All Czechs, but Particularly Women: The Positionality of Women in theConstruction of the Modern Czech Nation, 1820s - 1850s.

[摘要] My dissertation examines a complex set of the social, physical, physiological, and moral requirements through which nationalists strove to create the ideal woman who would guarantee the construction of the modern Czech nation, then part of Austria. I focus on the period between the 1820s and the 1850s when - uninterrupted by political events - numerous texts aimed at women appeared in the Czech community. Setting these sources in the larger scholarship on women, gender, nationalisms, sexuality, and medicine, and understanding the categories of gender and woman as fluid concepts, I explore how Czechs proposed that women become the nation’s crucial imaginary citizens.My study offers an expanded picture of how Czechs strove to make women responsible for the future national existence. Like others in subaltern and minority contexts, Czechs urged women to participate in the nation’s construction. But the encyclopedia for women, the story of Kateřina Maršalová, a female soldier who was presented as a role model despite her gender and social transgression, and even the way advice books promoted female friendships demonstrate that women’s participation in public nationalist activities could be highly controversial, even suggesting that women’s relegation to the private helped to achieve modernity. Furthermore, the lens of Foucauldian biopolitics gives new purchase on these nation-building processes by showing them as strategies to manage both the individual and the national body.In the context of the notion of malleable heredity, the focus on women’s physical and physiological fitness and their supposedly innate connection with education made women primarily accountable not only for their own health and the health of their families but also for the national future. My analysis expands notions of what was involved in constructing a nation, showing important connections between the liberal movement of nationalism and biopolitical forms of power. I demonstrate how the positionality of women was instrumental in creating a resilient modern national community, exerting a decisive influence over the construction of gender relations, as well as for the ways we consider histories of modern state formations, their periodizations, and temporalities both in the Czech context and more generally.

[发布机构] University of Michigan

[效力级别] Women"

[关键词] History;Women"s Studies;History (General);Humanities;History & Women"s Studies