Nira Yuval-Davis

Theorising
Gender and
Nation
 Main Ideas
Gender relations:
 Impact on national creatons (projects)
 Positions and positioning of women in national projects
 How national projects are gendered both by the notions of man and
womanhood
Epistemological framework:
 Knowledge drawn from one standpoint cannot be ‘finished’ i.e. finally
defined
 Though it does not mean invalidity or irrelevance to any particular
context
Theorizations - nation and
nationalism
Dissmissed the importance of gender relations (even women)
Primordialists – a school of nationalists
 Nations – natural, universal extention of kinship relations
Materialists
 Stress state bureaucracy, institutional apparatuses and the maintenance
of national-ethnic ideologies and boundraries
Others claim
 Intellectuals are important in creating nationalist ideologies
• esp. in opressed nations, e.g. bards, philosophers –either allowed or
banned show golden age of anation from the mythical perspective.

Women usually excluded from these neatly constructed theories !!!!!!!!!!!

 Why theories exclude
women?
Patterman’s (1988) and Grant’s (1991) explanations (social
contract)
 Public and private spheres family and politics women within the
family domain, separated from politics as irrelevant.
 Exclusion from public discourse was a consequence
 Imagined state of nature vs civilised society women on the sideof
nature, as those incapable of agression and reason (male features in
Rosseau and Hobbes)

Women were always in the national arena regardless of discourse – their

inclusion – recent amd partial.
 Nationalist Projects
Deconstructivist approach is taken.
 Nation-states can be:
• Sub-
• Super-
• Cross-states – physical boundraries rarely seem convergent here.
 Pre-modern perspective is not dismissed altogether:
• Growing fundamentalist movements esp. religious – produce new forms
of nationalist hegemony.
 Nation has its context:
• History
• National discourses of different groupings
• Fight or competition for hegemony
• Gendered character is contextualized
 Women and Gender
Relations
3 main questions for inquiry:
 How women are opressed – gendered relations of power, patriarchy
 Sex and gender debate – biologically and culturally defined differences
 Generalized notions of gender relations - how men and women see
themselves within those relations
Nature and culture in gender relations:
 Culture aimed at controlling women’s positioning
 Nature inferior to culture – western thread of thought
 In some cultures NATURE is not taimed – women in tribal hierachy
 Patriarchy and Fraternity
Patriarchy
 Typical of pre-modern historical period – king as father figure
 Can be located in the specific geographical area – Africa and Middle
East – family in the centre, woman’s ‘virtue’ important.
Fraternity
 Typical of modern, liberal period
 Agree ment on social contract – both equal in private and political
spheres
 Woman is not a passive non-participant – has a say in determining
gender relations
 Sex and Gender Debate
Sex (biological), gender (culturally constructed)
Enabled feminists of various schools to show the neccessity to
strive for social and sexual equality
Constructing discourses around those notions led to
deculturization of both notions
The meaningfulness of both is blurred – they intertwine
nowadays
 Theorising Nations and
States
The concept of nation-state:
 Nation boundrary ≠ state boundrary
 Not considered a members of a hegemonic nation
• Immigrants
• Refugees
• Without a state – diasporas e.g. Palestinians
National hegemony is an artifitial construct:
 Creates minorities
 Can lead to eventual ethnic cleansing
 State and Society
No universal definition for a state is possible to be devised
A variety of state types:
 Democratic
 Welfare state
 Bolshevist and fascist
 With collective or liberal tendencies
State may be understood as:
 Individual identities – in international relations
 An all-encompassing creature – in relations with society
Foucauldian paradigm:
 No unitary state whatsoever
 Instead focus on social policies, the law and institutional arrangements
 State and Society
Civil society
 Institutions, collectivitie and groupings outside the scope of state’s
defined agenda
 They complement and are complemented by the state’s projects
• Voluntary associations
• Controlling institutions (production of signs and symbols)
• Economic market
 The family domain:
• Social
• Economic
• Political networks
• Households
all organized around kinship and frendship relations.
 Civil Society
Factors shaping civil society:
 Heterogenity
 Ideologies
 Historical circumstances
 Ethnicity, class, gender, social groupings in general
 Form of governement
 Flexibility towards different national ans state projects
 Nation of nations
Primordialist theories on nation
 Eternal and universal
 Natural extention of family and kinship
• Man protecting the woman and children
• Established sexual roles
Imagined comunities (Anderson,1983)
 Direct results of developements of European history
 Print capitalism and technological advancement neccessary for their
rise
 Literacy is widespread, native tongue is the tool for all classes to read
mass publications
 Membership is still considered natural rather than chosen
 Membership involves sacrifice –fighting, killing or being killed
 Passions rather than pure interests, homogeneity = smooth functioning
 Nation of Nations
Durability:
 based on myth-symbol complexity
 Ethnic origin of the nation (Smith, 1986)
 Long history of centralized governements that created a sense of unity
 Political proceses influencing centralization(Zubaida, 1989)
 Common destiny crucial for construction and durability of nations
Structure:
 Bi or multinational
 Supra-state EU
 Regional autonomy Scotland
 Separatist or rebublican (reunion) movements
 Zionist movements Liberia, or Israel
 Immigrant communities, exiles or committed diasporas (ex post-facto
homeland) support
Dynamic Structure of Nation
Boundraries reconstruction
Immigration
Naturalization
Conversion
Social and political processes
Nation Projects - taxonomies
Historical taxonomies
• Focus on Europe
Sociological taxonomies
• Focus on various locations
• Specific goals like secession, pan-national liberation
• Kultunation (symbolic heritage) and Staatnation (Neuberger,
1986)
• Civic nationalism (Ignatieff, 1993)
 Strive for the rights within the community
 A sense of belonging one has
Gendered Nation - Biological
Reproduction
Biological reproduction – rights to either have families or not
 In some national projects women are forced to increase or decrease
thenumber of offspring
• Malthusian discourse (the decrease to prevent future national disaster)
• Eugenical discourse: improving the quality of the national stock:
classifying women: suitability to have children
 Genealogy
• By being born one is a member of a given collective
• Controlling marrige patterns, procreation and sexuality
• Fear of miscegenation
 Cultural reproduction
Gender symbols can be translated into gender roles
Women attempt to challenge traditionally established roles or
follow them:
 Emancipaton
• Veilling
• Voting
• Education
• Employment campaigns
 Following the tradition
 Citizenship,Military,Wars
Immigration, nationality and refugees legislation
 Expected to be dependent on family ties and live together
 On the multi-layered level of citizenship:
• Civil
• Political
• Social
rights and responsibilities women are often subjected to specific laws.
Military and wars:
 Profesionalization of the military
 Woman participation as soldiers
 War victims – raped, interned and refugees
Benedict Anderson

Imagined
comunities
 Imagined communitties
Nation can only be imagined when
 Universal language script (medeival Latin)
 New history and cosmology patterns
 Old organiational patterns vanished gradually
• Monarchy – divine rulers
• Hierarchy
That happened in Western Europe and elswhere due to:
 Economic change
 Social and scientific discoveries
 Devolopement of new, rapid comunication
 A search of the link between power, fraternity and time (history)
 Imagined communitties
Devolopement of print as commodity
 A range of new ideas could be transmitted or smuggled if neccessary
 Manuscripts replaced by reproductable knowlege
 Early print capitalism emerged – branches of printing bussinesses and
publishing houses – national boundraries ignored
 An early market search – literate Europe
 First – Latin readers – the others will quickly follow
 Cheap editions in vernaculars - mass readership developement
 Latin Transformation
Latin removed from the educational and eccleciastical contexts
Latin – entered as a language of print – unification needed
Impact of Reformation and the popularisation of ‘non-Latin’
languages (Luther – writing in German, popular by his name,
first ever bests-selling author)
Protestantism as an advocaate of print-capitalism
Index Librarium Prohibitium – Vatican on the other pole
(decrease of power)
New masses of readers – non-Latin speakers enter
 New languages
Europe was not as universalistic in political systems as in
linguistic domain
 New vernaculars for administration – Anglo-Saxon in England for
courts
 After the Norman conquest French mixing with Anglo-Saxon resulted
in new English (Early English)
 Choice of new language as dominant is pragmatic, unselfconcious, and
a gradual process – contributed to the decline of imagined European,
Christendom- dominated communitty.
 Languages fatality
Can be positive- generates language diversity
Unifies many ‘little nations’
 Unique fields of exchange
 printproducing language varieties and opening the geographical
boundraries
Interplay between fatality, technology and capitalism
Print- capitalism decided wchich langages were to extinct or
deteriorate (closer to print vernacular = succesfull)
 Imagined communitties
conclusion
Modern nation was preconditioned by;
 Convergence of capitalism and print technology
 Fatal created diversity of human languages
 Imagined community concept appeared

Contemporary naton-states are bound together by the existance of those

unifying print- languages and emerging new nation projects are the
evidence.