Gender and Nation in Galicia: A Cultural History

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Studies of national identity in Spain have tended to focus on questions of 'otherness' and the historical role played by Spain's non-European, Moorish and Jewish cultures. As a result, there is little historical and cultural analysis of the discursive formations arising from the tensions between hegemonic Spanish nationalism and insurgent Catalan, Basque or Galician nationalisms. This project seeks to act as a starting point for work in this area by showing that the relation between Galician and Spanish nationalist discourses is marked by a network of discursive violences that are, for the most part, premised on the logic of sexual difference and on traditional, static notions of masculinity and femininity. Specifically, the project will offer the following arguments: 1) That a reassessment from a gender, postcolonial perspective of the foundational works of Galician cultural and political nationalism -for the most part, a male-authored corpus of histories, literary texts, cultural essays and manifestos- reveals a series of so far unexplored patterns in the history of national discourses in Spain. In the past, and in tune with nationalist historiographical practices, such texts have been studied mostly in isolation as milestones in the progress towards politicization of the Galician nationalist movement. Less attention is granted to how they have interacted with a historically variable network of discourses (Spanish centralist nationalism, patriarchy and discourses on modernisation). Further, the study of these texts from a critical gendered perspective has been delayed by a nationalist Galician scholarly tradition reluctant to criticise the work of its 'founding fathers' and an international Hispanism that has only just started to devote due attention to the specificities of Galician culture and politics. The project aims to overcome this situation. 2) That in this new perspective, discourses about the nation in Galicia in their different historical and ideological manifestations show an interesting distribution of gendered images of Galicia, Galicians and the Galician language. In a nutshell, the texts of Galician apolitical regionalism are laden with images of a feminized Galicia and a definition of national identity that links cohesively with the traditionally feminine realm of the affective. By contrast, the texts of Galician political nationalism are marked by a heavily masculinist discourse that aims to distance itself from sentimental definitions of the nation and adhere to masculine definitions of political citizenship and activism. Such discourse can be read as a compensatory reaction to the debilitating, feminizing tropes used by Galician apolitical regionalism, but also by Spanish hegemonic centralism, for whom the idea of a feminised (submissive) Galicia held obvious political benefits. I will trace instances of these relational discourses in the texts of such disparate figures as Augusto Gonzalez Besada (writer of the first Galician literary history in 1887), Manuel Murguia (founder of Galician nationalist historiography and husband of Rosalia de Castro), Eugenio Carre Aldao (one of the founding members of the Real Academia Gallega in 1906), Anton Villar Ponte (the author of the first manifesto of Galician political nationalism), Vicente Risco (one of the main theoretical ideologues of Galician nationalism in the pre-War years), Antonio Couceiro Freijomil (author of the francoist Diccionario Bibliografico de Escritores Gallegos in 1952), Ricardo Carballo Calero (author of the most influential text of Galician literary history) and Alberto Nuñez Feijoo (the current president of the Galician Xunta government and supporter of what I will call a 'neo-regionalist' approach to Galician culture informed by the persistently colonial views of Galicia held by the Spanish right).