Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Gendered and Embodied Geopolitics of Borders, Marginalization, and Contingent Solidarity

2017; Indiana University Press; Volume: 13; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/15525864-4178990

1558-9579

Sara Smith,

Migration, Refugees, and Integration

When pushed to the margins and borders of the nation and state, do women produce new forms of political engagement? How does embodied life trouble borders and margins? This issue brings together cogent analyses of embodied politics and religious practice and pushes forward our understandings of the intersectional, contingent, and sometimes transformative nature of life on the margins. Nadje Al-Ali and Latif Tas write, "War is like a blanket," covering adjacent forms of gendered violence: state violence is patriarchal violence, regardless of the gender of those who enact it. In the four articles that open this issue, the paradoxical and fluid patriarchal practices of the state run through the embodied experiences of women, of Palestinians, of the poor, and of all manner of others. Their bodies not only are symbolically cast as the nation through the celebration of gendered norms and national ideals (Mayer 2000; Yuval-Davis 1997); they also materially experience borders and their margins through state violence, expulsion, and more subtle and mundane forms of policing that act on individual women's bodies, structure family life, or infect discourses (hooks 1984; Hyndman and Mountz 2007; Mountz 2004; Secor 2007). This work speaks to feminist geography and geopolitics, which ask us to contend with embodied political practice as both contingent on and constitutive of territory (Dowler and Sharp 2001; Fluri 2009; Gökarıksel 2012; Massaro and Williams 2013; Smith, Swanson, and Gökarıksel 2016). The consequences are twofold: on the one hand, gendered geopolitical violence conflates bodies and territory and blurs the boundaries between forms and sites of violence (Pain 2015); on the other, spaces of violence can become embodied spaces of solidarity that shift the political playing field.For Al-Ali and Tas, as conflict escalates against Kurdish regions, Turkish and Kurdish feminist academics' and activists' positions draw closer. Thus "Kurdish peace activists have come to see gender-based equality as central to their struggle," while "Turkish women's rights activists increasingly realize that there cannot be a struggle for women's rights while there are constant violence and war." Al-Ali and Tas demonstrate that conflict is "a site where masculinist militarism, patriarchy, and authoritarianism converge," and Turkish and Kurdish feminists teach us that there are key intersections between "making peace with the state" and "creating peace between men and women," as well as pointing to opposition for new embodied forms of political action even as they draw on existing gender norms (see also Gökarıksel 2016).In "Disreputable by Definition" Hanan Hammad explains how interwar Egyptian women participated in theft. Poverty placed women in an antagonistic relationship with the elite ideal of satr, a concept of Egyptian respectability that emphasizes "sexual, moral, and socioeconomic respectability." For poor and rural girls and women, economic class precarity meant that this ideal was foreclosed. They therefore had less to lose by participating in theft to support themselves and their families, "without apology or concern for respectability norms that never offered them much protection in the first place."While the women in Hammad's article subsist at the margins, in Rachel Feldman's "Putting Messianic Femininity into Zionist Political Action," mainstream Jewish ideals of femininity are used to bring a marginal movement into the center of Zionist political practice. The women foreground messianic femininity as playing a key role in the religious and territorial strategy to rebuild the Third Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount/Haram ash-Sharif compound in Jerusalem, and work to reach this goal through embodied practices that rely on whiteness and normative ideals of women as mothers. By using their own bodies as territorial agents that visit and demand space on the mount, these women normalize their messianic temporalities and fold them into mainstream discourse about the future.Farzaneh Hemmasi demonstrates that the sound of a woman's voice can also be a formidable political statement, traveling across borders and stirring up agitation, particularly when paired with the contextual incomprehensibility of veiled and pious religiosity. In "'One Can Veil and Be a Singer!'" Hemmasi traces the media-based commotion that follows Ermia, a competitor on a London-based satellite TV show, Googoosh Music Academy, as she both performs piety and defies expectations of that performance for an audience from the Iranian diaspora. By singing onstage but also veiling, Ermia refuses legibility along the lines of pre- or postrevolutionary temporality, secular/religious, or modest/immodest. This illegibility then makes her mysterious self-representation a cypher that induces love, hate, and debate. Crucially, her very existence is questioned, as the audience speculates in online spaces and social media sites about whether she is "real," suspecting her to be a fabrication to promote liberal Islam or an instrument of a foreign government.In the cases above, we are reminded of the critically intersectional and contingent nature of gender. Normative (but contested) national gender ideals can be either a strategic political performance or a trap that can be surpassed, subverted, or reinterpreted. Patriarchal state violence pervades daily life from home to military occupation; simultaneously, women and marginalized others derive political insights from their embodied experience of marginalization and draw on these to formulate new political strategies—whether involving radical visions of peace, occupation for the messianic times, or engagement in crime—by discarding respectability or embracing a politics of refusal (Simpson 2014) that escapes easy political or religious categorization.As they converge, these articles demonstrate a multivalent enmeshment of women's bodies with the political and the nation-state as grounded in territory and idealized gender norms. Embodied life in the margins pushes women to converge and forge political connections across ethnicity, but it also reveals how borders and marginalization coalesce in embodied form: as Ermia takes the stage, transnational anxieties and suspicions projected onto and through her body come to stand in for anxieties about the future of Islam. Moving forward, this work asks us to consider how marginal positions provide new insights that emerge from embodied experiences, in what ways bodies become political instruments and to what ends, and, finally, whether and how selective and strategic deployment of gender ideals can transgress and transform them.