EN270: Transnational Feminism, 2011/12 Sorcha Gunne Office: H540 Office Hour: Tuesday, 11am

Woman and Nation “Women figure as ‘the raw material for symbolisation - biology, reproduction, the body, morality, cycles of growth and decay’, rather than as equal participants in human culture” (Margaret Ward qtd in Emer Nolan).

The nation is symbolically formulated as the Mother figure that the male subjects must protect from the invading colonisers: “it is the ground for asserting national selfhood and identity against the colonial presence” (Irene Gedalof)

The Tea-Party recently deployed the trope...

“ Controlling women’s sexuality, exalting maternity and breeding a virile race of empire-builders were widely perceived as the paramount means for controlling the health and wealth of the male imperial body politic, so that… sexual purity emerged as the controlling metaphor for racial, economic and political power” (Anne McClintock) “Women in these conditions become guarantors of their men’s status, bearers of national honour and the scapegoats of national identity... [They] are not merely transformed into symbols of the nation. They become the territory over which power is exercised” (Gerardine Meany qtd in Ailbhe Smyth)

‘[A]t the core of the modern nation-state, a contradiction is set in motion insofar as there is a denial of sexual or racial difference or both, and simultaneous universalization of difference’ (2) CarenKaplan, Norma Alarcón and Minoo Moallem (Eds) Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminism, and the State ‘Women are both of and not of the nation. Between woman and nation is, perhaps, the space or zone where we can deconstruct these monoliths and render them more historically nuanced and accountable to politics’ (12). ‘[W]e question the continuous repetition of gender and sexuality and their symbolic power both in the historicity and temporality of the nation, as well as in the repetition of the raced ethnicities as powerful signifiers whose counternarratives and counterperformances disrupt the nation’s tendency to totalize its pedagogy for the people’ (9-10). ‘Nation and woman include a political economy that is related to the production, distribution, consumption, and circulation of discourse and practices dividing time and space between bodies who are the occupants of metaphoric and national homelands’ (14).

Suad Joseph – ‘Women Between Nation and State in Lebanon’

Next week: CAPITAL CENTRE You are producing and directing a film based on Djebar’s Fantasia. In the assigned groups, storyboard a scene from the film which you will then use to ‘pitch’ the film to the studio exec. Next week: CAPITAL CENTRE You are producing and directing a film based on Djebar’s Fantasia. In the assigned groups, storyboard a scene from the film which you will then use to ‘pitch’ the film to the studio exec.