The Healing Effect of Discourses: Body, Emotions, and Gender Subjectivity in Basque Nationalism

Abstract

This chapter addresses the role that emotions play in the construction of gender nationalist subjectivity. Oral narratives transmit people’s feelings, likes, and frustrations, revealing the emotional imprint that lived experience stamps into memory. I would argue that the fact that memory is a process of continual evaluation does not imply that all the meanings and resonances of the past are distorted. In my experience, I have observed that there are certain types of accounts in memory that, even if not immune to the intersubjective character of the interview and to the passage of time, have a deep emotional charge. This charge enables the account to remain quite faithful to the experience and the emotions felt in the past that provoked the memory in the first place.1 My purpose is to demonstrate that in human experience, emotions are intertwined with discourses and comprise a significant component of memory. The emotional imprint plays a fundamental role in recording a memory, but I also insist on the materiality of emotional experience. Consequently, we are both relating individual and social memory and inscribing emotion and feeling on a body that experiences and positions itself in the world.