Les Femmes et la modernité. Peuples Mediterranéens 44-45 (review)

Reviews 147 Les Femmes et la modernité. Peuples Méditerranéens 44—45. Revue trimestrielle , juillet-décembre 1988. Pp. 349. FF 148. "La modernité c'est le changement," argues Monique Gadant in her introduction to this rich collection of articles focusing on the relationships among feminism, nationalism, and modernity in the Mediterranean . The volume is divided into four main sections, Dans l'espace public; L'honneur, les alliances; Le corps, l'identité; and Nationalité et citoyennet é. The scope of the collection is broad in both conceptual and geographic space. Articles discuss the relationships of feminism and unionization in Italy and Tunisia; vendettas, the dowry, and the concept of honor; nationalist movements in Palestine, Algeria and postindependence Greece; the cultural production of novels, song and myth; the social, political and sexual struggles of Tunisian and Algerian immigrants in France; the politics of "westernization"; and the increasing medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth in UmbrÃ-a. In addition, it contains an Iranian document signed by scholars at the University of Teheran protesting the exclusion of women from admissions examinations to the agronomy faculty at the University of Mashad, and an interview with Milanese union leader Pima Madami. This is a very interesting volume, but the use of "modernity" to frame this collection, and much of the research within it, seems to have wreaked theoretical havoc. At least implicit in the modes of description and analysis of many of the articles is a complexity that belies the kind of reductive classification—evident in the four section titles—that a modernist theoretical position entails. The research here is far better than the theory that frames it. Conceptually, "the Mediterranean" and modernity fit well together . Gadant's narrow definition—that modernity is change—obscures the fact that both the postulating of "the Mediterranean" as a unified culture area and "modernity" itself, as elaborated in the mid19th century by Charles Baudelaire and by many others since, are based upon the positing of a traditional/modern dichotomy, that is, a very particular notion of history and of "change." Ironically, one analytic and descriptive shortfall of a modernist theoretical framework —which celebrates the dynamism of the present and largely ignores the past—is its inability to theorize "tradition" as not only of the ignored "past" but rather as continuously reinvented within political struggles of the present. That such a position might have been of heuristic value is clear in a number of the cases discussed in this volume. In Gadant's very interesting article on Algeria, for instance, it is argued that the state's positioning of itself as the only "authentic" interpreter of the Qur'an has resulted in, among other things, a par- 148 Reviews adoxical alignment which conceptualizes "woman" as "the guardian of tradition," while men reinterpret that "tradition" in the name of national "heritage." The power of this state strategy, also reported by Eleni Varikas in a discussion of 19th century Greece, lies in the assertion that feminism, and all attempts to change the "domestic sphere" (too often invoked in this collection), are vulgar "westernizations " which threaten national "heritage." Rosemary Sayigh's account of the struggles of Palestinian women (one of two articles in English) again raises these issues, the positioning of the family as the site of "cultural authenticity" that is occurring in many movements for national liberation. The effects of this linking of "woman" with "cultural authenticity " with respect to the position of women within particular nations are, as Sayigh points out, simultaneously liberating and constraining. But the more insidious, and more general, result of theorizing feminism within a "modernist" framework becomes clear by the end of Sayigh's essay, where she argues that the "woman issue" has been suppressed in the national struggle. Sayigh's formulation implies an acceptance of the reductive modernist position on representation and "authenticity," in which the positing of "men" as the universal leads inevitably to conceptualizing "woman," and her issues, as the particular . The positing and overlapping of traditional/modern and female/ male dichotomies results in the epistemologically overdetermined subjugation of "woman"—she becomes both particular and traditional, doubly and necessarily Other, in one stroke. Thus, a feminism which accepts the terms of a modernist nationalist...