Women as Cultural Markers/Bearers

Abstract

Women have been mobilized as cultural markers/bearers in relation to both nationalist discourse and subnational identity politics. Their role has been both symbolic, to represent the nation or culture, and functional, to transmit it (to their children and to other women). Women have borne the weight of cultural representation through prescriptions concerning their appropriate appearance and behavior, but at the same time women deeply internalize culture and the religious traditions that often inform it. Particularly in anti‐colonial or racial minority contexts, religion and culture have been politically mobilized and women have been called upon as both cultural emblems and as cultural police, in relation to other women. The scholarship examines both the deployment of women as symbols through their appearance and behavior, and women's own ambiguous relationships to these cultural roles, whether as participants (willing or not), defenders, and advocates, educators through maternal transmission of values to daughters and sons, or alternatively as resistants who attempt to create new cultural values.

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