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.

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