Conceiving the masculine : gender and Palestinian nationalism

Abstract

PALESTINIAN nationalism, like other nationalisms, is influenced in its philosophy by Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment Romantic thought. Enlightenment philosophy underlies a variety of nationalisms in Europe and, through European colonialism, many parts of the world.(1) In the European political arena, nationalism is expressed through gendered narratives. Although anti-colonial nationalist agency defines itself in opposition to European nationalism, it does not escape implication in the same narrative.(2) The metaphor of the as a mother- or fatherland, the practice of defending and administering it with homosocial institutions like the military and the bureaucracy, and the gendered strategies of reproducing not only the and its nationalist agents but also the very national culture defining it, were all constitutive of nationalist discourse.(3) Kumari Jayawardena identifies the gender objectives of nationalist reformers across Asia as two-fold: ... to establish in their countries a system of stable, monogamous nuclear families with educated and employable women such as was associated with capitalist development and bourgeois ideology; and yet to ensure that women would retain a position of traditional subordination within the family.(4) In putting this project into effect, the nationalists' combining of European and existing gender norms does not result in cultural syncretism; rather, it is a process whereby European norms sublate traditional ones. The new gender norms are modern inventions dressed up in traditional garb to satisfy nationalism's claim of a national culture for which it stands. These new ideals are not so much traditional as they are traditionalized.(5) In the Arab East, as in the rest of Asia,(6) national identity and nationalist agency were the sites of negotiating not only East and West as conceptual anchoring categories, but also, as importantly, the foundational ruse of gendered citizenship. The respective responsibilities of men and women to the emerged as epistemic cornerstones of nation-building. Arguing that masculinity was always the identitarian pole of European nationalist thought, I will examine how Palestinian nationalism conceives (of) the masculine in defining Palestinian nationalist agency. In so doing, the category of masculinity will be shown to have certain attributes as it is embedded within a temporal schema--that of post-Enlightenment modernity; a class schema--that of bourgeois entrepreneurs; and a geocultural schema--that of European colonial culture as a paradigm through which tradition is (re)interpreted. My objective here is not so much to describe the unfolding of a masculine-based nationalism, but, rather, to show the process through which masculinity itself is lived within the modality of nationalism-indeed, how masculinity is nationalized. I maintain that the mobilizing metaphors of nationalist movements are not only metaphors. They also reflect the fundamental assumptions of nationalist thought, which establishes the future gender constitution and gender roles of nationalist agents. History shows that other revolutions have foundered on a nation first, women after strategy; it is not too soon to ask this question of Palestinian nationalism and its vision of a post-colonial future. For a decade following the establishment of the state of Israel, in May 1948, and the subsequent expulsion of close to a million Palestinians, the Palestinian people remained without a national leadership. As a result, the majority of the Palestinians looked to Arab governments in the region to help them retrieve Palestine from the Zionists and return them to their homes. When no such development occurred, guerrilla groups began emerging in the late fifties in the refugee camps and among Palestinian university students. This development threatened Arab regimes, which by then had reached a modus vivendi with the decade-old Israeli state. As a response to this rising tide of Palestinian nationalist agitation, and in an attempt to control and restrict it, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was created, in 1964, by a number of Arab governments. …