No Longer in a Future Heaven": Women and Nationalism in South Africa (original) (raw)

All nationalisms are gendered, all are invented, and all are dangerous. Nations are not the natural flowering into time of the organic essence of a people, borne unscathed through the ages. Rather, as Ernest Gellner observes, nationalism "invents nations where they do not exist." Most modern nations, despite their appeal to an august and immemorial past, are for the most part very recent inventions. Benedict Anderson thus argues that nations are best understood as "imagined communities," systems of representations whereby people come to imagine a shared experience of identification with an extended community. Nonetheless, nations are not simply phantasmagoria of mind. The term "imagined" carries in its train connotations of fiction and make-believe, moonshine and chimera. The term "invented community," by contrast, refuses the conservative faith in essence and nature, while at the same time conveying more powerfully the implications of labor and creative ingenuity, technology and institutional power. Nations are elaborate social practices enacted through time, laboriously fabricated through the media and the printing press, in schools, churches, the myriad forms of popular culture, in trade unions and funerals, protest marches and uprisings. Nationalism both invents and performs social difference, enacting it ritualistically in Olympic extravaganzas, mass rallies and military displays, flag waving and costumery, and becoming thereby constitutive of people's identities. The green, black, and gold flag of the African National Congress, or a Palestinian kafiyeh, may be bits of colored cloth, but there is nothing fictive about their power to conjure up the loyalties of life and death, or to provoke the state's expert machinery of wrath. For this reason, nationalisms are dangerous, not, as Eric Hobsbawm would have it, in the sense that they should be opposed, but rather in the sense that they represent relations to political power and to the technologies of violence. Nationalisms are contested systems of representation enacted through social institutions, and legitimizing, or limiting, people's access to the rights and resources of the nation-state: land and water, political and economic power, children, food and housing, the technologies of violence. Nations are situations under constant contest. All nationalisms, moreover, are gendered. "When you own a big chunk of the bloody Third World, the babies just come with the scenery," as the Chrissie Hynde song goes. In the chronicles of male nationalism, women, too, are all too often figured as mere scenic backdrops to the big-brass business of masculine armies and uprisings. Theorists of nationalism (Fanon notably excepted) have seldom felt moved to explore how nationalisms are at every minute implicated in gender power. No nationalism in the world has granted women and men the same privileged access to the resources of the nation-state. So far, all nationalisms are dependent on powerful constructions of gender difference. George Santayana, for one, gives voice to a well-established male view: "Our nationalism is like our relationship to women: too implicated in our moral nature to be changed honorably, and too accidental to be worth changing." For Santayana political agency is straightforwardly male, and the male citizen stands in the same symbolic relation to the nation as a man stands to a woman, political power thus depending on a prior construction of gender power. Santayana's sentence could never be said by a woman, because, quite simply, the "our" of national citizenship is male. The needs of the nation are identified with the needs, frustrations, and aspirations of men. As in the translated (not original) title of Fanon's famous essay "Algeria Unveiled," women are construed as the "bearers of the nation," its boundary and symbolic limit, but lack a nationality of their own. In such WOMEN AND NATIONALISM 105 108 TRANSITION NUMBER 51