Gender Ironies of Nationalism: Sexing the Nation

by Mayer,Tamar; Mayer,Tamar

• ISBN13: 9780415162548
• ISBN10: 0415162548
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-11-16
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Gender Ironies of Nationalismprovides a unique social science reading on the construction of nation, gender and sexuality and on the interactions among them. Including international case studies including the US, the Caribbean, Indonesia, Ireland, former Yugoslavia, Liberia, Sri Lanka, Australia, Turkey, China, and India, contributors offer both the masculine and feminine perspective on exploring gender in Jewish and Chinese nationalism, and the anger of white men, just to name a few. They expose how nations are comprised of sexed bodies, and exploring the gender ironies of nationalism and how sexuality plays a key role in nation building and in sustaining national identity. The contributors conclude that control over access to the benefits of belonging to the nation is invariably gendered: nationalism becomes the language through which sexual control and repression is justified masculine prowess is expressed and exercised. While it is men who claim the prerogatives of nation and nationbuilding it is, for the most part, women who actually accept the obligation of nation and nation building.

Author Biography

Tamar Mayer is Professor of Geography at Middlebury College, Middlebury, Vermont, USA.

Table of Contents

List of plates	ix
List of contributors	x
Acknowledgments	xiii
Gender ironies of nationalism: setting the stage	1	(24)
Tamar Mayer
Spectacular sexuality: nationalism, development and the politics of family planning in Indonesia	25	(40)
Leslie K. Dwyer
Death of a nation: transnationalism, bodies and abortion in late twentieth-century Ireland	65	(24)
Angela K. Martin
Sexing the nation/desexing the body: politics of national identity in the former Yugoslavia	89	(24)
Julie Mostov
Uneasy images: contested representations of gender, modernity and nationalism in pre-war Liberia	113	(26)
Mary H. Moran
``Am I a woman in these matters?'': notes on Sinhala nationalism and gender in Sri Lanka	139	(24)
Jeanne Marecek
Native sex: sex rites, land rights and the making of Aboriginal civic culture	163	(24)
Elizabeth A. Povinelli
Kurdish nationalism in Turkey and the role of peasant Kurdish women	187	(24)
Cihan Ahmetbeyzade
Calligraphy, gender and Chinese nationalism	211	(26)
Tamara Hamlish
Men's sexuality and women's subordination in Indian nationalisms	237	(24)
Steve Derne
Nationalism and Caribbean masculinity	261	(22)
Linden Lewis
From zero to hero: masculinity in Jewish nationalism	283	(26)
Tamar Mayer
Gender, sexuality and the military model of U. S. national community	309	(20)
Holly Allen
Angry white men: right exclusionary nationalism and left identity politics	329	(22)
Andrew Light
William Chaloupka
Index	351