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The Anti-Essentialist Choice: Nationalism and Feminism in The Interaction Between Two Women's Projects
The Anti-Essentialist Choice: Nationalism and Feminism in The Interaction Between Two Women's Projects
0 ASEN 2000
Helen was ambivalent, feeling she was driven deeper into a British national
identity by Irish nationalism. ‘For me, IRA violence has encouraged me to
hold onto my British identity. So it’s not because I love Britain, it’s because
I hate people telling me what to do.’ Liz on the other hand (whose family,
like Helen’s, comes mainly from a Protestant tradition) said:
I understand nationalism in its beginnings to mean the right of a people to rule their
own destiny. But the problem to me is, who decides what a nation is? For me, living
in Ireland, I would agree with Maureen politically, in that my hopes would be the
same. But I don’t call myself a nationalist. I believe there are many dangers in
nationalism. Because my experience has been, not just in Ireland but from what I’ve
seen throughout the world, that nationalism sets up a principle of a certain type of
people, and then the people have to try to fit into that nationalism.
And Carol had a clear detachment from national belonging, seeing the
conflict between British and Irish nationalism as an ‘after-effect of
colonialism’.
f was brought u p to feel British but 1 never felt nationhood was very important. As
a child we wrote letters to each other and we put the address as ‘Belfast, County
Antrim, Northern Ireland, British Isles, Europe, the World, the Universe’, as though
we were a little part of a great big jigsaw. For me it’s not so important what the
country is called, what matters is the type of government and the amount of say
people have over their lives. If the situation changed so that there was a United
Ireland and good government by and for the people, I’d be happy enough to change
my nationality. If Britain was involved and the power handed down to people
equally, it wouldn’t matter. My parents would fight for it to remain British. But I
wouldn’t lose any sleep. That’s my very personal view of nationalism.
The anti-essentialist choice 615
Among the Bosnian women too there were differences. The recent massacres
of people for their supposed ethnic identity had, unsurprisingly, given a very
negative spin in Bosnia to the words ‘ethnic’ and ‘national’. They meant
hatred, exclusion and violence. Most women therefore sharply distinguished
themselves from ‘nationalists’. Jelena even felt she somehow lacked the
national bone in her body. Like many of the Medica women, she had been
among those who had preferred to identify as ‘Yugoslav’ in federal
Yugoslavia, rather than as belonging to one of the constituent nations. Her
family’s Orthodox past had not featured much in her sense of self.
First we had Yugoslavia. Then we lost it. When that happened I felt naked. I asked
myself all the time - because from my grandparents and parents I had this Serb
background. But maybe through my own fault I grew up without this feeling, this
base. Now it’s difficult for me at age forty to build up this identity. It’s somehow
underdeveloped.
take when they achieve power (Anderson 1983). Jan Nederveen Pieterse
similarly deconstructs ethnicity - representing it as a continuum, with wide
variation in terms of salience, intensity and meaning. Ethnic identity may be
merely an option, held lightly. Or it may become competitive with other
ethnicities. Aspiring to power, an ethnicity becomes a project for nation-
hood. Dominant, it may achieve nation-statehood (Pieterse 1997). But a
significant questionmark then hangs over the state. If the state is governed
by a social formation that remains nationalist, can it ever be fully inclusive
and democratic? Is ‘civic’ nationalism a contradiction in terms?
The dimension to nationalism that emerged as important in the encounter
between the two women’s organisations was that of essentialism versus anti-
essentialism. At any moment on the trajectory of the national project, the
most negative variants of nationalism are those that reduce nationality to an
essence. The source may be represented as genetic. Or it may be represented
as culture, in a timeless and homogeneous form. As Nira Yuvdl-Davis puts
it, ‘the myth of common origin or shared blood/genes tends to construct the
most exclusionary/homogeneous visions of “the nation”’ (Yuval-Davis
1997: 21). It tends, in Eric Hobsbawm’s words, towards ‘the murderous
reductio ad absurdum of nationalism in its territorial version’, logically
headed for mass expulsions and genocide (Hobsbawm 1990: 133). By
contrast, more positive national movements are those in which working-
class or anti-colonial projects, informed by socialism and egalitarianism,
adopt national identity as one of their several mobilising ideas. This kind of
nationalism looks to the future rather than the past, and does not define
‘the people’ by bloodline, tradition or religion (Cockburn 1998).
At the Mijas workshop it was clear that even those women who described
themselves as nationalist were not buying into a fundamentalist myth of
primordial nationhood. Maureen saw ‘her’ nationalism as a resistance
movement against imperialist injustice, with a socialist-inspired egalitar-
ianism. After all, as two relatively non-partisan analysts of the conflict put
it, ‘The “centuries of foreign oppression” thesis advanced by Irish
nationalists and socialists, for all its emotive colouration, is not without
validity’ (O’Leary and McGarry 1993: 102). When I later asked Maureen
whether she would still be a nationalist if Ireland were a unified state
governed by Irish nationalists, she answered, ‘I believe that Irish nationalism
would transmute into something less narrow as it achieved power. After all,
the thrust of the nationalist agenda for peace in Northern Ireland today is
an equality agenda.’ It does not follow from Maureen’s self-positioning that
others would share her optimism, but it is possible to see why they might
understand and tolerate it.
The Bosnian Muslim nationalism of Nudzejma and some other Bosniak
women in Medica they also represented as defensive and civic. It is widely
recognised that Bosnian Muslim identity has differed from its two
competitors, Bosnian Croat and Bosnian Serb nationalism, in lacking a
discourse of blood bonding and territorial claims. It has not mirrored them
The anti-essentialist choice 617
It was 1996 when Nudzejma spoke at the Mijas workshop. The Bosniak
political structure was still reeling from the war, and parties arguing for
ethnic inclusiveness were still contenders for power. But the nationalist
Party of Democratic Action (SDA) would later consolidate its dominance in
the state and religion would increasingly be used as a definer of national
belonging. Complaints would be heard that non-Muslims were being
marginalised and mixed marriages discouraged. How would the feelings of
Nudzejma and other Medica women about Bosniak identity develop as the
space between nation and state closed up?
In the evaluation of ‘nationalism’ by the women at Mijas, one thing was
common: a gender critique. Among the women (from both countries) who
identified themselves with nationalism there was a clear belief that women
potentially had a different way of ‘doing nationalism’ from the currently
visible and violent way, which they described as masculine.
Rosie, for instance, called herself nationalist, but qualified this by
appealing to that potential ‘settlement around rights’ described by Pieterse
above, but here inclusive not only of minority rights but of women’s rights.
As a feminist I wouldn’t want to see Northern Ireland just being merged with
Southern Ireland. I’d like to see an Ireland where all the different strands of
opinion and political thinking are negotiated, and we come up with a new Ireland
that accommodates women. Nationalism, as well, I think, can be a very male thing.
And I know that in Ireland women don’t fit in with being nationalist, being
nationalistic.
618 Cynthia Cockburn
We saw how Maureen talked about an Irish nationalism that had been
‘influenced by feminism’ among other progressive forces, and she admitted,
‘My idea of nationalism comes from being female. I don’t think men would
think about it this way.’ In her view, national liberation and women’s
liberation are mutually necessary. But she knew enough about the history of
anti-colonial struggle to know that nationalist women have to be prepared
for double militancy, struggling within but also against the movement - for
a national liberation movement but for women’s liberation within it. As
Valentine Moghadam puts it, ‘far from being the automatic concomitant of
national liberation, women’s liberation has been frequently regarded as
inimical to the integrity and identity of the national group’ (Moghadam
1994: 2).
The women (from both Medica and the Network) who were opposed to
nationalism, explained their suspicion not only by reference to the
murderous aggressiveness they had experienced from nationalists, but also
to the way women seem to them to be positioned in essentialist nationalist
discourses. Nira Yuval-Davis has demonstrated how in primordialist
renderings of nation, mobilising myths of common origin and common
destiny, the national community is represented as a natural extension of
family and kinship relations. A ‘natural’ sexual division of labour in the
family is celebrated and reinforced. Womanhood is made the locus of
national honour. And stress is laid on women’s role as mothers, biological
reproducers of the nation and those responsible for its cultural reproduction
(Yuval-Davis 1997). The Medica and Network women had seen this
patriarchalism in practice.
Women in Croatia are encouraged to have a lot of children. If they have only two
children they don’t get any privileges . . . [The nationalists] look on a woman only as
a mother. It’s easy for women to be caught in male politics. Leila.
If a nation honours its women, and a warring nation comes along, women become
part of the land, possessions. Women’s bodies are made war upon. Women become
victims of aggressive nationalism. Raping the woman becomes raping the country. Liz
Yes, it is a way of abusing women for the political purposes of men. Sanela
And, because the more primordialist a given nationalism the more clearly
was it patriarchal, it was possible to feel that women had a potential for
reducing the exclusiveness of national movements, refusing the injunctions
of cultural reproduction.
If mothers have a cosmopolitan democratic spirit they can educate their children in
that, independently of their husband. Or if they are religious they can teach that
other religions have equal value. That it’s a richness there are many religions, but in
a spirit of equality. So women aren’t just powerless living in patriarchy. If we have
the confidence and the courage. Jelena
These organisations then are not only alliances between women who by
name ‘belong’ to different ethno-national collectivities, each with a supposed
The anti-essentialist choice 619
historical grievance against the other or others. They also handle the greater
challenge of allying women who have different relationships to nationalism
itself. They achieve this by implicitly distinguishing between forms and
moments of nationalism, distancing themselves from primordial, patriarchal,
aggressive and exclusive nationalisms. The two projects are thus better
described not as anti-nationalist but as anti-essentialist.
This orientation is expressed clearly in the projects’ habitual treatment of
ethne, religion and culture, as was clear in my earlier research among them.
In both Medica and the Network they acknowledge, with pleasure, different
traditions and cultures. But they avoid fixing any person’s identity in
relation to them. They represent them as fluid, as resources for people,
rather than as fixed, closed, definers of people. They refuse ethnic closure,
waiting to see what a person herself says about her relationship to her
ascribed community, her given ‘name’, her family, the place she was born,
the religious and political authorities that lay claim to her (Cockburn 1998).
They would, I think, endorse Benedict Anderson’s notion that it is only in
so far as ethne or nation exist in the the collective imagination that they
have substance, or indeed that they exist at all (Anderson 1983).
The gender perspective from which the women view nationalism suggests
that ‘being women’s projects’ may have a bearing on their ability to
negotiate their politicised ethno-national differences. But what kind of a
bearing? A question often asked in and of the two projects is ‘are they
feminist?’ The Women’s Support Network does define itself as a feminist
project. As to individual members, some are happy to use the term, others
feel uncomfortable and want to qualify it. For instance, one woman
described herself to me as ‘a street feminist’, another ‘a working-class
feminist’. Medica too had been defined as a feminist project early in its life,
when German women were still actively in partnership with Bosnian women
in bringing it into being. Subsequently this had been less publicly stressed.
As with the Network, individual women differed on the subject. Jelena saw
herself as feminist and ‘longed for the birth of an international women’s
movement’, while one colleague expressed mistrust of ‘a woman living for
herself’, and another simply said ‘I’m feminist the Bosnian way.’ Closer
questioning showed such differences arose partly from different conceptions
of ‘what feminism is’. Women might feel happy with ‘women’s rights’, for
example, but unhappy with a feminism that fixes women’s identity and
opposes it to that of men.
It was less what women said, however, than what the two projects were
actually doing, their practice, that clarified what feminism meant to them.
What emerged, particularly during the exchange of visits, as central to the
operation of both the Women’s Support Network and Medica Women’s
620 Cynthia Cockburn
Association was a gender analysis of (1) violence and (2) political power. We
saw a good deal of commonality in their thinking, positioning and practice
on these things. As I shall suggest, it defines their position in relation to
feminism, and this in turn enables a reconsideration of the relation
‘feminisdnationalism’.
who have trained for this work) can offer emergency counselling or give
help with getting pregnancies terminated (abortion is illegal in Northern
Ireland.) The centres are not equipped or staffed for this kind of work in
the way that Medica is. But they work closely with other agencies in
Northern Ireland, and they took their visitors to meet some of these:
Women’s Aid, the Family Planning Association, the Rape Crisis Centre.
The exposure women get through Medica and the Network to the
incidence of sexual violence is a forceful consciousness-raiser. It legitimises a
women-only project: women abused by men clearly need a safe space
provided by women. It brings to view the different positioning of men and
women in relation to violence. True, some women fight. But many more
men than women carry arms and take part in fighting; more men than
women are sexual abusers; more women than men are raped; more women
than men are battered by sexual partners. More importantly, since these
skewed statistics result from men’s societal dominance and authority over
women, it introduces notions of gender power relations and gender
ideologies. The imbalances are perpetuated by cultures in which masculinity,
militarism and force are associated, and in which men assume rights over
women. Women in the projects are led to see a gender dimension in all
forms of violence, including male violence against men, and thus to detect a
continuum linking them.
But the team in Infoteka, in the very nature of their role in Medica, were
looking outwards to the context of national and local political institutions
and civil society, and noting their patriarchalism. They could see how
drastically women’s political representation had fallen with the loss of the
old Yugoslav 30 per cent female quota system. They could see the generous
social provisions, securities and relative equalities of the old Yugoslav state
being whittled away, with little resistance. They were mobilising for Medica
to have a stronger campaigning role.
and Asian countries earlier in this century, concludes ‘in these cases ...
feminism and nationalism were complementary, compatible and solidaristic’.
She goes on to suggest however that ‘this has clearly changed. Today
feminists and nationalists view each other with suspicion if not hostility . . .’
(Moghadam 1994: 3). By contrast, Gisela Kaplan, from the perspective of a
different continent, writes, ‘feminism and nationalism are almost always
incompatible ideological positions within the European context’ (Kaplan
1997: 3). She finds only mid-nineteenth-century Italy and early twentieth-
century Finland to be exceptions. Does the answer to the question then, as
these accounts suggest, depend purely on the historical and geographical
moment, and the variant of nationalism that flows from it?
In understanding how the Women’s Support Network and Medica
maintain their alliances, I have suggested it is indeed important to
distinguish conceptually (as the organisations implicitly do in practice)
different nationalisms. But the above account of the work of Medica and
the Network suggests it is also important to distinguish different kinds and
moments of feminism - and to locate the two organisations among them.
Analyses of the relationship of nationalism and feminism tend to be more
diligent in deconstructing the former than the latter. There is a tendency to
write of ‘nationalisms’while permitting feminism to remain in the singular. It
is succinct and convenient to speak of ‘the’ feminist paradigm, ‘the’ feminist
critique, and ‘the’ women’s movement in relation to nationalism. But
feminism too has its political variants. There is the familiar triplet of liberal,
radical and socialist feminisms (Beasley 1999). There are dominating and
marginalised feminisms (hooks 1982). Specially significant for the present
purpose, there are essentialist and anti-essentialist or social-constructionist
feminisms. The difference has been well expressed by Diana Fuss.
Essentialism is classically defined as a belief in true essence - that which is most
irreducible, unchanging, and therefore constitutive of a given person or thing . . . In
feminist theory, essentialism ... appeals to a pure or original femininity, a female
essence, outside the boundaries of the social and thereby untainted (though perhaps
repressed) by a patriarchal order. It can also be read in the accounts of universal
female oppression, the assumption of a totalising symbolic system which subjugates
all women everywhere, throughout history and across cultures. (Fuss 1989: 20)
By contrast, social-constructionist feminisms are more cautious in how they
represent women as a collective social actor. Constructionism, says Fuss,
insists that essence is itself a historical construction. Constructionists
demonstrate the way previously assumed self-evident kinds (like ‘man’ or ‘woman’)
are in fact the effects of complicated discursive practices . . . constructionists are
concerned above all with the production and organization of differences, and they
therefore reject the idea that any essential or natural givens precede the processes of
social determination. (Fuss 1989: 20)
The women of the Women’s Support Network and Medica would probably
not identify with extreme versions of constructionism, in which any
626 Cynthia Cockburn
how it has given them an acute perception of the political exclusion and
marginalisation of women. Seeing these things in a context of essentialist
nationalisms has exposed contradiction at the heart of the gender regime of
the societies they live in. They see ‘value’ placed on women in religious/
nationalist discourse, while endemic male violence against women implies
their worthlessness. They see the hyped importance of women in the family,
and simultaneously how they can be beaten and abused there with impunity.
They see women set up as key actors in the private sphere, while they are
excluded from politics and public life. It is these perceptions that give the
coherence to their political analysis and the cohesion to their relationships.
Rather, then, than pursuing the unanswerable question ‘are feminism and
nationalism naturally opposed, or are they natural allies?, we need to admit
that nationalism and feminism are both plural phenomena. In some of their
variants they are compatible, in others incompatible. The configuration may
be progressive or it may be reactionary. But where a feminist and a
nationalist movement do find grounds to unite in a progressive alliance, a
fierce struggle against patriarchalism within the national movement is
unavoidable.
Notes
1 Originally called the Medica Women’s Therapy Centre, Medica changed its name in 1997 to
reflect a broadening of its activities.
2 The research was carried out by the author from the Department of Sociology, City
University London. We wish to thank the following for funding support: the E. and H. N.
Boyd and J. E. Morland Charitable Trust; the William A. Cadbury Charitable Trust; the
Community Relations Council of Northern Ireland; the Global Fund for Women; Gresham
College; the Lipman-Miliband Trust; the Network for Social Change; the Niwano Peace
Foundation; the Scurrah Wainwright Charity; and Womankind Worldwide.
3 A third organisation, Bat Shalom of northern Israel, also participated in this research.
4 The methodology of the project is described in Cockbum and Mulholland (forthcoming).
5 All the personal names used in this article are pseudonymous.
6 Later that year a similar exchange of visits took place between the Women’s Support
Network and Bat Shalom, in Israel. This is described in ‘Crossing borders: comparing ways of
handling conflictual differences’ in a thematic section of Soundings: Journal of Politics and
Culture (Cockburn and Hunter 1999). that reported the final conference of this research
exercise. The conference, titled Doing Trunsversal Politics: Women’s Activism Across Politicized
Ethnic and National Differences, was held at Gresham College, London, in January 1999.
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