FEMINIST PERSPECTIVES ON NATION AND NATIONALISM

Nation is generally described as an imagined political community (Anderson Reference Anderson1983), a socially constructed community that creates bonds of belonging. It implies imagining a national past and present and the use of a wide range of symbols to project it. Benedict Anderson (Reference Anderson1983) describes three fundamental characteristics that define this imagined community: delimitation by borders, sovereignty, and being conceived as a community of citizens.

Nationalism is a manifestation of political identification that can be state led (assimilation of all within a state) or state seeking (mobilization for recognition as an independent state) (Peterson Reference Peterson1999). Its definition is generally state-centric, which is particularly problematic in a context of “globalization, changing sovereignties, proliferation of actors, deterritorialization and space/time compression” (Peterson Reference Peterson1999, 57). Anthony D. Smith's influential typology (Reference Smith1971, Reference Smith1986) differentiates between “ethnic-genealogical” nationalism and “civic-territorial” nationalism. Smith also distinguishes between “ethnocentric” and “polycentric” nationalism. Ethnocentric nationalists consider their own nation as superior to others and are associated with imperialism and the desire to dominate other nations. Polycentric nationalism does not regard its own nation as superior and is associated with nationalist movements of colonized nations. Gregory Gleason (Reference Gleason1991) identifies three faces of nationalism: liberation (related to self-determination and democratization), exclusivity (promotion of group homogeneity), and domination (suppressing difference within the group).

Nationalism in general is problematic in relation to conflict between groups but also for those within the nation who share least in elite privilege and political representation (Peterson Reference Peterson1994). In this sense, control over access to the benefits of belonging to the nation is invariably gendered (Mayer Reference Mayer2000). Women's position within this framework is therefore problematic, as it is also the relation between feminism and nationalism in connection with a broader debate in the social sciences regarding the nature of the individual as opposed to collective rights and identities within nation-state formations (Jacoby Reference Jacoby1999).

Despite the fact that “all nations depend on powerful constructions of gender” (McClintock Reference McClintock1993, 61), it was not until the 1990s that feminist perspectives were incorporated into studies in relation to nations (Palau Reference Palau2015), and since then, feminists have largely analyzed the gendering of the state and of nationalism, rendering visible how women's bodies and movements are controlled, policed, and regulated for the nation's interests and maintenance. Nation and nationalism are normally discussed as part of the public political sphere, from which women are excluded. This is linked to a more profound distinction between the public and private spheres and its relation to the social contract, in which women are located in the private domain, which is not seen as political (Pateman Reference Pateman1988). This has important consequences for the experience of women both in relation to the nation and in relation to research on it. Moreover, as V. Spike Peterson (Reference Peterson1994) argues, nations constituted heteropatriarchal family and household formations as the foundational socioeconomic unit of the state and the basis of inheriting property and citizenship claims, showing that modern state-making processes normalized binaries of gender, sexuality, and race and that the regulation of sexuality, property, membership, and intimacy has been key to imperial projects.

In their seminal work Woman, Nation, State (1989), Nira Yuval-Davis and Floya Anthias identify different dimensions in which women have been situated in relation to nationalisms. Women have been conceived as biological reproducers of the nation, implying regulations and restrictions on their sexual and reproductive rights. This idea has taken the form of pronatalist policies to force sterilization of certain groups, but also systematic rape and sexual enslavement where women's bodies become a battleground in wars. Women have also been conceived as social reproducers of group members and cultural forms, including cultural transmission. This can be materialized through legislation regarding marriage, property inheritance, or the “battle of the nursery” (Peterson Reference Peterson1994), which also involves the ideological reproduction of group members. Moreover, women have been seen as signifiers of group differences and as symbolic markers of the nation, meaning that women's bodies become the battleground of group struggles through the metaphor of nation-as-woman that signifies the boundaries of group identity.

Yuval-Davis and Anthias (Reference Yuval-Davis and Anthias1989) also identify women as participants in political identity struggles and as active in conflicts involving their communities, going beyond women as mere symbols. The authors point out that although women have traditionally been denied participation in public activities, they have had relevant roles in different fields, showing their agency. Finally, women are viewed as members of society in general. In this sense, it is important to highlight that women are not a homogeneous category, as gender divisions are interrelated with other social divisions such as ethnicity, age, religion, class, sexuality, and so on. In this sense, nationalist projects treat different groups of women differently, incorporating some of them and excluding others (Yuval-Davis Reference Yuval-Davis1993).

The “politics of belonging” concept has also been central to understanding the relation between nation and gender. Yuval-Davis (Reference Yuval-Davis2011) uses the term to encompass specific political projects aimed at constructing belonging to particular a collectivity/ies, within specified boundaries, and tightly related to the question of citizenship. The author defends that while solidarity based on shared history, language, and culture can be an important tool of mobilization, self-determination, and liberation, any political project of belonging that uses the boundaries of the collectivity to exclude or delegitimize the full individual and collective rights of all other members of society can end up constructing its own version of racialized autochthony.

The relation between gender and nation is expressed not only through women's positions but also in connection with masculinity and heteronormativity. As Cynthia Enloe argues, “nationalism has typically sprung from masculinized memory, masculinized humiliation and masculinized hope” (Reference Enloe1990, 45). Joane Nagel (Reference Nagel1998) also shows the strong links that relate nationalism, patriotism, militarism, imperialism, and masculinity. This imagined community is built on the notion of “brotherhood” (Anderson Reference Anderson1983), which is also seen as a fundamental aspect of the symbolic construction of the idealized mother and the rejection of homosexuality, which allows the creation of fraternal relations (Ugalde Reference Ugalde1996). Actually, as Peterson defends, the “conjuncture of heterosexist ideology and practice is inextricable from the centralization of political authority/coercitive power that we refer to as state-making” (Reference Peterson1999, 39). Peterson also argues that heterosexism and gender binary are constitutive of early and modern Western state making, as the heterosexist state denies male homosocial sexuality in favor of male homosocial politics, while it denies women's homosexual and political bonding through the public-private dichotomy (Peterson Reference Peterson1999). In this sense, the nation cannot be thought of as sexless, as sexuality plays a central role in nation building and national identity (Mayer Reference Mayer2000).

Moreover, sexuality is central for the creation of national identity, not only through the reinforcement of heteronormativity but also through the inclusion of certain groups of sexual dissidents. There has been a growing body of work that identifies the accommodation of LGBT claims as an integration and acceptance of the “proper homosexuals” into neoliberal citizenship, at the cost of rising Islamophobia and exclusion of racial “others.” This has been defined as “homonationalism” by Jasbir Puar (Reference Puar2007), and it has been a crucial concept for understanding the relation between the LGBT community, citizenship, and the construction of the nation-state. From the perspective of homonationalism, it is possible to analyze who is included or excluded from the “nation” in relation to LGBT liberatory discourses, identifying that it is through the assimilation of the LGBT collective that whiteness is reinforced in national projects. Puar (Reference Puar2007) also develops the idea of sexual exceptionalism as a way of describing the construction of the own nation as better than others in relation to LGBT rights, pitting this nation against the other, often represented as “Arab” and uncivilized.

As has been seen, the use of women's bodies and work has been considered crucial for national projects, but there is also the question of the relation between feminist movements and nationalist projects. Most feminists consider nationalism to be detrimental to women and feminism (Seodu Herr Reference Seodu Herr2003). The tensions and conflicts between feminists and nationalists, the problems of facing the patriarchal assumptions of male colleagues in such movements, the permanent accusation that they generate division in the nationalist struggle or “now is not the time” as a way of not incorporating feminist demands into the agenda have been identified as the main tensions (Vickers Reference Vickers2000). In general, it is argued that women are relegated to minor or symbolic roles in nationalist movements and conflicts (Enloe Reference Enloe1990); this has also been part of the invisibilization of women's actions, proposals, and contributions to this field.

The tendency to focus on the subordination of gender justice to national priorities has obscured the complexity of the relation between feminism and nationalism (Vickers Reference Vickers2006). Vickers (Reference Vickers2006) argues that there is a diversity of women's experiences that is underexplored and includes feminists, generally in “the West,” being alienated from nationalism and not seeing national projects as a site for women's liberation, as well as women who are mobilized by national projects and nation making, sometimes with positive outcomes. In a globalized context, this differentiation has contributed to the tendency of “Western feminists” to reject the potential of nationalism as an emancipatory framework and to treat those women who participate in nationalist projects as not following the “authentic” feminist parameters (Hasso Reference Hasso1998). This leads to a situation in which, as Gisela Kaplan argues, “[f]eminism and nationalism are almost always incompatible ideological positions within the European context” (Reference Kaplan and West1997, 3).

However, as Lois A. West explains, “women are (re)constructing the meanings of both nationalism and feminism from a women-centred viewpoint… . This is what defines them as ‘feminist nationalists’ movements: simultaneously seeking rights for women and rights for nationalists within a variety of social, economic and political contexts” (Reference West1997, xiii–xxx). Sylvia Walby (Reference Walby1997) considers that women are more likely to organize to insert feminist goals into a national project if the project is open and pluralistic and advocates a more “positive” sex/gender regime than if it is committed to militarism/fascism. Also, women of minority nations experience a greater sense of responsibility for reproducing their national identity. This may predispose some minority nations’ women to struggle to liberate “their” nations and make affiliation with such national projects more likely, even if women may support a different national project from that of men (Walby Reference Walby1997). Mila Amurrio Vélez (Reference Amurrio Vélez2002) argues that women who participate in national projects direct their commitments in a different way, showing that there is an interaction between gender structure and nation. On the contrary, Anne Lee and Linda Cardinal (Reference Lee, Cardinal, Strong-Boag, Grace, Anderson and Eisenberg1998) believe those who are part of majority nations are the ones who cannot see themselves as “nationalistic”—what Kenneth McRoberts (Reference McRoberts and Seymour2004) describes as a “collective amnesia” in which members of majority/dominant nations within a nation-state understand their nationality only in terms of a common citizenship. This is also related to Michael Billig's (Reference Billig1995) idea of “banal nationalism,” which refers to practices, beliefs, and customs that established nations manifest in subtle and everyday ways in order to reproduce themselves. This kind of nationalism normally remains unexamined but is fundamental for the persistence of nation-states.

Kumari Jayawardena (Reference Jayawardena1986) shows that although feminists and nationalists view each other with suspicion, feminism was compatible with the modernizing dynamic of anti-imperialist national liberation movements in Asia and other colonized nations. Ranjoo Seodu Herr (Reference Seodu Herr2003) explores the relation between nationalism and feminism, stating that even if most “Third-World feminists” consider nationalism to be detrimental to their goals, many of them have collaborated with nationalists in their pursuit of national independence from a colonial power. Nationalist women in non-Western contexts become politically active through their participation and collaboration with their male counterparts in struggles against colonial/postcolonial power or external threat (Jacoby Reference Jacoby1999).

In relation to Third-World feminists, Seodu Herr (Reference Seodu Herr2003) argues that “polycentric” nationalism has potential for advocating feminist causes in such contexts, as feminists may consider that women's liberation is possible only when the sovereignty of their nation is achieved. The author defends that grassroots, bottom-up nationalism in the Third World, reconceptualized in a nonessentialist way, may have genuine potential for promoting democracy and feminist causes. So “nation” can be useful for political mobilization if it is understood as a “large community whose members differentiate themselves from others through their possession of a common ‘pervasive’ or ‘societal’ culture” (Seodu Herr Reference Seodu Herr2003, 148). In this definition, there is no reified essence of a nation and it is capable of accommodating foreign ideas and people to create a “hybrid” culture. Also, nationalism should be conceived in this sense as involving an external goal (self-determination and recognition) and an internal one (equality among members of the nation). In this sense, the goal of “polycentric” nationalism is the attainment and maintenance of national self-determination. Moreover, as Alba Alonso states in relation to the Catalan and Scottish cases, “feminist engagement is not necessarily subordinated to the endorsement of nationalism” (Reference Alonso2018, 19), and there is a need for complex frameworks that help understand the effects of different contexts for women's movements’ positions.

Another central question for feminist research has been the impact of different types of state architecture on activist women's strategies and the effects of different public policies on women (Vickers Reference Vickers2010). On one side, multiple levels of government may be less effective at protecting women's rights, and this may weaken feminists’ capacity to lobby. However, federalist models may also offer positive competitive dynamics and foster policy innovation (Celis, Mackay, and Meier Reference Celis, Mackay and Meier2013).Footnote ² Focusing on Flanders and Scotland, Karen Celis, Fiona Mackay, and Petra Meier (Reference Celis, Mackay and Meier2013) argue that federalization offers an advantage to women's movement organizing (WMO) through the creation of new levels of governance. Against the idea that ethnolinguistic or peripheral nationalism has negative consequences for gender equality, their findings show a more complex scenario in which a key element is the connection between WMO and regional political elites, “where access to policymaking for WMOs is facilitated by technocratic (in the case of Flanders) or democratic (in the case of Scotland) discourses, the lure of the regional level is strong” (Celis, Mackay, and Meier Reference Celis, Mackay and Meier2013, 62). Moreover, the way majority and (national) minority women experience federalism in multinational federations is different, as majority women favor a strong central government and (national) minority women favor strong meso-level governments, considering that they are more progressive on gender issues (Vickers Reference Vickers2013).

In sum, the relation between feminism and nationalism is complex, and it is generally seen as in tension. Because of the negative consequences that nationalism and the state have had for women in relation to sexual, reproductive, civic, and political rights and the violence suffered in the name of national projects, feminists tend to see nationalism as opposed to women's liberation. Moreover, the rise of xenophobia, far-right politicians and parties, and supremacists mobilizing around hate-centered nationalist frames reinforce the idea that nationalism is dangerous, ethnicist, and racist. In contrast, “Third-World feminists” have criticized “Western feminists” for the Eurocentrism that hides the experiences of colonized women struggling for national emancipation, revealing that nationalistic expressions not only are materialized as xenophobia but also can be expressed through liberatory frameworks. However, there seems to be a dichotomy between Western nationalism (detrimental for women and minorities) and national struggles in the Third World (with liberatory potential for women).

THE CATALAN CASE

Shifting politics in the Catalan context makes it difficult to analyze the situation with perspective, but it may be worth contextualizing the current situation. In recent years, support for the independence of Catalonia has seen an important increase, derived mainly from the lack of response by the Spanish government to demands for greater autonomy, which also led to the rise of a novel bottom-up secessionist movement supporting the idea of holding a referendum on Catalan independence from Spain (Gibernau Reference Gibernau2014). In 2015, pro-independence parties won a majority in the Catalan Parliament and constituted a government, with the objective of celebrating a referendum on self-determination that the Spanish government never agreed to negotiate. The referendum was organized and held on October 1, 2017, with the participation of more than two million voters,Footnote ³ more than 90% of whom voted for independence. The images of repression by the Spanish police were seen around the world, showing the Spanish government's antidemocratic and violent response, which resulted in more than 1,000 people being injured.

The declaration of independence took place on October 27, 2017, and was followed by the imprisonment of two activists from the cultural and political associations that had been organizing the demonstrations, as well as some members of the elected Catalan government and the former speaker of the Catalan Parliament. The president and other members of the executive were exiled to Belgium on November 2. The Spanish government subsequently applied Article 155 of the Spanish Constitution, which grants it the power to intervene in Catalan institutions, relieve the government, and call for elections. Restrictions on freedom of speech in the Spanish state, the suspension by the Constitutional Court in Madrid of laws approved by the Catalan Parliament (such as the laws on bank taxes, against evictions, the agency for social protection, against energy poverty, for gender equality, and against fracking) and repression led by legal institutions of different kinds of mobilizations have given the Catalan struggle motivations that go beyond nationalism and national identity.Footnote ⁴ This situation has also given arguments to pro-independence supporters to identify elements, beyond the historical ones, that define the situation as a case of oppression that, for instance, would justify the right to self-determination: political prisoners, intervention in institutions, repression, state violence, and discrimination based on language would be explicit elements that situate the Catalan case in a position of domination by the Spanish government nowadays.

The role of the Catalan feminist movement in this process has been rendered invisible by the general media, but feminists have also organized themselves on different platforms in order to promote feminist perspectives within the Catalan struggle.Footnote ⁵ This coincides with what Walby (Reference Walby1997) argues in relation to the probability that women will engage in national projects if they are open and pluralistic. Much evidence can be found in the Catalan case of feminist activists being active in different fields, raising their voices to place gender and LGBT issues on the political agenda, and organizing through different levels in order to develop strategies to build a Feminist Catalan Republic (e.g., Feministes per la Independència, or Feminists for Independence).Footnote ⁶

The engagement of the Catalan feminist movement with nation-building processes is not unique in Western countries, and similar approaches have been developed in the Basque Country and Galicia as well as in Quebec and Scotland. For instance, Basque feminism developed the concept of triple oppression in the 1970s as the recognition of class, gender, and cultural oppression; currently, the movement is incorporating intersectional analysis to recognize the interaction of multiple layers of oppression (Bilgune Feminista Reference Feminista2015, Reference Feminista2016; Gandarias Goikoetxea Reference Gandarias Goikoetxea2017). This goes beyond the consideration of only three axes and focuses on their combination and not as independent structures. Similarly, in the 1960s, Quebec feminists identified with the women's double oppression analysis, related to gender and nation (Maillé Reference Maillé2007), with slogans such as, “No national liberation without women's liberation; no women's liberation without national liberation” (Maillé Reference Maillé2002, 38). In the 1970s, class was also considered an axis of oppression, integrated into the global liberation struggle (Maillé Reference Maillé2012). Also in Scotland, feminists have argued that independence can be seen as an opportunity for women and feminism, as it could open up the possibility of restructuring institutions and society. Cat Boyd and Jenny Morrison (Reference Boyd and Morrison2014) argue that there is a need for a collective feminist movement that considers class, race, and sexuality differences among women and that struggles for the sovereignty of the Scottish people.

Returning to the Catalan case, in the recently published book No One's Land: Feminist Perspectives on Independence (Gatamaula 2018), a collective volume with more than 50 contributions, many feminist activists, academics, and professionals engage with debates on independence, defending that the struggle for independence is a feminist struggle, too, and that the creation of a new Catalan republic could be a favorable scenario for breaking away from gender, sexual, racial, and class injustices. Some authors are also alert to homonationalist discourses (Sadurní Balcells Reference Sadurní Balcells2018) about citizenship policies that exclude migrants from political participation (Aatar Reference Aatar2018; Ortiz Reference Ortiz2018) and the exclusion of racialized others and discrimination within the country (Yuval-Davis Reference Yuval-Davis2018), among others.Footnote ⁷ However, there is a transversal line that considers independence as a possible radical and transformative democratic process from very different feminist perspectives: queer, antimilitarist, anarchist, postcolonial, socialist, communal, and internationalist. Although this is a relevant contribution that relates gender and nation, this issue has historically been controversial for the Catalan women's movement. As Alonso states in relation to the Catalan case, “In 2015, the debate shifted from the right to hold a referendum to defining a path toward a declaration of independence in the frame of a changing party system. In such a scenario, the women's movement can be expected to find greater incentive for mobilization, to ensure that any eventual Catalan republic takes gender equality seriously” (2018, 17). This is a relevant issue as it shows how the struggle for independence is not merely seen in relation to national identity but also to the possibility of social change, and this is a key element for understanding the interest in independence of broader feminist groups that initially were reluctant to engage with these issues.

In the following section, I will present the concept of intersectionality in relation to its genealogies and analyze how power relations in knowledge production have contributed to rendering some proposals—such as the Catalan perspective on intersectionality—invisible. Next, I will focus on the works of Maria-Mercè Marçal, a Catalan activist and poet who in the 1970s and 1980s was a pioneer in intersectional developments, showing her conceptualizations on the relations between gender, nation, and class. I argue that her contributions contest hegemonic genealogies of intersectionality and, at the same time, offer a new perspective on how to relate feminism and national identity.

SITUATED INTERSECTIONALITY: DECENTERING GENEALOGIES

First coined and elaborated by the black feminist and critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw, the term “intersectionality” emerged in the late 1980s to address the particular experiences of black women in the United States. Crenshaw (Reference Crenshaw1989) exposed the problems of treating race and gender separately in the legal context and developed an analytical frame that allowed the multidimensionality of the experiences of oppression and the complexity of the interconnections between different axes to be understood. Her contributions followed calls from black feminists for new frameworks that could account for the experiences of black women.

This is generally the way in which the concept of intersectionality is presented: associated with North American black feminism as a conceptual and political proposal for emancipation. Emphasizing the link between the concept of intersectionality and the context of its creation and motivations is vital if we do not wish to lose sight of its transformative potential, radicality, and power. The popularity of this concept within the framework of public policies on a European level has diluted it, particularly with regard to the issue of race. Numerous works (see Alexander-Floyd Reference Alexander-Floyd2012; Carastathis Reference Carastathis2016; Hancock Reference Hancock2016) have identified a movement attempting to marginalize race-related discrimination in works dealing with intersectionality; an attempt to both “disappear” black women and silence their voices has also been noted in studies on intersectionality, with a failure to recognize their experiences and contributions. Sumi Cho, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Leslie McCall state that “our sense is that some of what circulates as critical debate about what intersectionality is or does reflects a lack of engagement with both originating and contemporary literatures on intersectionality” (Reference Cho, Crenshaw and McCall2013, 788). From my point of view, these are really important issues at stake, so placing the concept at the core of black feminism and highlighting the specific voices and bodies from which it arises is crucial to avoid whitewashing and ignoring black women as the producers of knowledge and as active players in the fight against discrimination.

It is also important to note that ideas on intersectionality, or what Hancock (Reference Hancock2016) calls “intersectionality-like thought,” were already present in the United States as part of black feminism's political and intellectual tradition before Crenshaw coined the term (see Alexander-Floyd Reference Alexander-Floyd2012; Hancock Reference Hancock2012, Reference Hancock2016; May Reference May2015). Acknowledging these origins highlights their link with political movements, which goes beyond academic theorization. Ange-Marie Hancock (Reference Hancock2016) engages with the debate on whether intersectionality can be the intellectual property of a group and shows that there has been an important debate on whether power dynamics are at work when trying to define the historical antecedents of intersectionality. On one side, there are authors who defend that intersectionality loses its analytical and rhetorical power when it is not focused on U.S. black women's experiences (Jordan-Zachery Reference Jordan-Zachery2007) and that its roots must be situated in black feminism (May Reference May2015). On the other side, there are authors such as Puar (Reference Puar2012) who suggest that when the genealogy of intersectionality is only focused on U.S. black women, other women of color who are not black or American are “othered.” S. Laurel Weldon (Reference Weldon, Goertz and Mazur2008) proposes the intersectionality-plus framework, in opposition to the intersectionality-only one, as a means of considering diverse ways in which social structures affect each other and vary over space and time. The author defends that this framework is more elastic and better suited to cross-national research.

While Hancock situates the debate on “whether intersectionality is an intellectual property in need of conservation or a meme that has gone viral” (Reference Hancock2016, 18), here I want to point not to processes of transmission, translation, application, or traveling of the concept but to the genuine development of intersectional thinking in feminist social movements around the world. Precisely from an intersectional viewpoint that shows that one can be in a position of oppression and privilege at the same time, the theory of intersectionality arising in the United States should be situated against a global backdrop of economic, political, and cultural imperialism and within a context of English-speaking hegemony in knowledge production. It is this hegemony that permitted the dissemination and spread of authors and ideas around the world, but also contributed to minimizing other ideas that were being produced in other languages and other places.

So, the aim here is not to change the historical antecedents in the United States from a white and European perspective, which would be a way of replicating the power relations that intersectionality tried to fight against (Alexander-Floyd Reference Alexander-Floyd2012; May Reference May2015), but to show how there are other developments of intersectionality, or, more precisely, of “intersectionality-like thought” that, in their inception, shared the same motivations and were rooted in similar features (lived experience, struggle against multiple layers of oppression, political activism). Although it is necessary to show that the North American roots of intersectionality lie in black feminism, beyond the world of academia and the 1980s (see Cooper Reference Cooper, Disch and Hawkesworth.2015; Hill Collins and Bilge Reference Hill Collins and Bilge2016; Hancock Reference Hancock2016), there is also a need to show examples of intersectionality-like thought outside the United States to understand it as a more diverse phenomenon that goes beyond the English-speaking world and the academic literature.

For instance, already in the 1980s, sociologists in the United Kingdom were contending with the interrelations between categories (Anthias and Yuval-Davis Reference Anthias and Yuval-Davis1983, Reference Anthias and Yuval-Davis1992). But less known are the intersectional conceptualizations that occurred in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s.Footnote ⁸ In those years, Latina feminists were already developing approaches involving the intersection of different identities and cultures (see Moraga and Anzaldúa Reference Moraga and Anzaldúa1983; Nieto-Gómez Reference Nieto-Gómez1974). Mara Viveros Vigoya (Reference Viveros Vigoya2016) gathers together samples of intersectional approaches within the context of Latin America from the nineteenth century onward, from both written works and works of art reflecting the concept of intersectionality. In the context of Peru, she quotes the 1899 denouncement by Clorinda Matto de Turner in the book Aves sin nido of the vulnerability of being an indigenous woman in terms of the sexual abuse perpetrated by the local governing class in Peru. The author also shows how the triad of oppressions of race, gender, and class with regard to women was also tackled in the 1960s in Brazil within the framework of the Brazilian Communist Party and how criticism of the absence of the issue of racism in the political debates of the feminist movement was already present in the Second Feminist Encounter of Latin America and the Caribbean held in 1983 in Lima (Viveros Vigoya Reference Viveros Vigoya2016).

In order to contextualize intersectionality, it is necessary to identify the specific contexts in which it develops and acknowledge the importance of place of intersectional relations (Rodó-de-Zárate Reference Rodó-de-Zárate2014). This also relates to what Yuval-Davis (Reference Yuval-Davis2011) has called situated intersectionality, a perspective that acknowledges the role of context and particular social and historical configurations in order to examine the complexity of social relations. In turn, Sandra Harding (Reference Harding2004, 7–8), in her development of the “standpoint theory,” suggests that social and political disadvantages can become epistemic, scientific, and political advantages. Knowledge created outside the English-speaking world, and more specifically when using minority languages such as Catalan, and in nonacademic contexts such as social movements, can contribute to the conceptualization of issues key to understanding the workings of inequalities.

Indeed, the theory of intersectionality is itself a proposal for knowledge creation that comes from the margins of society. The text of bell hooks's Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Reference hooks1984) is an assertion of the margins as places of resistance. The works of Chandra Talpade Mohanty (Reference Mohanty1988) also point in the same direction, showing that the margins are just the place for questioning these hegemonic identities. And it is no coincidence that it is precisely from these margins that ideas such as intersectionality arise, ideas that show how one single explanatory framework (be it class, gender, or race) cannot, on its own, account for the dynamics of oppression and cannot alone give due accounts of inequalities.

In the following section, I will present Maria-Mercè Marçal's work on the relation between Catalan national identity and gender as an example of a theoretical and political interconnection between axes of oppression that can be seen as a pioneering intersectional framework for conceptualizing the relationship between forms of oppressions. The aim is not to present her work as a competition to show “who was the first” but to decenter hegemonic genealogies within feminist theorizing and contribute to the debate on gender and nation from a different perspective—the intersectional framework.

MARIA-MERCÈ MARÇAL: RELATING GENDER AND NATION FROM AN INTERSECTIONAL FRAMEWORK

Maria-Mercè Marçal (Ivars d'Urgell, 1952–Barcelona, 1998) was a poet, writer, editor, translator, Catalan language teacher, and political and cultural activist. She is considered one of the most recognized poets of Catalan literature from the twentieth century, honored with a wide range of literature prizes and translated into various languages. Here I want to focus on her political texts as a feminist, pro-independence, Marxist, and lesbian activist in order to show how her perspective on the relation between oppressions can be considered a precursor of intersectionality and a challenge for conceptualizations of gender and national identity.

“Divisa” (Motto) (Marçal, Reference Marçal1977) is one of her best-known poems, one that became a rallying cry and has been widely used in political events, both at the time of its appearance and today: “I am grateful to fate for three gifts: to have been born a woman, / from the working class and an oppressed nation. / And the turbid azure of being three times a rebel.”Footnote ⁹

The publication of “Divisa” in 1977 provoked a quite hostile reception from the feminist movement, because just as “woman” was becoming constituted as a political subject that could provide the basis for a movement, Marçal's “Divisa” highlighted the “other” identities that also ran through the lives of “women”: class and nation as issues that could divide the movement but also offered a more complex view of identities and struggles. “Divisa” arose from experience and political practice and takes the form of verses, of a slogan, as black feminists did in their day.

The tensions between feminism and class and national struggles have been present in Catalan politics since the beginning of the twentieth century (Capmany Reference Capmany1973). But it was after Francisco Franco's dictatorship (1939–75) that the complex interaction between Catalanist, leftist, and feminist ideologies emerged in meetings such as the Primeres Jornades Catalanes de la Dona (First Catalan Meeting of Woman) in 1976, which represented the first popular and massive event after the dictatorship, where more than 4,000 women gathered in Barcelona to discuss their experiences and strategies in relation to gender oppression. Authors such as Marçal, Maria Aurèlia Capmany, and Montserrat Roig at that time defended feminist and leftist positions next to a defense of Catalan, a forbidden language during the dictatorship (Francés Díez Reference Díez and Ángels2010). During the meeting, there was an important controversy in relation to Capmany's position in defense of the class, national, and feminist struggle. The group Col·lectiu Feminista opposed her discourse, stating, “Regarding her nationalist character, we consider any national culture to be exclusive to the men of that nation. Women have not intervened at all, their feminine point of view has never been taken into account” (Pàmies Reference Pàmies1976, 30). Capmany's answer was the following:

Roig, who was also present at this meeting, stated that Catalan women suffered a double exploitation, as women and as Catalans (Francés Díaz Reference Díez and Ángels2010). As a journalist and writer, she struggled against the silence through her research from her feminist, antiracist, Marxist, and antifascist perspective (Torres Reference Torres2016). She was a feminist activist who had been very active against the dictatorship and a defender of the Catalan language. As she stated when asked about it, “If I am asked why I write in Catalan, three reasons spring to mind: first, because it is my language; second, because it is a literary language; and, third, I write in Catalan because I feel like it” (Roig Reference Roig1991, 28).

Capmany, Roig, and Marçal knew each other and recognized themselves as role models and inspiring voices (Torres Reference Torres2016). The three authors all died of breast cancer: Capmany (aged 73) and Roig (aged 45) in 1991 and Marçal (aged 46) in 1998. The loss of their voices had an impact on a specific way of understanding feminism and its relation to the Catalan question that became an almost invisible perspective until recent years, when the independence process became central to the political agenda.

Going back to Marçal's work, oddly enough, the year in which “Divisa” appeared was the same as the publication of the Combahee River Collective Statement. This statement is often regarded as a pioneering text that puts the concept of intersectionality on the table for the very first time, with its authors arguing that “the major systems of oppression are interlocking” and that “the synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives” (Combahee River Collective Reference Moraga and Anzaldúa1983, 232). In the Catalan context, at the very same time, Marçal's verses were pointing in the same direction: they reveal the experience of multiple positions of oppression while acknowledging that these oppressions are sources of knowledge, political action, and rebellion.

Marçal's poems were not isolated, and many other feminist and LGBT struggles were taking place at that time (Rodríguez and Pujol Reference Rodríguez and Pujol2008; VVAA 1976). The Front per l'Alliberament Gai de Catalunya (FAGC, Gay Liberation Front of Catalonia), an association for gay liberation created just after the Spanish dictatorship ended (1976), drafted the FAGC Manifesto (1977). The following argumentation is an explanation of the association's flag:

This shows how LGBT struggles were also taking place from an intersectional perspective in the 1970s. Even though they were not using that specific term, their politics were intersectional. What I want to show here is that some sort of “Catalan intersectionality” was developing during the 1970s and 1980s, as it was also happening in the United States. Noteworthy is the fact that despite the similarities of the discourse and the terms used to refer to the intersection of oppressions, the debate was not centered on race but rather on class and the cultural and political oppression by the Spanish state that pointed toward other kinds of intersectionalities, as conceptualized in Galicia and Basque Country at the same time. An intersectional frame that Marçal shows in her poems but also in her less-known political texts.

One of Marçal's works, and undoubtedly the one that most clearly evidences this intersectional vision, is the text “Dona i Nació” (Woman and nation), which she wrote with other feminist colleagues (Olivares et al. Reference Olivares, Masó, Duran, Gusi, Marçal and Sentís1982) and presented during the Second Catalan Women's Meeting (1982). It is a text that states, in a pioneering and almost premonitory way, that “feminism must be a tool for global liberation that breaks the chain of interrelated and inseparable oppressions upon which society is based” and that criticizes positions, within both the feminist movement and the left-wing Catalan independence movements, that aimed to “deny that the two spaces intersect at some point, argue that we are dealing with two areas that are mutually exclusive or that have nothing to do with one another.” With regard to personal experience and political practice, the authors also show how “that which we had, on a personal level, experienced in a totally inextricably intertwined way, but were required to disassociate and keep up a constant attitude of tension and unease, encountering a deep incomprehension of feminism and, in the feminist movement, reticence with regard to the national issue and, in practice, an unquestioned pro-Spanish inertia.” The experience of oppression, as with black feminism, is seen as something disassociated from mainstream political practice. And this very disassociation was also expressed by Marçal with regard to the issue of class: “the anguish involved in having to fight two simultaneous and often clashing battles: against class oppression and against sexist oppression, one that is also manifested on a daily basis amongst the ranks of those fighting capital” (Marçal Reference Marçal1979a).

Such statements point to the heart of intersectional politics and theorizations, which can be found in the English literature (see hooks Reference hooks1981; Crenshaw Reference Crenshaw1991; Hill Collins Reference Hill Collins1990), with conceptualizations such as the “inseparability of oppressions,” the “specific experience” of women crossed by different oppressions, or the “space where oppressions intersect” as a point of departure for the struggle. Moreover, for the authors, national identity was seen as a source of oppression because of belonging to a dominated nation, so “nation” and “gender” do not appear as contradictory but as constituting the intersectional experience, a perspective that is generally missing in accounts on women and nation. It is also rare to find “nationality” as an intersectional oppression and a source of liberatory struggle (at least in the European context), but conceptualizing it in this way helps us understand why feminists engage in national struggles: it is not only a strategy to pursue gender justice but also an aim in itself, to end up with what is lived as oppression.

In her recently published biography of Marçal, Lluïsa Julià (Reference Julià2017) sheds light upon many other texts by the author that highlight her threefold rebellion. Despite her shifts in political militancy, she was determined enough to broach the nationalist and language-related issue in feminist circles and raise the feminist struggle within left-wing independence movements. Although she stated that her concern for feminism outranked other struggles, her political actions were based on an in-depth study of Karl Marx's writings, a marked class consciousness, and a strong commitment to building the “Catalan Countries.”Footnote ¹⁰ Although she ceased being an active militant in left-wing parties in 1984, she remained a committed lesbian feminist until the end.

Another text of Marçal's was written for the Joves en lluita (Fighting Youth) newsletter of the PSAN (Socialist National Liberation Party of the Catalan Countries) in 1976, in which she speaks of the level of awareness of the women of the Catalan Countries with regard to the issues of class, nation, and gender. For the journal Lluita (Struggle), linked to the PSAN, she wrote articles such as “8th March: A Day of Mass Mobilization for Women's Liberation” (Reference Marçal1977, coauthored with Anna Costa), in which the authors state that the struggle they propose “seeks a radical change in social structures and questions the very foundations of capitalism: family, private property and its value system,” and other articles that speak of abortion, prostitution, and adultery. Also for March 8, in 1979, Marçal wrote another article stating that women are the heirs of other struggling women around the world, heirs of women who loved other women, of prostitutes, of mothers, of domestic workers, of imprisoned women, and of those stigmatized in several ways (Reference Marçal1979b). In doing so, she points to the importance of building bonds between women while recognizing the diversity among them. She also gave presentations on the state of the feminist movement in the Catalan Countries and in other regions, such as the Basque Country, where she established links with Basque nationalist feminists. One key document, which highlights her commitment to the feminist struggle and the need to incorporate it into left-wing movements, is undoubtedly the paper she gave on the Women's Front to the First PSAN Congress (Congrés del PSAN 1978): “The Struggle for Women's Liberation,” a text of more than 50 pages providing a Marxist and feminist analysis of the status of women in the Catalan Countries (see Conca Reference Conca2012; Julià Reference Julià2017).

This complex way of understanding oppressions was also always present in Marçal's literary output. The entire book Llengua abolida (Reference Marçal1989) (Abolished language, which brings together most of her works of poetry) makes reference to these silenced voices: the voice as a people, as women, and as class. Later texts also included, as part of her ongoing contemplation of identities, the issue of lesbianism, love and sex between women, in an explicit manner that was highly unusual for the time. There were also references to her rural upbringing in Ivars d'Urgell, and to motherhood as a life experience. With regard to the latter issue, it is also important to note the link between Marçal's work La germana, l'estrangera (The sister, the foreigner, Reference Marçal1985) and the work by leading U.S. black feminist author Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (Reference Lorde1984). Both works contain thoughts on maternity, love between women, and intersectional experiences, as well as the struggle for the word and against imposed silences. The work of the two with regard to promoting awareness of cancer provides another important point of connection.

Marçal had a specific way of viewing the Catalan national issue, too, always interrelated with social class and gender. As the author stated, “we do not believe that there is any other revolutionary option for the Catalan Countries than the unification of the popular movement in an alternative promoting national, socialist and non-patriarchal liberation” (Marçal Reference Marçal1979a). Her support for Catalan nationalism was therefore framed within the Catalan Countries and based the construction of the nation on the idea that there was a need to create it “by means of a popular, anti-bourgeois, left-wing movement that is willing to integrate the immigrant population” (Julià Reference Julià2017, 141), one with an internationalist vocation, of solidarity with other peoples, and one in which the issue of ecology was of key importance. Initially motivated, above all, by defense of the Catalan language, her struggle for the word was also complex and multifaceted: “if, in my adolescence, I switched from writing poems in Spanish to writing them in Catalan, I now realize that I am switching from writing poems ‘in the masculine’ to writing them ‘in the feminine’” (Busquets i Grabulosa Reference Busquets i Grabulosa1980). It should be remembered that the context within which Marçal made these arguments (the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s) was different from that of today. Militancy in political parties and the feminist debates of the time or migration issues were expressed in a language undoubtedly different from that of today. However, her notion of a complex and contradictory identity struggling against oppression in all its forms demonstrates how Marçal's works are pioneering and radical in the way they view inequalities and the political struggle, on the basis of lived experience as a source of knowledge and applying an intersectional approach to analysis and political practice.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

Why is Maria-Mercè Marçal not more commonly regarded as a pioneering intersectional thinker, poet, and activist? There are two key elements that can explain this. First, the hegemony of the English-speaking world and the marginalization of ideas developed in minoritized languages such as Catalan. Its disregard for these “other forms of intersectionality” is a type of cultural imperialism, rightly understood from an intersectional standpoint. As Patricia Hill Collins (Reference Hill Collins1990) argues, there are no pure victims of oppression: one can be both at the margin and in the center and be, at once, oppressor and oppressed. In this case, although black feminists obviously have a marginalized status within their context, their voice (because of the language in which they express themselves and the country in which they make it heard) is a privileged one on a global level. It is important to note here, from the same intersectional perspective, that Catalan identity may be seen as oppressed in relation to Spanish domination, but it is, at the same time, a privileged position in relation to global politics. Catalonia is part of Europe, and its position in relation to colonialism and imperialism with regard to Latin America, for instance, situates it in a clear position of privilege, as the oppressor. This is a very important feature to understand the multiplicity of axes and the different layers and scales in which inequalities and power relations are configured.

For instance, Francophone Quebec feminism and its internalization of narratives of national oppression in which French Quebec's settlers were conquered by Britain, failing to examine indigenous dispossession and colonial anti-Native racism (Maillé Reference Maillé2012). This is an example of these multiple layers of inequality and how dismissing them contributes to the reinforcement of power relations. This also shows the importance of considering different positionalities occupied by stateless nations in relation to colonizer-colonized dimensions. Quebec, as a white settler society that has colonized native populations (Maillé Reference Maillé2012) differs from the Catalan case in fundamental issues, but the colonizing past is a shared feature that should be taken into account for an analysis of national oppression developed from a feminist intersectional framework. Furthermore, the margins also arise within a context of knowledge production governed by academic standards, in which it is difficult to collate, analyze, and systematize the knowledge produced by social movements, which are based on collective processes that do not provide a good fit with established citation systems: manifestos, papers, debates, events, communiqués, and so on.

Second, in addition to the issue of English-speaking hegemony and the privileged position of the academic world in knowledge creation, there is also the question of nationalism as a source of “irritation” in feminist discussions. Rarely do feminists regard a national identity as a source of oppression, discrimination, or violence worthy of an intersectional theory. Ethnicity, religious identity, disability, and social class seem to be more easily accepted as part of an “intersectional” framework that can be transformative than the issue of nationalism, which is always seen as prejudicial to women, even though it is framed within the context of the struggle for liberation.

Here I have tried to show how intersectional perspectives were developing in the Catalan context at the same time that black feminists in the United States developed them, too. This has to be seen as a reinforcement of intersectionality, as it shows how knowledge is produced precisely from marginalized positions in a specific context. Noting that in different unconnected places similar intersectional theories and practices took place may highlight the importance of positionality, experience, and margins as sites of resistance and creation of new imaginaries. In this specific case, it also shows that the intersectional perspective takes different forms depending on the context and the salient identities of a specific group, and that national identity can be experienced and thought of as an intersecting axis of oppression from a feminist perspective.