Killing the joy, feeling the cruelty: Feminist geographies of nationalism in Azerbaijan

Abstract

Feminist political geographies complicate our understanding of nationalisms, unraveling the gendered, racist, sexualized and classed logics that enable and legitimize nationalist projects and experiences. Scholarship on the “national intimate” usefully re-centers those feminized and trivialized mundane practices, bodily experiences, subjects and spaces that in fact powerfully reproduce nationalist sentiments. I draw on this reframing here, demonstrating the insights of a feminist geographic critique of national enjoyment in Azerbaijan. In particular, I mobilize Sara Ahmed’s figure of the feminist “killjoy” to unmask how national enjoyment obscures and yet reproduces patriarchal, heterosexist and racist narratives and mundane bodily encounters. Examining national enjoyment around men’s football, women’s beauty, smoking and heterosexual marriage, I attend to the oft-ignored but vital embodied sites and objects involved in reproducing enjoyment in national meaning. I show the conditions that are necessary for different bodies to gain access to national enjoyment, and the emotional, bodily and economic investments that are necessary to navigate heteronormative, patriarchal and racialized alignments in enjoying the nation. Feminist, critical race and queer theory has unequivocally demonstrated that nationalisms depend on—indeed cannot be separated from—the workings of patriarchy, misogyny, racism and heterosexism. As geographers, moving forward, it is vital that we attend to this work if we are to better understand the ordinary power of national enjoyment.

Intimate geographies of virginal blood

“…Geographers have long identified the scale of the intimate as crucial site for (geo)political and cultural analyses to draw attention to unjust power and social relations. 28 Global intimate entanglements of (geo)political projects 29 illustrate how households, family relations, or bodies become central sites of negotiation for border demarcations, 30 nationalisms, 31 and migration policies. 32 In today's digital era, the everyday production, transformation, and appropriation of digital spaces illustrates how intimacy in the sense of sharing knowledge, loving, and caring for one another stretches 'beyond the boundaries of the domestic'.…”

Between nation and state: Boundary infrastructures, communities of practice and everyday nation-ness in the Chinese rail system

“…Other geographers have incorporated affect theory to explore how atmospheres (Closs Stephens, 2016) and bodies (Militz, 2018; Militz and Schurr, 2016) realize nation-ness. Militz (2020) examines how accessing national enjoyment requires different investments for differently racialized, gendered and sexualized bodies.…”

“…This paper applies conceptual tools from science and technology studies (STS) to investigate how rail infrastructure produces everyday nation-ness, and how it fails. Scholarship on everyday and affective nationhood has examined how quotidian things and embodied practices reproduce nation-ness within the texture of everyday life (Edensor, 2002; Edensor and Sumartojo, 2018; Militz, 2020; Militz and Schurr, 2016; Skey and Antonsich, 2017). Political geographies of infrastructure have shown how the concrete specificities of material and non-human things enable, constrain, transform and shape state power and the national community (Akhter, 2015; Meehan, 2014; Oakes, 2019).…”

Feminist political geographies: Critical reflections, new directions

“…For Militz, Sara Ahmed’s (2010) feminist killjoy is one such inspirational and transformative figure. In “Killing the joy, feeling the cruelty: feminist geographies of nationalism in Azerbaijan,” Militz (2020) uses the killjoy to develop a provocative feminist political geographic intervention. Her work builds on a longstanding concern in political geography with “banal nationalism”, that has examined the spatialities of everyday expressions of nationalist pride, loyalty and connection through, for example, stamps and sporting events (e.g.…”