Kneading our daughters: Pedagogies of nation-building and girls’ schooling in (post)colonial Bahrain

Abstract

A school-based ethnography, this dissertation traces the intertwining, intimate, and global histories that labor to produce a particular knowledge about the desired girl citizen-subject in (post)colonial Bahrain. The re-configuration of the “ideal girl” figure is central to how the purpose of girls’ education is imagined, articulated, and upheld through Bahrain’s K-12 education policy and practice. Simultaneously, this dissertation examines how girls enact particular linguistic practices when (en)countering kneading forces—historical and sociopolitical—unfolding in their everyday, within and beyond their school. My focus on girls’ linguistic practices reflects the significance of language in the formation and transformation of social categories of difference, across missionary, colonial, anti-colonial, and ethnonationalist political projects, manifesting in nineteenth and twentieth century colonial Bahrain. In so doing, I attend to the disciplining, constructing, and restraining power of the nation-state. Equally important, I explore girls’ creative negotiations in relation to dynamic kneading forces in an ever-emergent process, holding endless possibilities for emancipation and social control. In foregrounding relationality, I argue that an adequate understanding of complex gender politics and ever-becoming gendered subjectivities in (post)colonial Bahrain cannot be comprehended without a shift in our analytical focus of scale and scope, in ways that insist on refusing epistemic binaries and oppositional thinking.