Gender, citizenship & nationalism nexus

Sanskrati Srivastava

Bachelors in English & French (3rd year)

Gender, citizenship & nationalism nexus

The process of state-building and state-maintenance as well as the interaction between states, whether overtly or covertly is achieved through the intimate love-triangle relationship between citizenship, nationalism and gender.

Most people would confuse nationalism and citizenship as synonyms. And most people do not understand the requirement of gender-neutral nature in each one of them. Gender is especially regarded as womanhood in terms of the nation. Each nation assigns gender roles to its citizens. Emerging from disciplines such as anthropology, history, psychology, and sociology, the literature on nationalism has traditionally focused on the origins, development, and evolution of nations and nationalism, ethnic politics, and national identity.

In western nations, men are assigned the roles of protector and labourer, whereas women are assigned the roles of mother and homemaker. By defining roles for women and men, nationalism also denies the existence of a gender identity outside the traditional male or female. Inter-sexed individuals have no gender role, i.e. no designated role to play in or for the nation.

The consideration of gender roles and differences within the participation of citizenship and nationalism took place during the imperialism era. By creating gender roles that gave men power over women, the colonisers earned the support and cooperation of the society’s men, making it easier to imperialise them. The involvement of every citizen regardless of their genders has played a critical role in the journey of understanding freedom and nationalism.

Women may have the status of citizenship within their states, but not the practice of it, given discrimination and the continuing views of women's roles and location in the private sphere. Women in many countries gained social rights as mothers or workers before they got the vote and before they even got civil rights in marriage [ iv ]. The point is that rights often mean one thing for women and another for men. For instance, the right to contraception and abortion, because men and women have different lives and different bodies.

An ironic fact is that during the last thirty years women have been integrated into the labour market and it is remarkable that this expansion of women wage workers has not been followed by a change in social policies to support the roles of women as working mothers. Whereas even Netflix, a massive online content streaming platform with gazillions of viewers who are influenced by it, is trying to put in its contribution by launching a series called “Working Moms”!

Women become markers for the nation – women’s status stands in for the progress of the nation as a whole. Through this process of homogenisation, individual women are silenced, their identities lost. Women’s bodies become sites for viewing the nation, sites for debates around tradition, and sites where the Nation is regenerated. Women’s bodies are fetishised in nationalist discourses, and the boundaries of women’s bodies are conflated with the borders of the nation. Hence, nationalist discourses seek to protect and maintain the integrity of national/female bodily borders from invasion/penetration of “outsider” (male) citizens/nationalists, once again demonstrating the racialized nature of Nations. The maintenance of the nation’s racial and ethnic integrity can be clearly seen in the practical control nations exert over the sexuality and reproduction of both their own and other nations’ women. For the nation is symbolically a woman, the revenge or depiction of power over one nation by the other is taken out on the women citizens. The outrage is that mass rape is a form of systematic racism against the men of the nation. Mass rape is commonly viewed as more serious than widespread rape, for example in South Africa where rape statistics are the highest in the world, for the simple reason that mass rape is genocide – it is not directed merely at the women who are victimised, but at the entire race/ethnicity, including and most importantly, the men to whom the women belong.

For maybe nations are in-fact ‘domi’nations. Mass rape is viewed as a dominant move in the name of national security thus creating a direct relationship between genders and citizenship in regard to nationalism.

As we might all agree, gender, race, and sexuality are all social and cultural constructions, just as are nations. These constructions are contentious, because they are far too broad. Gender leaves out those who are transgendered, transsexual, androgynous, and inter-sexed. All of these categories of identity are normative, historical categories formulated in relation to each other and differing from culture to culture. Each of these constructs break down into sub-constructs, which are involved in binary, oppositional relationships with each other, and each of these relationships is a relation of power. Yet, gender breaks into “man” and “woman,” with man holding privilege. Race is broken into basic categories of “white” and “non-white,” privileging those who are white. Sexuality divides into “heterosexual” and “homosexual,” with heterosexuality holding privilege. Nations define themselves in terms of “insiders” and “outsiders,” privileging insiders, or so-called citizens.

Citizenship represents civic identity, political residence whereas nationalism marches about ethnic identity, cultural relations to a birth land. t is these incomplete and non-contextual constructions that are the building blocks of society. It is these constructions that bind societies together and allow for the formation of nationalism.

The nation is envisioned as a patriarchal family, a fraternity or brotherhood of men, in which the traditions of the forefathers are passed down through the generations to young men who become the heroic protectors of those traditions. Women, on the other hand, are defined out of participating in the fraternal national project as equals, and are conceived as mothers, the reproducers of the nation whose wombs bring forth the next generation of the patriarchal line. Julie Mostov writes, “women physically reproduce the nation, and men protect and avenge it.”[ i ]. Another way of looking at this is that young men are generally considered to be expendable enough to be sent to their deaths in the name of their country’s safety. Gender difference is defined by women's disproportionate association with biological and social reproductive labor. These gendered, racialized familial formations are strongly heterosexist, leaving out of lesbian, gay, and bisexual people. People who produce combined-race children are conceived as a threat to the cohesiveness of the nation, and childless people become disloyal members, as participation in national family values and traditions requires reproduction [ i.i ]

Through my own feminist view, nations reinforce and support male privilege. When the nation is imagined as a patriarchal family, and citizenship is imagined as a brotherhood, women are excluded from positions of power and there is no equal sisterhood in citizenship. Zillah Eisenstein writes, “Nations are made up of citizens and the fiction here requires that anyone can be of the nation… Women are absented from the fraternity unless its for fertility… They are given no voice.”[ ii ] In Indonesia, population control is a major part of national identity, and women are encouraged to limit the number of children they have. Indonesia is presenting an image of a controlled and focussed nation to the world, a modern nation ready to participate in the global political economy. Key to this project is presenting a controlled image of the national family – national family planning, so to speak – and it is doing so through stringent control over female contraception [ iii ]

Nationalist narratives not only position women into restrictive roles of subordination, they place women in dangerous and precarious positions. The representations of women in nationalist discourses have real effects on the bodies of real women.The narratives of nationalism mould the experiences of real women in national settings. Because nations and states are not identical, national narratives challenge women’s rights of state citizenship and threaten women’s physical safety and integrity by conflating women’s bodies with national borders and ensuring that women fulfil their roles as reproducers and keepers of morality.

I want to interpret this research from a citizen perspective, as the seed of nationalism within me and every other citizen would grow from the acceptance and acknowledgement of the gender identity that I hold. Putting it poetically in layman terms:

Nationalism speaks for citizenship,

citizenship talks about gender,

and the gender defines the nation.

As a relief, the good thing about socially constructed categories, like gender, sexuality, race, and nation, is that they are not grounded in any objective truth. There is possibility for changing these categories, and the discourses that come out of them.

By reading works of scholars, [ v ] feminists do not aim to make citizenship gender-neutral. According to them, they argue that we need to rethink citizenship from the viewpoint of a female citizen.

So, if being a citizen gives one all the citizenship rights one needs - as social liberals assume - why should women need women’s rights?

Does this mean that women do not possess all the citizenship rights or do women for some reason need extra, collective rights?

Or is the national liberal idea about the relation between citizenship and gender rights flawed?

References

[ i ] [Mostov, Julie. “Sexing the Nation/Desexing the Body: Politics of National Identity in the Former Yugoslavia” in Gender Ironies of Nationalism: Sexing the Nation (Mayer, T., ed.). London: Routledge, 2000, 89.]

[ i.i ] Mostov, Julie. “Sexing the Nation/Desexing the Body: Politics of National Identity in the Former Yugoslavia”

[ ii ] Zillah Eisenstein. Beyond equality and difference: Citizenship, feminist politics, and female subjectivity.

[ iii ] Dwyer, Leslie K. “Spectacular Sexuality: Nationalism, Development and the Politics of Family Planning in Indonesia” in Gender Ironies of Nationalism: Sexing the Nation (Mayer, T., ed.). London: Routledge, 2000, 29.]

[ iv ] Bock, G., & James, S. (1992). Beyond equality and difference: Citizenship, feminist politics, and female subjectivity. London: Routledge

[ v ] Feminism and citizenship, By Maria Christine Bernadetta Voet Rian Voet, Rian Voet