ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the connection between colonized territory and gender in the discourses of two prominent women activists in Germany and Ireland, Käthe Schirmacher and Maud Gonne. Schirmacher campaigned for the aggressive ‘Germanization’ of the Ostmark (the Eastern Marches of Posen and West Prussia), territory that had first been colonized in the tenth century. Gonne was a leading figure in campaigns for Irish nationalism and for independence from an exploitative and cruel British Empire. The first part of the chapter explores the concept of ‘internal colonialism’ and whether it can be usefully applied to the Ostmark and to Ireland, and argues that there are parallels between the peripheral (geographical, political and ideological) location of the Ostmark and Ireland and the status of politically active women at the time. The second part of the chapter focuses on the discursive construction of the Self and the Other in Schirmacher’s and Gonne’s speeches and writings; in particular, how they draw on recognizable features of colonial discourse to portray their respective territories as colonies, and how they negotiate their own role as women – and therefore a potential Other – in polemicized discourses that are otherwise largely male-dominated.
