goals would bring about their liberation (Fleisch-
mann 1999, 115). Hence, as the promise of emanci-
pation fell short of expectations after independence
(Algeria is the most suggestive illustration in this
regard), scholars and feminist activists have repre-
sented the nation-emancipation linkage as some
sort of infringed contract. However, such a “uti-
litarian” depiction of women’s involvement in
nationalist struggles, as if it were motivated mainly
by feminist aspirations, is somewhat teleological
and superficial. It fails to take into account the con-
tingencies of wars and war movements, which are
rarely related to any consideration of what will
happen after the war ends (Lazreg 1994, 119).
Additionally, such a depiction perpetuates the false
image of anti-colonial struggles as a masculine affair
with women playing only a marginal role, and
implies that as far as the nationalist struggle is con-
cerned, women’s motivations essentially differed
from those of men.
The case of the Palestinian nationalist movement
is of particular interest given that it is probably the
only ongoing anti-colonial struggle in the Islamic
world. The nation-emancipation linkage did not
exist in Palestinian nationalist discourse until well
into the 1970s, when women joined military oper-
ations. Women’s partaking in informal communal
politics was legitimized by the Palestinian national
movement, but the absence of any challenge to
patriarchal structures turned aside the emergence
of feminist consciousness (Joseph 2000, 37).
“All nationalisms are
gendered”: from women’s
agency to gendered nations
Gender as a category of analysis has been absent
from the mainstream theorizing about nations and
nationalism. This enduring academic oblivion has
been explained as an outcome of the male-biased
nature of the classical theories of politics (Yuval-
Davis 1997, 2). Yet, the dramatic emergence of cul-
tural studies in recent years has inspired a new set
of theoretical questions concerning both gender
and nationalism. In both fields, foundational con-
cepts have been problematized and deconstructed,
and the validity of disciplinary boundaries and def-
initions has been challenged. While most of the ear-
lier studies of nationalism stressed political and
social processes by employing methods from the
social sciences, there is a growing contemporary
tendency to apply analytic tools developed in post-
structuralist and cultural theory, discourse analysis
in particular, and explore nationalism as a cultur-
ally-constructed phenomenon. By the same token,
in the field of gender studies the basic category of
overview 519“women” as a unitary, homogeneous concept has
proven to be methodically misleading together with
a series of dichotomies that had previously been
taken for granted, including that of male/female.
Moreover, it has become evident that if one wants
to comprehend social and cultural complexities,
one has to ask how gender relations shaped social
arrangements and discourses in the most constitu-
tive senses (along with class, ethnicity, and other
categories). These conceptual developments are
bringing forth what seems to be a major shift in the
study of gender and nations, namely, moving from
reconstructing women’s political position on to
looking at nations as historically gendered entities.
The notion that “all nations are gendered,”
coined by Ann McClintock, has been substantiated
since the early 1980s in a good number of studies
on gender and nations in various contexts. Never-
theless, as far as Islamic countries are concerned,
gender as a critical category of analysis referring to
both maleness and femaleness is still missing from
most mainstream discussions on nationalism. At
best, it is habitually “added” to monographs or
anthologies together with other “marginal” social
forces (such as minority groups) by way of a stan-
dardized lip service, required by the growing appeal
of gender studies in the West. Moreover, most of the
research about nationalism and women treats the
former as a political movement rather than seeing it
also as a cultural or discursive project in which
ideals of womanhood and manhood, deeply in-
vested in modernist visions, were key elements
(Abu-Lughod 1998, 17). While applying the terms
“women” and “gender” interchangeably and nar-
rowing the issue of gender to questions of women’s
rights and political activism, students of national-
ism in the Islamic world are, generally speaking,
still blind to the significant role of gendered
metaphors, constructions of maleness and female-
ness, and gender-based discourses in processes of
nation formation.
Investigation of nations as culturally-gendered
constructs is a new enterprise in the study of Islamic
cultures. Most of the questions associated with gen-
der and nation are thus still to be addressed.
However, the available research does allow us to
presume that in most if not all contexts the gen-
dered nature of nationalism is deeply intertwined
with discourses of modernity. There may be little
doubt that the production of the woman of moder-
nity, with its various implications, complicates the
simple statements about the emancipatory project
of modernity (Najmabadi 1998a, 183).
Partha Chatterjee’s well-known depiction of Ben-
gali highly gendered anti-colonial discourse appears