How Gender Binary Affects Transnational Relations and Why It Matters

Kosovo Maiden (1919) by Uroš Predic, based on the Serbian epic poem.

On Monday, March 12, Dean of the NYU Liberal Studies department, Julie Mostov, gave an interesting dialogue entitled “Gender and Nation.” Drawing from her research for two of her books, Soft Borders: Rethinking Sovereignty and Democracy (2008) and From Gender to Nation (2002), Mostov’s talk looked at transnational relations from the unusual perspective of the gender binary. Since a lot of her research was centered on the countries of former Yugoslavia, many of her examples in the dialogue came from that region. However, her research is still relevant today, especially as applied to the issue of immigration, which is burning in Italy, the U.S. and many other parts of the world in 2018.

Mostov began her dialogue by breaking down what gender means. She called it a “social construct” and one of the oldest dichotomies in the world. While activists may try to tear it down, Mostov said that notions of gender are deeply embedded in a country’s language, customs and political strategies. Because the binary is seen as natural, according to Mostov, “we begin to paint these boundaries” around nations, family structures and other parts of society.

Mostov argued that every nation relies on people believing in the existence of the gender binary because it creates a mentality of associating some people with “us” and others with “them.” “Belonging means that others are excluded,” said Mostov. Since nobody wants to be excluded, everyone in a nation is willing to go along with “nationalist narratives that naturalize gender.”

Mostov went on to discuss how the language we use to discuss nations and borders are actually metaphors for how we think of the gender binary. Words for “space” and “earth” are feminine in Italian and other Romance languages. When someone invades a country, they are penetrating into someone else’s land, and, according to Mostov’s analogy, the land may as well mean women. For example, the language used around a “rape of a nation” can be both related to land and women, such as “contamination, violation, rape and purity,” said Mostov. Therefore, borders are necessary in order to protect the nation, or the “woman,” from another’s nation’s men.

She declared that part of a nation’s mythmaking is saying that “men are going to sneak across our space and take our women.” Recently, during a rally for the Italian political party Lega, the anti-immigration politician Matteo Salvini said that women were increasingly at risk of being raped by migrants coming into Italy illegally. This is one example of what Mostov was saying -- that women are not only often linguistically associated with what it means to be a nation, but they need men and borders in order to protect them from the men from the “other” nation. “How vigilant our men must be as our border guards,” said Mostov sarcastically.

According to Mostov, the worth of a woman in this analogy is simple. “Under many regimes, women are reproducing the nation,” she stated. In order for a country to survive, it “needs the guardians (the men) to control their (women’s) bodies” so that they can reproduce for the nation. Mostov noted how many countries around the world focus on raising birth rates and even prevent easy access to abortions as a way to make sure women stick to their task of reproducing. Women who abort are “contributing to the death of the nation,” said Mostov, along with women who don’t want children, have mixed children or are gay. “They are killing the nation.”

She used the example of the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 to illustrate the worth of a man. In this battle, Serbian men held out against the Ottomans in order to defend their country. According to Mostov, mothers were proud if their sons died in this war for the nation. “The real hero is the dead hero,” said Mostov, and while women mourned the dead, they also celebrated that the men died honorably. The ultimate duty for a man is then to be a guardian. Anything “other,” such a man who’s “feminized” or chooses not to die for the nation, is “not a real man,” said Mostov.

If women of the land are protected by the men, then the women must be “properties of the nation,” stated Mostov. This means that when, during wartime, a “rape of a nation” occurs, it is actually an attack on the property of the “masculine other,” said Mostov. The “masculine other” refers to the enemy men. If the men at home don’t defend the women, they “bring shame upon themselves.” This is part of the role of the guardian.

Mostov argued that as a wartime strategy, the “rape of a nation” has nothing to do with sex, and everything to do with power. By raping women of another country, the “masculine others” are interrupting that nation’s reproduction. Women bear children of the enemies, destructing that homogeneous nationalist narrative. “You see this in many ethnic battles, where rape is part of doing away with people,” said Mostov.

When convincing people, and men specifically, to fight for the nation, Mostov pointed out that “when (a nation) wants to criticize an ethnic other, (they) say ‘look at how they treat their women.” Mostov referred to a Time magazine article entitled “Do Muslim Women Need Saving?” which is about how Western mainstream media frequently points to the men in Muslim countries and declare that they oppress their women. Lila Abu-Lughod, the writer of the article, says that this is not true. She argues that a Muslim woman who wears a veil, a clothing item that is often seen as a symbol of oppression in the West, finds it a liberating invention according to their religious norms. Also, people in the West often only hear the one-sided story of females being subjugated to violence as articulated by books such as I am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced and I am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban. The truth is that there are women in positions of power in the Middle East, and in urban areas, girl do finish high school at rates similar to those of young men. However, the single narrative is convincing to a Western audience who, more often than not, doesn’t seek to learn more about the Middle East.

Mostov declared that the West does this as a form of propaganda as it has to do with “the idea that the ‘masculine other’ has no respect for their women and we (in the West, and more specifically, in the U.S.) do.” Citing how difficult it is for some to have access to abortions or birth control in the U.S, she retorted: “Well, we don’t!”

During the Q&A of the event, many audience members asked whether looking at transnational relations from the perspective of the gender binary was restricting. One member asked about how intersex and gay people fit into the picture. Mostov brought up an example from her research in Yugoslavia of how, in the past, homosexuality was seen as a sign of weakness. She cited a Serbian news story where an Albanian man raped a Serbian man, and instead of condemning the rapist, it became a piece of propaganda to argue that Serbians have lost their manhood, their ability to defend themselves and the nation. They need to “man up.”

The final comment from an audience member was about fitting the analogy of the gender binary into the modern context of Italy. She said that while it’s true that Italy’s birth rate is low and that political parties are focusing on that instead of other pro-women issues, racism and xenophobia are also important factors to address when talking about transnational relations. To this, Mostov answered that ultimately, when looking at Italy, the question is “How do we preserve Italian-ness? What makes up a nation?”

“There are many ways of looking at that question,” said Mostov. The gender lens is an important perspective to consider since the gender binary is still so embedded in many of the world’s cultures, languages and traditions. It’s important to be aware of it, said Mostov, advising students in the audience to not “let anyone else fix it. It’s not something you want to have imposed on you. Tell others that you want to talk about identity politics and fluid identities.” Nonetheless, as long as people believe in gender roles, the gender binary will remain a part of transnational relations whether we want it to be or not.

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