Gender and nation

Abstract

‘Debatable lands’ and ‘passable boundaries’: both concepts are emblematic of the kind of inevitably shifting, multi-dimensional perspectives that are found in any consideration of nation and gender.1 Homi K. Bhabha writes of the ‘ambivalent margin of the nation-space’ and ‘the ambivalent, antagonistic perspective of nation as narration’ (1990a: 4). These ‘ambivalent margins’ are contained in the Scottish metaphor of the Debatable Land. Originally the term was for that area ‘holdin to be Debateable Lands betwixt the twa nations of Scotland and England’, and very specifically defined as ‘now forming the Parishes of Canonbie in Scotland and Kirk Andrews on Esk in England’ (Carlyle 1868: appendix 33, 1). It became first a term for the Scottish/English borders as a whole, which were fought over and consequently neither static nor entirely definable. Its subsequent manifestation is as a metaphor for any borderline state or idea.2 Women’s writing in particular is often assessed in terms of borders and margins that provide those tropes of liminality used to point up a fluidity and an ambiguity identified with the position of women in society. Maggie Humm, for example, adopts such terms in ways that echo the Scots concept of debatable land: