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Budapest W3: Nationalism, Gender and Sexuality - Class Notes

Women and nation

Formal mechanisms and institutions come together to form paradigm for the state.
Davis - written in '89 - UEL professor and director of migration centre (now)
Anthias - ibid - Rohampton professor (now)
Mcclintock - '93 - Princeton (now) Colombia (then) - environmental and sexuality studies

Mcclintock - written at the peak of protest and divestment of South Africa's apartheid. It ended one year after publication.
- ANC is a male-dominated nationalist party

Davis/Anthias - Intersectional zeitgeist, grafting race onto issues of sex/class
- Marxist influence in feminism - class considered as class (women as a class - reminiscent of Marxist analysis)
- How successful is integration of critique when 2nd wave feminism still has so much baggage?
     - Poststructuralist technique - binary structure critique, hadn't entered these textual discourses. Liberal theories of society and state are shown. Agency and resistance from a marxist perspective. Not assuming unitary category of woman.

Mcclintock - Gender is not a reducable category of analysis
Post colonial analysis! Quoting Edward Said.
- Although post-colonial is in her piece, post-structuralist analysis has not. Patriarchy is not a post-structuralist concept because it maintains binary power relations - Structuralist vision of power (Marx)
Politics as liberatory politics - Liberation vs. Power

Davis/Anthias - Ways in which women participate in ethnic and national processes - guarding women from having sex with inappropriate people
p. 9 - women stopped from having sex with men from other groups.
Status of the offspring is the consequence
- guardian of the nation - blurring the line worries the maintenance of national groups

 Mcclintock - p.65 - A woman's political relation to the nation was submerged as a social relation to a man through marriage.
- Metaphorical level - Invented nationalism - bound in reproduction - mothers role
- Symbolic level - p.72 - Mother monument - erases women as active agents in colonisers - Agency - how much did women do? Did their agency get forgiven? p.72 - White women are both colonised and colonisers, ambiguously implicated in the history of African dispossession.
- Literal level - women's demands - motherhood - calls to action for the revolution -reclaiming the narrative of motherhood as subjugated
Women claiming power through motherhood - children used to justify claims

- National disempowerment by representing female disempowerment
- Agency - women claiming agency - ANC - still oppressed from within
- p.11 women involved in controlling other women (intersection of race/class/gender)

Women - reproduce babies, tradition - upholding agenda made by men
- indirect citizens only viable by marriage (p.65)
- bound to the nation while men carry them along

Women being passive - family structure (men>women>children) passed on to nation (erases complicity)
Women are the site of nation/gender intersected - which stops them from being sexually free

Mcclintock - Temporality - men are forward looking, women are the protector of an eternal moment. Imagining a great past in order to justify power over the present. Return to the greatness of fictionality. Janus-faced nationalism.

Turning the genealogical family into a public evolutionary tree - creating a nation - which then becomes exclusive again.

Agency - women using motherhood and structure in order to gain political power
Women's political involvement leans on tropes of mothers and femininity
Mobilising resistence through motherhood - thorugh constraints of power

How does this add to nationalism as a concept?
- Returning to the state
- Family, time, history
- Commonalities and differences
- Nation and gender use racial distinctions
- Fetishism of the popular - how is it gendered?

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