- In male nationalisms – gender difference between men and women serve as a symbolic
definition of the limits of national difference and power between men.

- Women are typically construed as the symbolic bearers of the nation but are denied any
direct relation to national agency  they are given only a symbolic role.

- 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):

- 1. as biological reproducers of the members of national collectivities

- 2. as reproducers of the boundaries of national groups (through restrictions on sexual or
marital relations) [there are national restrictions and communal restrictions]

- 3. as active transmitters and producers of the national culture

,- 4. as symbolic signifiers of national difference

- 5. as active participants in national struggles

- Therefore, from the beginning nationalism is a gendered discourse

- The national family of man:

- Nations are frequently figured through the iconography of familial and domestic space. –
‘the home’ -- nations are spoken as ‘motherlands' and ‘fatherlands'.

- Nation - symbolically envisioned as a domestic realm ===== this is important for 2 reasons:

- 1. Notions of family/ domesticity offers a ‘natural' figure for sanctioning social hierarchy
within a putative organic unity of interests. ***

- 2. it offers a ‘natural' trope for figuring historical time.

- ^^ using ‘family’ as a metaphorical institution alludes to existence beyond politics, history
etc… and at the same time becomes the organising figure for national history.

- A masculine narrative of using the domestic home space as a metaphor for the nation allows
men to symbolically ensure the continuation of their dominance within nationalism. Also
womens domestic roles as nurturers and upbringers are politicised as their role comes to be
injecting nationalist ideologies into their children and also nurture nationalist developments

- The family metaphor offered a justification for 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 order.

- ^ National or imperial intervention could be imagined as an organic, non-revolutionary
progression that naturally contained hierarchy within unity: paternal fathers ruling benignly
over immature children.

- Fanon – notes that imperial intervention frequently took shape as a domestic rescue drama.
– women’s bodies get pulled into this narrative – colonialism stating they are ‘saving’ or
‘rescuing’ women - the domesticated, female body became the terrain over which the
military contest was fought.  the use of ‘domestic rescue drama’ is powerful because of
the centrality/ importance of the domestic home for South Asians.

- Women’s political relation to the nation actually is a social relation to a man through
marriage – their citizenship in the nation was mediated through marriage relation in the
family

- The gendering of nation time:

, - Deniz Kandiyoti - expresses the temporal contradiction within nationalism – ‘it presents
itself both as a modern project that melts and transforms traditional attachments in favour
of new identities and as a reflection of authentic cultural values culled from the depths of a
presumed communal past' [Kandiyoti, 1992)

- Walter Benjamin's crucial insight into the temporal paradox of modernity  For Benjamin, a
central feature of nineteenth century industrial capitalism was the 'use of archaic images to
identify what was historically new about the "nature" of commodities' (Buck-Morss, 1989:
67).

- ^ in this insight, the mapping of 'Progress' depends on systematically inventing images of
'archaic' time to identify what is historically 'new' about enlightened, national progress

- Also – the clash in nationalism of nostalgia for the past and the desires for progression – is
resolved by assuming this contradiction as a ‘natural’ division of gender.

- ^ Women are represented as the ancient and authentic 'body' of national tradition (passive,
backward-looking, and natural), embodying nationalism's conservative principle of
continuity. Men, by contrast, represent the progressive agent of national modernity
(forward-thrusting, potent and historic), embodying nationalism's progressive, or
revolutionary principle of discontinuity. Nationalism's anomalous relation to time (desires
for both past and present) is thus managed as a natural relation to gender.

- Even when women are allowed entry near the political sphere – they are assigned to be
suffering and self-sacrificial

- “By portraying the Afrikaner nation symbolically as a weeping woman, the mighty male
embarrassment of military defeat could be overlooked, and the memory of women's vital
efforts during the war washed away in images of feminine tears and maternal loss.”

- ^^^^ the same could be said for India [and Pakistan?] – bringing women in as the major
symbol – the continuous assigning of women as the nation so that any masculine defeat
could be overlooked.

- Women play a large role in nation-building – largely because the home is seen as the last
space left untouched by colonial rule [and also last space left where men’s authority and
dominance remains untouched/ unchallenged] – notions of motherhood were mobilised in
the service of nation-building

- Motherhood becomes a political concept in nationalism

- Women's volunteer work/ activism was approved in so far as it served the interests of the
(male) 'nation', and women's political identity was figured as merely supportive and
auxiliary.

- “Feminism is imperialist when it puts the interests and needs of privileged women in
imperialist countries above the local needs of disempowered women and men, borrowing
from patriarchal privilege” [77]

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