Nira Yuval-Davis provides an authoritative overview and critique of writings on gender and nationhood, presenting an original analysis of the ways gender relations affect and are affected by national projects and processes. In Gender and Nation Yuval-Davis argues that the construction of nationhood involves specific notions of both `manhood' and `womanhood'. She examines the contribution of gender relations to key dimensions of nationalist projects - the nation's reproduction, its culture and citizenship - as well as to national conflicts and wars, exploring the contesting relations between feminism and nationalism. Gender and Nation is an important contribution to the debates on citizenship, gender and nationhood. It will be essential reading for academics and students of women's studies, race and ethnic studies, sociology and political science.

This book provides a unique social science reading on the construction of nation, gender and sexuality and on the interactions among them. It includes international case studies from Indonesia, Ireland, former Yugoslavia, Liberia, Sri Lanka, Australia, the USA, Turkey, China, India and the Caribbean. The contributors offer both the masculine and feminine perspective, exposing 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. Whilst it is men who claim the prerogatives of nation and nation building it is, for the most part, women who actually accept the obligation of nation and nation building.

This volume offers an empirically rich, theoretically informed study of the shifting intersections of nation/alism, gender and sexuality. Challenging a scholarly legacy that has overly focused on the masculinist character of nationalism, it pays particular attention to the people and issues less commonly considered in the context of nationalist projects, namely women and sexual minorities. Bringing together both established and emerging researchers from across the globe, this multidisciplinary and comparison-rich volume provides a multi-sited exploration of the shifting contours of belonging and Otherness generated by multifarious nationalisms. The diverse, and context specific positionings of men and women, masculinities and femininities, and hegemonic and non-normative sexualities, vis-à-vis nation/alism, are illuminated through a vibrant array of contemporary theoretical lenses. These include historical and feminist institutionalism, post-colonial theory, critical race approaches, transnational and migration theory and semiotics.

Sex, Gender, and the Politics of ERA is the most profound and sensitive discussion to date of the way in which women responded to feminism. Drawing on extensive research and interviews, Mathews and De Hart explore the fate of the ERA in North Carolina--one of the three states targeted by both sides as essential to ratification--to reveal the dynamics that stunned supporters across America. The authors insightfully link public discourse and private feelings, placing arguments used throughout the nation in the personal contexts of women who pleaded their cases for and against equality. Beginning with a study of woman suffrage, the book shows how issues of sex, gender, race, and power remained potent weapons on the ERA battlefield. The ideas of such vocal opponents as Phyllis Schlafly and Senator Sam Ervin set the perfect stage for mothers to confess their terror at the violation of their daughters in a post-ERA world, while the prospect of losing ratification to this terror impelled supporters to shed the white gloves of genteel lobbying for the combat boots of political in-fighting. In the end, the efforts of ERA supporters could neither outweigh the symbolic actions of its opponents nor weaken the resistance of those same legislators to further federal guarantees of equality. Ultimately, opponents succeeded in making equality for women seem dangerous. In thus explaining the ERA controversy, the authors brilliantly illuminate the many meanings of feminism for the American people.

An examination of nationalism and gender.

Gender, Nation and State in Modern Japan makes a unique contribution to the international literature on the formation of modern nation–states in its focus on the gendering of the modern Japanese nation-state from the late nineteenth century to the present. References to gender relations are deeply embedded in the historical concepts of nation and nationalism, and in the related symbols, metaphors and arguments. Moreover, the development of the binary opposition between masculinity and femininity and the development of the modern nation-state are processes which occurred simultaneously. They were the product of a shift from a stratified, hereditary class society to a functionally-differentiated social body. This volume includes the work of an international group of scholars from Japan, the United States, Australia and Germany, which in many cases appears in English for the first time. It provides an interdisciplinary perspective on the formation of the modern Japanese nation–state, including comparative perspectives from research on the formation of the modern nation–state in Europe, thus bringing research on Japan into a transnational dialogue. This volume will be of interest in the fields of modern Japanese history, gender studies, political science and comparative studies of nationalism.