Nationalism and feminism-disjuncture
 Subordination of the gender question to the nation’s
supracommunal aims; subordination justified in the
name of the nation
 Taken off the table for negotiation with the colonial
ruler; continuity rather than break
 Feminism—an internal matter; acquiescence to
patriarchy
 Postcolonial nationalism—patriarchy’s 21st c idiom
Disruptions of feminism
 Feminism--disruptive because feminism seen as hostile
to nationalism (“washing dirty linen in public”)
 Sexual women: traitors
 Exposing a constitutive violence governing
heterosexual relations, throwing Syrian nationalism in
an ambivalent light
Transnational feminism

Gould’s approach—supportive, instructive, personal/academic (“geographic
awareness of the stakes of literary form”, 212)/political, in solidarity

Bringing the personal in

Local and global—complex and dynamic relationship

Post 9/11 and other global challenges—Islam and the West, petrol and
resources—loaded atmosphere for TN feminism

Transnational feminist hermeneutic—role of feminist critique against the
national imperative to silence it

Feminism the lens through which the world is read