Week 5 – Balkans from empires to nation states

Anne McClintock – Imperial leather: race, gender, and sexuality in the colonial context

1. In what ways are nationalisms gendered?

 Nationalism are gendered and dangerous

o Dangerous in the sense of representing relations to political power and the technologies of violence
 For Gellner, nationalism invents nations where they don’t exist
o Anderson warns that Gellner associates invention with falsity rather than imagining and creation
 Form him, nations are historical practices through which social difference is both invented
and performed
 Nations depend on powerful constructions of gender
o Questions of how men’s and women’s access to the rights and resources of the nation state vary
o Cynthia Enloe argues that nationalisms have typically sprung from masculinised memory, humiliation
and hope.
 George Santayana presents a well-established male view
o His ‘our’ of national agency is male and the representation of male national power depends on the
prior construction of gender difference.
 Often in male nationalisms, gender difference between women and men serve to symbolically desfine the
limits of national difference and power between men
o Women are subsumed as the boundary and metaphoric limit of the national body politic
 “Singapore girl you’re a great way to fly”
o As Elleke Boehmer points out, the “motherland” of male nationalism may not signify “home”
and “source” to women

2. What are the typical roles ascribed to women in national projects (nationalism, nation states,
etc.)?

 5 ways
o Biological reproducers
 Views of Women as producers of ethnic ideals – nazi germany
o Reproducers of the boundaries of national groups – through restrictions on sexual or marital
relations
o Active transmitters of national culture
 Through raising children
o Symbolic signifiers of national differenc
o Active participants in national struggles
 Feminist theory of nationalism
o Can investigate formation of male theories of nationalism
o Bring historical visibility to womens’ participation in national formations
o Bringing nationalist institutions into relation with other social structures and institutions
o Paying attention to the structures of racial, ethnic and class power
3. What is the role of familial and gendered representations of the nation?

 Speak of “motherlands” and “fatherlands”

 Family trope offers a “natural” figure for sanctioning national hierarchy within a unity of interests
o Family offered a figure by which national differences could be shaped into a single historical genesis
narrative
 Women are represented as the authentic body of national tradition (inert, backward-looking and natural)
o Men represent the progressive agent of national modernity, embodying nationalism progressive
principle of discontinuity

Irvin Cemil Schick:

1. What does rape have to do with nationalism?

 Sexual violence can offer a representation of territorial appropriation and the inability of men to defend their
territory and manhood
o Violence against women becomes an assault of men’s and national honour – shows inability to
protect
 In the struggle for Greek independence, the motif of a Greek female captive of the turks was used to
mobilise public opinion in support of the cause

2. How does the symbolic sexualization of wartime conflicts serve the national cause?

 Suffering was a key ingredient of the inter-ethnic and intercofessional sexual relationships used to
represent national conflict
o Collective memories of national conflict helped nations accrue political capital
 This elicited support for national independence movements
3. What political role did art and literature play in the nineteenth century
Ottoman Balkans?

 Greece personified as a harem woman

 Idyllic land of Greece being defiled by Turkish lust
o Their passion riots in her pride, and lust and rapine wildly reign
 Greece presented as a damsel in distress
o

4. How does Schick use and analyse visual and textual sources to prove his main
arguments? (Thinking actively about this can be
useful practice for your own analysis of primary sources in the essay)
5. What was philhellenism and how did it manifest in art and literature?
 Seminar discussion

 Gender and agency

o Women traditionally excluded from
 The family in nationalism
o Implies something that has always existed
o A gendered hierarchy
 Nationalism is backward looking to tradition and forward looking to modernity
 Schick article discusses how ottoman violence has been presented in art and literary culture
o Argues that problem with dealing with rape of women as a nationalising tool is that it turns people
into a project, turns victims into such
o Explores how the same kind of art existed among high art and popular culture
 Unknown whether they have seen these art pieces
 Suggests that this art in popular culture must have grown out of general beliefs and
stereotypes
o Art can have political impact
 Is an accessible means of understanding Ottomans as deviants through a sexual medium
o Media made it impossible for british empire to
 Philhellinism
o Love of Greek tradition
o A lot of artistic production – representation in poems and paintings
 Gender history
o What role does gender have in nation-building
 Analysis of discourse in visual imagery as well as text