Abstract
At the turn of the twenty-first century, feminist scholar Cynthia Enloe made the oft-quoted observation that nationalist ideologies tend to stem “from masculinized memory, masculinized humiliation and masculinized hope.”1 Focusing on male nationalists in colonial Algeria, Enloe sought to convey how Algerian anticolonial nationalists used women as passive symbols to affirm their masculine national identity while denying them an active role in the country’s process of nation-building. Her perceptive analysis is part of an ongoing effort to better understand the intricate interrelationship between gender and the nation. Scholars from various disciplines have studied this interrelationship for more than three decades. Feminist scholars in particular have demonstrated how male nationalists incorporated women as symbolic, cultural, and biological reproducers of the nation into their “imagined communities.” Yet most studies on the subject tend to focus solely on the tensions between women’s inclusion in nationalist discourse and their exclusion from political decision making. Others have explored women’s active role in nationalist movements. Masculinities have received surprisingly little attention in these publications.2
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Notes
Cynthia H. Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 44.
See, for example, Nira Yuval-Davis and Floya Anthias, Woman-Nation-State (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989);
Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation (New York: Sage, 1997);
Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer, and Patricia Yaeger, eds., Nationalisms and Sexuality (New York: Routledge, 1992);
Ida Blom, Karen Hagemann, and Catherine Hall, eds. Gendered Nations: Nationalism and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century (New York: Berg, 2000);
Tamar Mayer, ed., Gender Ironies of Nationalism: Sexing the Nation (New York: Routledge, 2000);
Yasmeen Abu-Laban, ed., Gendering the Nation-State: Canadian and Comparative Perspectives (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008).
Thembisa Waetjen, “The Limits of Gender Rhetoric for Nationalism: A Case Study from Southern Africa,” Theory and Society 30, no. 1 (2001): 123–124.
Ronald L. Jackson II and Murali Balaji, “Introduction: Conceptualizing Current Discourses and Writing New Ones,” in Global Masculinities and Manhood, ed. Ronald L. Jackson II and Murali Balaji (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 21.
R. W. Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1995), 37–38, 77;
Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Free Press, 1997), 13–42.
On the theoretical development of masculinity studies, see Jürgen Martschukat and Olaf Stieglitz, Geschichte der Männlichkeiten (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2008), 33–50;
Michael Kimmel, Jeff R. Hearn, and R. W. Connell, eds., Handbook of Studies on Men and Masculinities (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004);
Rachel Adams and David Savran, eds., The Masculinity Studies Reader (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002);
Bryce Traister, “Academic Viagra: The Rise of American Masculinity Studies,” American Quarterly 52, no. 2 (June 2000): 274–304.
Demetrakis Z. Demetriou, “Connell’s Concept of Hegemonic Masculinity: A Critique,” Theory and Society 30, no. 3 (June 2001): 337–361.
Ibid.; Raewyn Connell and James W. Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept,” Gender and Society 19, no. 6 (December 2005): 829–859;
Martin Summers, Manliness and Its Discontents: The Black Middle Class and the Trans formation of Masculinity, 1900–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 10–13.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Reved. (New York: Verso, 1991);
John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 2;
Craig Calhoun, Nationalism (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1997), 4–5;
Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation, 21; Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: Sage, 1995).
Etienne Balibar, “The Nation Form: History and Ideology,” Review 13, no. 3 (Summer 1990): 331.
Anderson, Imagined Communities; David Brown, “Are There Good and Bad Nationalisms?” Nations and Nationalisms 5, no. 2 (April 1999): 281–302.
See also Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1991).
Todd Reeser, Masculinities in Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 171–199.
See Klaus Theweleit, Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror. Male Fantasies, vol. 2 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 77–94.
See Lauren Berlant and Elizabeth Freeman, “Queer Nationality,” Boundary 2 19, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 149–180;
V. Spike Peterson, “Sexing Political Identies/Nationalism as Heterosexism,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 1, no. 1 (June 1999): 34–65;
José Esteban Muñoz, Dissidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999);
Eithne Luibhéid and Lionel Cantú, eds., Queer Migrations: Sexuality, U.S. Citizenship, and Border Crossings (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005);
Aren Z. Aizura, “Transnational Transgender Rights and Immigration Law,” in Transfeminist Perspectives in and Beyond Transgender and Gender Studies, ed. Anne Enke (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012), 133–153;
George Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996);
Joanne Nagel, “Masculinity and Nationalism: Gender and Sexuality in the Making of Nations,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 21, no. 2 (March 1998): 242–269.
Connell and Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity,” 849. See also R. W. Connell, “Masculinities and Globalization,” Men and Masculinities 1, no.1 (July 1998): 3–23.
Christine Beasly, “Rethinking Hegemonic Masculinity in a Globalizing World,” Men and Masculinities 11, no. 1 (October 2008): 86–103, 99.
For a related critique, see Jeff Hearn, “From Hegemonic Masculinity to the Hegemony of Men,” Feminist Theory 5, no. 1 (April 2004): 49–72.
James Messerschmidt, “And Now, the Rest of the Story: A Commentary on Christine Beasley’s ‘Rethinking Hegemonic Masculinity in a Globalizing World,’” Men and Masculinities 11, no. 1 (October 2008): 104–108.
Nagel, “Masculinity and Nationalism,” 249. See also Wolfgang Schmale, “The Construction of Masculinity and the National,” Wiener Zeitschrift zur Geschichte der Neuzeit 10, no. 1 (2010): 164–172.
Karen Hagemann, “Of ‘Manly Valor’ and ‘German Honor’: Nation, War, and Masculinity in the Age of the Prussian Uprising Against Napoleon,” Central European History 30, no. 2 (1997): 187–220.
Marilyn Lake, “Mission Impossible: How Men Gave Birth to the Australian Nation—Nationalism, Gender and Other Seminal Acts,” Gender and History 4, no. 3 (September 1992): 305–322.
For similar studies that focus on the United States, see Christina Jarvis, The Male Body at War: American Masculinity during World War Two (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003);
Gail Bederman, Manliness &; Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
Jason Crouthamel, “‘Comradeship’ and ‘Friendship’: Masculinity and Militarisation in Germany’s Homosexual Emancipation Movement after the First World War,” Gender and History 23, no. 1 (April 2011): 111–129.
Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effeminate” Bengali in the late Nineteenth Century (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1995);
Sikata Banerjee, Make Me a Man! Masculinity, Hinduism, and Nationalism in India (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005);
Sikata Banerjee, Muscular Nationalism: Gender, Violence, and Empire in India and Ireland (New York: New York University Press, 2012).
Chacko Wilson Jacob, Working Out of Egypt: Effendi Masculinity and Subject Formation in Colonial Modernity, 1870–1940 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).
For a case study on South Africa, see Thembisa Waetjen, Workers and Warriors: Masculinity and the Struggle for Nation in South Africa (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004).
See also Natasha Erlank, “Gender and Masculinity in African Nationalist Discourse, 1912–1950,” Feminist Studies 29, no. 3 (2003): 653–671.
Patrick F. McDevitt, “Muscular Catholicism: Nationalism, Masculinity, and Gaelic Team Sports, 1884–1916,” Gender and History 9, no. 2 (1997): 262–284.
Similar developments took place in Palestine, where native men sought to equal their Zionist enemies through “martial prowess” and “muscular strength.” Joseph Massad, “Conceiving the Masculine: Gender and Palestine Nationalism,” Middle East Journal 49, no. 3 (1995): 467–483.
Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998).
See also Beatriz Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era (New York: Feminist Press, 2013);
Fatima El-Tayeb, European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
For a historical study, see Katie Sutton, The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011).
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© 2015 Pablo Dominguez Andersen and Simon Wendt
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Andersen, P.D., Wendt, S. (2015). Introduction: Masculinities and the Nation. In: Andersen, P.D., Wendt, S. (eds) Masculinities and the Nation in the Modern World. Global Masculinities. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137536105_1
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