Gender and Nation: the Gaelicisation of Irish Manhood

Abstract

In most modern nation states, there has been a tightly woven historical relationship between constructions of gender, national identity and national cinema. As far as gender and nation are concerned, there has generally been a strong investment in the configuration of males as active and of females as passive and symbolic, as Enoch Powell’s alleged definition of the nation as ‘two males plus defending a territory with women and children’ (Yuval-Davis, 1997) so aptly demonstrates. In many large nations, national cinema played a vital role in thus ‘imagining the nation’ (Anderson, 1983): in America, the Soviet Union, India, Mexico and Great Britain, most early cinematic images of ideal manhood and womanhood were effectively embodiments of the core values of nationhood: how to be American or Russian or Indian was literally performed through the gendered bodily acts and rituals of the films’ protagonists. According to David Gerstner (2006: 51), American cinema preserved the tropes of frontier realism and idealism long after the real frontier was closed down and thus played a greater role than any other art form in weaving together notions of the landscape, manliness, democracy and romantic realism under the banner of American selfhood. For Gerstner, American theatre and cinema ‘enabled the myth of manly America’.