Family Feuds

Gender, Nationalism and the Family

Bibliographic Data

ID3946274
AuthorsAnne Mcclintock (corresponding author)
Year1993
Issue44
Pages61
Publication date1993-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueFeminist Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0141-7789 • E-ISSN: 1466-4380
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/1395196
OpenAlexW4244454879
LanguageEN
Citations received380
References cited20

All nationalisms are gendered, all are invented, snd all are dangerousdangerous, not in Eric Hobsbawm's sense as having to be opposed, but in the sense of representing relations to political power and to the technologies of violence. Nationalism, as Ernest Gellner notes, invents nations where they do not exist, and most modern nations, despite their appeal to an august and immemorial past, are of recent invention (Gellner, 1964). Benedict Anderson warns, however, that Gellner tends to assimilate 'invention' to 'falsity' rather than to 'imagining' and 'creation'. Anderson, by contrast, views nations as 'imagined communities' in the sense that they are systems of cultural representation whereby people come to imagine a shared experience of identification with an extended community (Anderson, 1991: 6). As such, nations are not simply phantasmagoria of the mind, but are historical and institutional practices through which social difference is invented and performed. Nationalism becomes, as a result, radically constitutive of people's identities, through social contests that are frequently violent and always gendered. But if the invented nature of nationalism has found wide theoretical currency, explorations of the gendering of the national imaginary have been conspicuously paltry. All nations depend on powerful constructions of gender. Despite nationalisms' ideological investment in the idea of popular unity, nations have historically amounted to the sanctioned institutionalization of gender difference. No nation in the world gives women and men the same access to the rights and resources of the nation-state. Rather than expressing the flowering into time of the organic essence of a timeless people, nations are contested systems of cultural representation that limit and legitimize peoples' access to the resources of the nation-state. Yet with the notable exception of Frantz Fanon, male theorists have seldom felt moved to explore how nationalism is

Feminism · Human sexuality · Ideology · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · The Imaginary · Anthropology · Cultural Studies · Gender Politics and Representation · Gender Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · Irish and British Studies · Law · Philippine History and Culture · Political Systems and Governance

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