Green,red, yellow and purple: gendering the Kurdish Question in south-east Turkey

This article discusses the role of women in the contemporary ethno-territorial struggle of Kurdish Question in Turkey. I argue that gendered development has become the primary terrain where Turkish and pro-Kurdish political groups articulate their nationalist interests. The Kürt Sorunu (Kurdish Question) – the enduring debate over the political status and rights of Turkey's Kurdish population – is Turkey's largest geopolitical challenge to date. In the last decade, Turkish government policy towards the predominantly Kurdish south-east region has shifted from military intervention to gendered and socio-economic development. Simultaneously, the popularity and growth of a formal pro-Kurdish political movement has given the campaign for Kurdish rights an institutionalized voice and stronger role in regional affairs. The primary work of both the Turkish national government and local pro-Kurdish municipality of late has focused on women. Drawing on historical analysis and participant observation of development activities, I describe the symbolic and physical role women play in the contemporary Kurdish Question. Geographically, this pointed focus on women marks a territorialization of political power upon gendered spaces of the home and neighbourhood. I describe this process of territorialization through an examination of education curriculum, neighbourhood mapping and nationalist landscapes.     

Gender,Nation and the Politics of Dress in Twentieth‐Century Philippines

This paper examines the politics of dress in twentieth‐century Philippines, exploring the imbrication of dress, politics and gender. It argues that there was an inherent tension between Western Dress/Filipino Dress in the period as the contrast between these two types of dress came to represent opposing political and gendered identities. The visual categories of Western Dress/Filipino Dress did not always 'naturally' correspond to not nationalist/nationalist, powerful/disempowered, modern/traditional, or even other/self. The gendering of costume mirrored men's and women's positioning in the political axis of the nation as the status of 'bearer and wearer of national tradition' shifted from women to men once the colony became an independent nation‐state.     

Consuming icons: nationalism and advertising in Australia*

ABSTRACT. In extension of Billig's (1995) and Edensor's (2002) contribution to the literature, this paper examines an often overlooked element in ‘mundane’ nationalism, company advertising. Through the development of a typology of advertising strategies, it examines the role of companies as nationalist actors, and highlights how advertisements can engage with and impact on wider national discourses. Nationalist company advertising is classified into types, depending on how associated the company is with nationalism in popular discourse, and whether the advertising campaign involves the company's participation in broader nationalistic political projects. The types developed in this typology include (1) ‘ordinary marketing/achieving nationalist credentials’, (2) ‘ordinary marketing/established nationalist credentials’ and (3) ‘activist marketing/achieving nationalist credentials’. Case studies from the Australian context are used to illustrate these types, how the different types use nationalism, and their varying impact on shaping wider nationalistic discourses.     

Competition,cooperation and resistance: women in the political field in Iraq

After the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime in April 2003 many women supported the process of transition and became active in political parties and coalitions. A wide range of groups were also formed which pursued women's rights agendas and, in many cases, included a call for peace and reconciliation and charity activities for women and children. However, female political action and the field of women's rights remain divided by the same multiple boundaries of belonging which affect Iraqi society itself; women operate in specific ethnic and denominational, local and regional settings, and they support nationalist, secularist, left‐wing or Islamist agendas. Women's rights—whatever the direction—can be of major or minor concern. This article outlines female political action and draws attention to the key issues which are discussed, in particular, by secular feminists in Iraq. In so doing, the article highlights how women in Iraq have not only lost, as a wide range of observers argue, but have also benefited from the restructure of the political landscape. Female political activists are still faced with old and new social, cultural, legal and political obstacles. The article argues that when women support narratives that leave men's superiority untouched, they are not simply victims of men or ‘false consciousness'; women either compete and cooperate, or they reject ideological narratives and power relations, while pursuing agendas of individual interest. Yet, despite competition among women and women's groups, and women's loyalty to agendas controlled by men, radical overtones that resist male domination can be heard— and should be supported.     

Women's Organizations,Voluntarism, and Self‐Financing in Solomon Islands: a Participant Perspective

Arguing that the capacity to organize is not foreign to Solomon Islands women, this paper demonstrates their resourcefulness, resilience, and significant but neglected national potential by focusing on a key domain of women's practice and management expertise ‐ women's groups, organizations, and associations, most of which are church‐based, and government programs or projects directed to women. The paper surveys the establishment and operation of different categories of women's groupings before and since independence in 1978. It highlights the commitment to voluntarism and self‐financing that has enabled many groups and organizations to function and even flourish despite recent armed conflict and the resultant near collapse of the economy and the state, especially in the capital, Honiara. It exemplifies the priority shift which has seen many women and their organizations supplement the traditional concerns of home economics, health, education, and community service with overt attention to questions of economic development, political participation, and human rights. The paper concludes by considering the problems facing women's groupings in Solomon Islands, including those generated by women's own attitudes and behaviour as well as gendered and other external constraints.     

Reconsidering nationalism and feminism: the Kurdish political movement in Turkey

Feminist scholars have documented with reference to multiple empirical contexts that feminist claims within nationalist movements are often side‐lined, constructed as ‘inauthentic’ and frequently discredited for imitating supposedly western notions of gender‐based equality. Despite these historical precedents, some feminist scholars have pointed to the positive aspects of nationalist movements, which frequently open up spaces for gender‐based claims. Our research is based on the recognition that we cannot discuss and evaluate the fraught relationship in the abstract but that we need to look at the specific historical and empirical contexts and articulations of nationalism and feminism. The specific case study we draw from is the relationship between the Kurdish women's movement and the wider Kurdish political movement in Turkey. We are exploring the ways that the Kurdish movement in Turkey has politicised Kurdish women's rights activists and examine how Kurdish women activists have reacted to patriarchal tendencies within the Kurdish movement.     

Women,Nationalism and the Philippine Revolution

Abstract. Filipino women participated actively in the Philippine Revolution (1896–1902), performing a wide range of tasks essential to sustaining the revolutionary challenge against Spanish and American imperialism. Though largely omitted from mainstream histories of the nationalist revolution, women's involvement has been recorded in several marginalised texts. However, these texts have invariably used a limiting format based on presenting biographies of outstanding women. This article suggests an alternative approach, by situating the history of revolutionary Filipino women within a comparative framework. The article outlines key ideas of feminist writers who have analysed women's participation in nationalist struggles from an international perspective. Drawing on these ideas, some new approaches to women in the Philippine Revolution are suggested.     

Gender Equality in National Politics: The Views of Australian Male Politicians

Studies of gender and politics have typically been studies of women and politics. In contrast, this paper places men at the centre of its inquiry by drawing on interviews with 15 current federal male politicians. Of concern is exploring the ways in which men conceptualise the question of gender equity in the Australian parliament. Three frameworks are identified in the men's narratives. These are that the parliament is a masculinised space but that this is unavoidable; that the parliament is now feminised and women are advantaged; and that the parliament is gender neutral and gender is irrelevant. It is argued that collectively these framing devices operate to mask the many constraints which exist to marginalise women from political participation and undermine attempts to address women's political disadvantage as political participants. The paper concludes by highlighting the significance of the paper beyond the Australian context and calling for further research which names and critiques political men and their discourses on gender and parliamentary practices and processes.     

‘We Wanted to be Free as a Nation,and We Wanted to be Free as Women’: Decolonisation,Nationalism and Women's Liberation in Zimbabwe, 1979–851

This article examines one of the most intractable problems that a newly independent nation encounters; the dissonance between the rhetoric of a revolutionary movement and its subsequent treatment of women in nationalist and supposedly decolonial projects. In drawing on interviews and archival research carried out in periodicals, newspapers and Hansard, the article examines the optimism, disillusionment and betrayal of Zimbabwe's women in the first decade of independence. Exploring women's variegated roles during the country's war of independence, this article argues that many women believed that their participation in national liberation would be a precursor to a broader programme of cultural and societal emancipation. Yet, as is shown, governmental thinking placed women as consumers and not producers of new nationalist culture. In particular, the grim reality of the situation was unambiguously shown just three years into independence through ‘Operation Clean-Up’, whereby thousands of women in Zimbabwe's main cities of Harare and Bulawayo were indiscriminately detained with state machinery arguing that the women were prostitutes, vagrants and beggars. A blatant effort to curtail women's autonomy in urban spaces, the machinations of ‘Operation Clean-up’ demonstrated an uneasy coherence between colonial and post-colonial thinking regarding the ‘appropriate’ place for women in the new nation.     

Saudi Arabia's Wahhabism and Nationalism: The Evolution of Wataniyya into Qawmiyya

For many scholars, the Arab Spring was actually an Islamic Winter, especially when ISIS rose up in Iraq and Syria, and the Muslim Brotherhood won democratic elections in Egypt and took control over the state. But in other unshaken regions in the Middle East, like Saudi Arabia and the GCC states, the Arab Spring or the Islamic Winter led to something different, which I will call “rethinking nationalism.” This article asserts that since Saudi Arabia's independence in 1932, the royal family has succeeded in forming Wahhabi nationalism, meaning that despite the fact that all Saudi civilians enjoy Saudi citizenship, only those who ascribe to the Wahhabism creed can be part of the nation in terms of political participation and policy decision‐making. Although some steps in affirmative action have been taken in recent years — also as a Saudi response to the Arab Spring — toward women and the Shi'a minority, these groups or sectors still are not perceived by the royal family as part of the nation, and probably not as equal citizens, for religious reasons that over the years have distinguished between real Saudi nationalist groups and Saudi civilians.     

The Transmigration of Rights: Women,Movement and the Grassroots in Latin American and Caribbean Communities

In order to better understand both the global and local contours and impact of transnationalism as a political and cultural force, this article suggests the need for an exploration of shifting gender roles and expectations as they are becoming manifest in situated arenas. The awkwardness of transposing an international rights discourse into local communities and settings deeply infused with tradition, or onto grassroots nationalist movements that work to resist foreign impositions is a widely recognized concern. At the same time, the influence of diaspora populations is seen to leaven and situate global discourse for local movements in a sending country and translates more local interests into global concerns in important and effective ways. Transnational feminist discourse now often concerns itself with the different strategies employed by diasporas, the strategic uses of global discourse, and the meaningful efforts to resist it. Through illustrations drawn from a study of women refugees in El Salvador, the Haitian democracy movement, and a rural Brazilian women's organization, this article links the experience of transmigration to women's mobilizing efforts and the proliferation of rights discourses.     

Rape in Kosovo: Masculinity and Serbian Nationalism

Abstract. Accusations of Albanian rape of Serbs in Kosovo became a highly charged political factor in the development of Serbian nationalism in the 1980s. Discussions of rape were used to link perceptions of national victimisation and a crisis of masculinity and to legitimate a militant Serbian nationalism, ultimately contributing to the violent break‐up of Yugoslavia. The article argues for attention to the ways that nationalist projects have been structured with reference to ideals of masculinity, the specific political and cultural contexts that have influenced these processes, and the consequent implications for gender relations as well as for nationalist politics. Such an approach helps explain the appeal of Milo?evi?'s nationalism; at the same time it highlights the divisions and conflicts that lie behind hegemonic gender and national identities constructed around difference.     

Christological Foundations for Political Participation: Women in the Global South Building Agency as Risen Beings

This paper draws upon the theologies of Jon Sobrino and Engelbert Mveng to construct a social ethics of participation for those who have been marginalized by corrupt political and economic institutions, focusing on the agency of women in Sub-Sahara Africa. In light of the philosophy of political participation in developing countries, I examine Sobrino's insights that the victims of the evil of this world have to live as risen beings, I consider the African Theologian Engelbert Mveng's concept of anthropological pauperization, and argue that it makes a difference to consider historical events that influence the contexts in which we view the victims. I also argue that both Sobrino and Mveng provide foundations for political participation of the victims, but there is a need to reinforce the agency of the victims, and their own ability to come down from the cross and live as risen beings. Such agency suggests the need for reinforcing the political participation of the victims. Finally, I supplement Mveng's thoughts with the cultural features of the African philosophy of Ubuntu — related to African Humanism — to show that Ubuntu, as well as Mveng, reinforce Sobrino's claims.     

Ethnic Nationalism and Subaltern Political Process: Exploring Autonomous Democratic Action in Kashmir

Abstract. This article argues that the emergence and development of subaltern political process is a significant conflict dynamic found in the escalation of ethnic nationalist movements. These ethnie‐defined modes of political participation are in turn an expression of the autonomous nature of ethnic nationalism, but occur ‘underneath’ and often antecedent to the organised violence and militancy which distracts most analyses of these conflicts. The article discusses this process of insurgent political mobilisation as a response to the structural paralysis of the post‐colonial state, using the ethnic nationalist conflict in Indian Jammu and Kashmir as the central case study. In its discussion of this case, the article seeks to argue that the presence of such subaltern political process provides additional empirical evidence of the autonomous nature of ethnic nationalism, and its capacity to carve out alternative options for democratic action and popular participation.     

Post-trafficking bordering practices: Perverse co-production,marking and stretching borders

This paper highlights the significance of post-trafficking scenarios for understanding bordering practices in political geography. In so doing, it addresses two significant research gaps: the lack of attention to trafficking in geography and the failure of wider interdisciplinary debates to engage with post-trafficking specifically. While extensive research in political geography has addressed the related experiences of refugees, asylum seekers and ‘illegals’, much of this work has centred on policies, processes and practices that aim to keep ‘unwanted strangers out’. By contrast, very little research has addressed how the border is configured for and by those who are crossing-back over; those who are ‘returning home’, in this case from diverse trafficking situations. The paper draws on recent empirical research on post-trafficking citizenship and livelihoods in Nepal which examined how women returning from trafficking situations deal with stigma and marginalisation. Our analysis illuminates how bordering practices circumscribe and shape women's lives in powerful ways as they seek to (re)establish a sense of belonging and respect. We examine the interplay of state and non-state actors (national and transnational) in structuring mobility and anti-trafficking advocacy through a range of bordering practices and explore how the border is (co-)produced by varied actors at different border sites. This includes women returning from diverse trafficking situations, who invoke the border to argue that they are ‘not as trafficked’ as other women, and others who perform the border differently as agents for trafficking prevention.     

Nationalism,Sports and Gender in Finnish Sports Journalism in the Early Twentieth Century

The aim of this article is to examine through Olympic sports journalism the connections between sports, gender, nation and class in Finland during the period before the Second World War. The relationship between sports and the nationalist project has always been strong in Finland, and it is often considered that the Finns were the first nation to exploit sports for political purposes in such a consistent way. The attention here is focused on gender and class, since these were the two most significant dividing factors in Finnish sports at the turn of the twentieth century. The article concludes that the idea of a Finnish national character can be seen as a gender-specific narrative, as the image of the Finn has been built on masculine determinants and the male sphere of life. This is proved by the fact that women are not required, or sometimes even allowed, to follow national stereotypes and characteristics. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the sports journalists were nevertheless obliged to conceptualise Finnish women as well through nationalist thinking. This was achieved by contrasting them with foreign women: the 'Other' women functioned as a sexualised background against which it was possible to depict the activities of Finland's own female athletes as pure, feminine, decent and respectable.     

'Ladies are often very good scaffoldings': Women and Politics in the Age of Anne

The age of Anne saw unprecedented politicisation of society, the expansion of patronage and the election of ten parliaments between 1695 and 1715. If, as has been argued for the second half of the 18th century, such factors facilitated women's political participation, then the prerequisites for women's political involvement, at least at the level of the political elite, existed in the age of Anne. Yet we still know surprisingly little about the shape and extent of women's political participation beyond the dynamics of the Augustan court. This article encourages historians of women and politics to return to the age of Anne and consider women's political participation writ large. Was this period, which has often been seen as a political watershed, also a watershed for women's political involvement? Through an examination of Elizabeth Coke's involvement in the Derbyshire election of 1710, where she served as her brother's political agent, this article calls historians' attention to the activities of one group of politically-active Augustan women – those who served as intermediaries and agents. It argues that politics could be one aspect of a broader familial agency, one which saw women step in and out of family, household, estate and political management, as necessary. Nor, it argues, should these women be seen as mere Swiftian 'scaffoldings'– as means to an end for politically-ambitious men. As agents and intermediaries, women as well as men played recognized political roles, in similar ways, in campaigns across the country; their involvement requires closer examination.     

Constructions of Australia in pro‐ and anti‐asylum seeker political discourse

ABSTRACT. Whilst there has been a proliferation of research on the role of nationalism in the exclusion of asylum seekers, less attention has been paid to how nationalism can be mobilised in accounts opposing, rather than supporting, harsh anti‐asylum seeker regimes. This paper compares the ways in which ‘Australia’ is constructed and used in parliamentary speeches on asylum seekers by both refugee advocates and those seeking harsher asylum seeker laws in Australia. This dual focus is particularly important as it highlights the flexibility of nationalist discourse, in that the same constructions of the nation may be used for both exclusive and inclusive purposes. Whilst typologies of inclusive and exclusive nationalisms, such as Smith's (1991) ethnic/civic typology, focus on the content of nationalist ideologies, we argue that the inclusivity or exclusivity of nationalism can best be determined by examining the subject positions, political solutions and social realities they make possible, and who these discourses benefit and oppress.     

East and West in Jewish nationalism: conflicting types in the Zionist vision?

ABSTRACT. This article analyses the ethnic and civic components of the early Zionist movement. The debate over whether Zionism was an Eastern‐ethnic nationalist movement or a Western‐civic movement began with the birth of Zionism. The article also investigates the conflict that broke out in 1902 surrounding the publication of Herzl's utopian vision, Altneuland. Ahad Ha'am, a leader of Hibbat Zion and ‘Eastern’ cultural Zionism, sharply attacked Herzl's ‘Western’ political Zionism, which he considered to be disconnected from the cultural foundations of historical Judaism. Instead, Ahad Ha'am supported the Eastern Zionist utopia of Elchanan Leib Lewinsky. Hans Kohn, a leading researcher of nationalism, distinguished between ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ nationalist movements. He argued that Herzl's political heritage led the Zionist movement to become an Eastern‐ethnic nationalist movement. The debate over the character of Jewish nationalism – ethnic or civic – continues to engage researchers and remains a topic of public debate in Israel even today. As this article demonstrates, the debate between ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ Zionism has its foundations in the origins of the Zionist movement. A close look at the vision held by both groups challenges Kohn's dichotomy as well as his understanding of the Zionist movement.