Participants

The workshop was hosted by the project’s members, the PIs, Prof. Dr. Jessica Gienow-Hecht and Prof. Dr. Gülay Çağlar, the project's doctoral researchers, Johanna Heß and Tobias Klee, as well as the project's student assistant, Samuel Plumb.

The following people attended the workshop as speakers: social psychologist Dr. Oliver Lauenstein, who acted as the appointed discussant for the workshop's input paper; the historians Dr. Gemma Torres, Prof. Enric Ucelay da Cal, and Dr. Florian Grafl; the political scientist Dr. Maria Rodó de Zárate; as well as the musicians Magalí Sare and and Manel Fortià. Historian Maximilian Klose and the musicians' manager Laura Gràcia Nedderman attended the workshop as listeners.

Programme

The workshop started out with an introduction of the research group by Prof. Gienow-Hecht and Prof. Çağlar, followed by a presentation and a discussion of the working paper “Ni masclisme , ni inclusio Gendered Language and Debates around the Catalan National Anthem” by Johanna Heß and Tobias Klee, Oliver Lauenstein acting as a discussant.

During their presentation of the working paper, Johanna Heß and Tobias Klee gave an outline of their general research and their findings. Through combining a historical approach with an approach from the political sciences, they investigated why the gender-inclusive performance of the Catalan anthem by Magalí Sare and Manel Fortià caused such a public outrage and what that outrage tells us about past gendered images in Catalan nationalism that still persist today. Doing so, they touched on the matter of nationalism as a masculine project, the gendered nature of Catalan national symbolism, as well as the issue of collective national identity.

In his discussion of the paper, Oliver Lauenstein, contextualised the working paper with the general literature on nationalism, gender, and family symbolism. He wondered in which spaces women act and acted in the construction of Catalan nationalism, as well as about the relevance of ethnic and civic nationalism in the Catalan context. Maria Rodó de Zárate commented that Catalan national symbols are fragile, due to their historical suppression by Spain. Therefore, Catalan nationalists perceive attacks on them as specifically severe.

Afterwards followed the first panel, titled “The Impotence of 1898 and the Rise of Catalonia“, headed by Gemma Torres and Enric Ucelay da Cal.

Gemma Torres started out with a presentation on the crisis of Spanish imperial identity after Spain had lost its last colonies to the USA in the war of 1898. As she explained, this imperial identity informed itself strongly through the notion of masculinity. Losing the colonies therefore also meant a hit to the national sense of masculinity. From this dual crisis several discourses emerged around the restoration of Spanish virility. These discourses developed around the Spanish wars against Morocco. The two major camps were the “Africanistas”, military personal fighting in Morocco, promoting a military masculinity, and the more metropolitan circles who, in opposition to these notions, promoted rationality as a key masculine attribute. Gemma Torres ended her presentation by proposing that the crisis of Spanish masculinity might have provoked the rise of Catalan nationalism in the sense that Catalans felt themselves to be manlier than Spaniards.

During the second presentation, Enric Ucelay da Cal gave a general overview about key debates and developments in Catalan nationalism throughout the last 150 years. This included the growing popularity of the Catalan language during the period of romanticism, discourses on regionalism vs. separatism, as well as on republicanism vs. monarchism, processes of urbanisation on the Iberian Peninsula, as well as the involvement of women in the Catalan national movement from the 1980s onwards.

The following debate centred on the role of women in Catalan nationalism. The question if their involvement really only started in the 1980s arose, as well as what their societal and political role had been previous to the Spanish Civil War, and how they shaped the movement post the 1980s. In this context, the role and position of women regarding Spanish colonial activity in Morocco became relevant as well. Gemma Torres talked about Catalan author Aurora Bertrana, who criticised the incompetence of the Spanish colonial administration. Lastly, the participants discussed contemporary images of Catalan masculinity in comparison to Spain.

During the early afternoon, Magalí Sare and Manel Fortià gave a short concert, followed by a talk and question round on their role performing a gender-inclusive version of the Catalan anthem “Els Segadors” during the inauguration of Catalan president Pere Aragonès in May 2021.

Florian Grafl and Maria Rodó Zárate headed the second panel “Segadors and Segadores—Memory and Countermemory in the Catalan Independence Movement”.

After the panel, Magalí Sare and Manel Fortià gave a concert. In the following discussion, Magalí Sare explained why she chose to sing a gender inclusive anthem, how she perceived her role during the inauguration as a whole, and how she dealt with the public outrage afterwards.

Florian Grafl started off the second panel. In his talk, he addressed the period of social unrest, violent protests, the performative traditions of street demonstrations in Barcelona, and generally the politicisation of the public space in Barcelona during the period between 1917 and 1923. In this, he addressed the clash between social issues and Catalan nationalism, as well as different ideas of how the state should be structured. Further, he explained the importance of publicly singing “Els Segadors” during these conflicts. He also addressed women's demonstration during this time period, which mostly arose from a threat to their living conditions, rather than an overt political statement.

In her following presentation, Maria Rodó de Zárate talked about the issues of Catalan nationalism and intersectionality. One of her principal questions was how pro-independence feminist groups in Catalonia challenged hegemonic conceptions of nationhood. She discussed how in Western feminism nationalism is antithetical to feminism, whereas in postcolonial theory often unites the struggle for national liberation and women’s liberation. According to her, national identity can be understood as an axis of oppression, which is why it can be investigated through an intersectional approach. She also pointed out how intersectional theory itself is a conception that represents the hegemony of the anglo-sphere, as similar theories appeared in parallel during the period of decolonisation, albeit remained largely ignored.

During the following discussion, participants argued about the role of digital spaces as discursive and performative stages. They pondered if post-colonial theory is applicable to the Catalan case. Can one really consider that Spain oppresses people of Catalan national identity, especially compared to oppressions by e.g. the Turkish state against Kurdish people? Yet again, the role of women in the historical, as well as the contemporary protest movements became a point of discussion. Two focal questions focussed on how the contemporary feminist independence movements address migrant working class women, as well as which historical memories and identities female activists can draw on. Lastly, the participants discussed the general role of historical memories for the invocation and production of collective identities.

The workshop concluded with a short round of closing remarks by the PIs and the doctoral students.

Conclusion

The workshop was very effective in bringing historical and political science perspectives on Catalan nationalism into a conversation with one another. By also bringing in the larger Spanish context, we could contextualise the gendered origins of Catalan nationalism within a wider crisis of Spanish masculinity. Focussing on the role of real women in Catalan nationalism then allowed us to investigate the internal gendered dimensions of Catalan nationalism. Our hope is to conduct a follow-up workshop in Barcelona where we can present further research on gendered images in the formation of Catalan national identity.