Women & the Nation's Narrative

Women & the Nation's Narrative

Author: Neloufer De Mel

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 9780742518070

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This book explores the development of nationalism in Sri Lanka during the past century, particularly within the dominant Sinhala Buddhist and militant Tamil movements. Tracing the ways women from diverse backgrounds have engaged with nationalism, Neloufer de Mel argues that gender is crucial to an understanding of nationalism and vice versa. Traversing both the colonial and postcolonial periods in Sri Lanka's history, the author assesses a range of writers, activists, political figures, and movements almost completely unknown in the West. With her rigorous, historically located analyses, de Mel makes a persuasive case for the connections between figures like actress Annie Boteju and art historian and journalist Anil de Silva; poetry whether written by Jean Arasanayagam or Tamil revolutionary women; and political movements like the LTTE, the JVP, the Mother's Front, and contemporary feminist organizations. Evaluating the colonial period in light of the violence that animates Sri Lanka today, de Mel proposes what Bruce Robbins has termed a 'lateral cosmopolitanism' that will allow coalitions to form and to practice an oppositional politics of peace. In the process, she examines the gendered forms through which the nation and the state both come together and pull apart. The breadth of topics examined here will make this work a valuable resource for South Asianists as well as for scholars in a wide range of fields who choose to consider the ways in which gender inflects their areas of research and teaching.


Stories of Women

Stories of Women

Author: Elleke Boehmer

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2005-09-03

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 9780719068782

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This text combines Boehmer's keynote essays on the mother figure and the postcolonial nation, with incisive new work on male autobiography, 'daughter' writers, the colonial body, the trauma of the post-colony, and the nation in a transnational context.


Gender and Nation

Gender and Nation

Author: Nira Yuval-Davis

Publisher: SAGE

Published: 1997-03-25

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1446240770

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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.


En-Gendering India

En-Gendering India

Author: Sangeeta Ray

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2000-06-20

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 0822382806

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En-Gendering India offers an innovative interpretation of the role that gender played in defining the Indian state during both the colonial and postcolonial eras. Focusing on both British and Indian literary texts—primarily novels—produced between 1857 and 1947, Sangeeta Ray examines representations of "native" Indian women and shows how these representations were deployed to advance notions of Indian self-rule as well as to defend British imperialism. Through her readings of works by writers including Bankimchandra Chatterjee, Rabindranath Tagore, Harriet Martineau, Flora Annie Steel, Anita Desai, and Bapsi Sidhaa, Ray demonstrates that Indian women were presented as upper class and Hindu, an idealization that paradoxically served the needs of both colonial and nationalist discourses. The Indian nation’s goal of self-rule was expected to enable women’s full participation in private and public life. On the other hand, British colonial officials rendered themselves the protectors of passive Indian women against their “savage” male countrymen. Ray shows how the native woman thus became a symbol for both an incipient Indian nation and a fading British Empire. In addition, she reveals how the figure of the upper-class Hindu woman created divisions with the nationalist movement itself by underscoring caste, communal, and religious differences within the newly emerging state. As such, Ray’s study has important implications for discussions about nationalism, particularly those that address the concepts of identity and nationalism. Building on recent scholarship in feminism and postcolonial studies, En-Gendering India will be of interest to scholars in those fields as well as to specialists in nationalism and nation-building and in Victorian, colonial, and postcolonial literature and culture.


Gendered Paradoxes

Gendered Paradoxes

Author: Fida J. Adely

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2012-08-28

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 0226006905

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In 2005 the World Bank released a gender assessment of the nation of Jordan, a country that, like many in the Middle East, has undergone dramatic social and gender transformations, in part by encouraging equal access to education for men and women. The resulting demographic picture there—highly educated women who still largely stay at home as mothers and caregivers— prompted the World Bank to label Jordan a “gender paradox.” In Gendered Paradoxes, Fida J. Adely shows that assessment to be a fallacy, taking readers into the rarely seen halls of a Jordanian public school—the al-Khatwa High School for Girls—and revealing the dynamic lives of its students, for whom such trends are far from paradoxical. Through the lives of these students, Adely explores the critical issues young people in Jordan grapple with today: nationalism and national identity, faith and the requisites of pious living, appropriate and respectable gender roles, and progress. In the process she shows the important place of education in Jordan, one less tied to the economic ends of labor and employment that are so emphasized by the rest of the developed world. In showcasing alternative values and the highly capable young women who hold them, Adely raises fundamental questions about what constitutes development, progress, and empowerment—not just for Jordanians, but for the whole world.


Acts of Narrative Resistance

Acts of Narrative Resistance

Author: Laura J. Beard

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2009-10-01

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 081393057X

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This exploration of women's autobiographical writings in the Americas focuses on three specific genres: testimonio, metafiction, and the family saga as the story of a nation. What makes Laura J. Beard’s work distinctive is her pairing of readings of life narratives by women from different countries and traditions. Her section on metafiction focuses on works by Helena Parente Cunha, of Brazil, and Luisa Futoranksy, of Argentina; the family sagas explored are by Ana María Shua and Nélida Piñon, of Argentina and Brazil, respectively; and the section on testimonio highlights narratives by Lee Maracle and Shirley Sterling, from different Indigenous nations in British Columbia. In these texts Beard terms "genres of resistance," women resist the cultural definitions imposed upon them in an effort to speak and name their own experiences. The author situates her work in the context of not only other feminist studies of women's autobiographies but also the continuing study of inter-American literature that is demanding more comparative and cross-cultural approaches. Acts of Narrative Resistance addresses prominent issues in the fields of autobiography, comparative literature, and women's studies, and in inter-American, Latin American, and Native American studies.


The Promise of Patriarchy

The Promise of Patriarchy

Author: Ula Yvette Taylor

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2017-09-05

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 1469633949

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The patriarchal structure of the Nation of Islam (NOI) promised black women the prospect of finding a provider and a protector among the organization's men, who were fiercely committed to these masculine roles. Black women's experience in the NOI, however, has largely remained on the periphery of scholarship. Here, Ula Taylor documents their struggle to escape the devaluation of black womanhood while also clinging to the empowering promises of patriarchy. Taylor shows how, despite being relegated to a lifestyle that did not encourage working outside of the home, NOI women found freedom in being able to bypass the degrading experiences connected to labor performed largely by working-class black women and in raising and educating their children in racially affirming environments. Telling the stories of women like Clara Poole (wife of Elijah Muhammad) and Burnsteen Sharrieff (secretary to W. D. Fard, founder of the Allah Temple of Islam), Taylor offers a compelling narrative that explains how their decision to join a homegrown, male-controlled Islamic movement was a complicated act of self-preservation and self-love in Jim Crow America.


Feminism for the Americas

Feminism for the Americas

Author: Katherine M. Marino

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2019-02-05

Total Pages: 367

ISBN-13: 1469649705

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This book chronicles the dawn of the global movement for women's rights in the first decades of the twentieth century. The founding mothers of this movement were not based primarily in the United States, however, or in Europe. Instead, Katherine M. Marino introduces readers to a cast of remarkable Latin American and Caribbean women whose deep friendships and intense rivalries forged global feminism out of an era of imperialism, racism, and fascism. Six dynamic activists form the heart of this story: from Brazil, Bertha Lutz; from Cuba, Ofelia Domingez Navarro; from Uruguay, Paulina Luisi; from Panama, Clara Gonzalez; from Chile, Marta Vergara; and from the United States, Doris Stevens. This Pan-American network drove a transnational movement that advocated women's suffrage, equal pay for equal work, maternity rights, and broader self-determination. Their painstaking efforts led to the enshrinement of women's rights in the United Nations Charter and the development of a framework for international human rights. But their work also revealed deep divides, with Latin American activists overcoming U.S. presumptions to feminist superiority. As Marino shows, these early fractures continue to influence divisions among today's activists along class, racial, and national lines. Marino's multinational and multilingual research yields a new narrative for the creation of global feminism. The leading women introduced here were forerunners in understanding the power relations at the heart of international affairs. Their drive to enshrine fundamental rights for women, children, and all people of the world stands as a testament to what can be accomplished when global thinking meets local action.


Narratives of Nation-Building in Korea

Narratives of Nation-Building in Korea

Author: Sheila Miyoshi Jager

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-07-08

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13: 1317464117

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This book offers new insight on how key historical texts and events in Korea's history have contributed to the formation of the nation's collective consciousness. The work is woven around the unifying premise that particular narrative texts/events that extend back to the premodern period have remained important, albeit transformed, over the modern period and into the contemporary period. The author explores the relationship between gender and nationalism by showing how key narrative topics, such as tales of virtuous womanhood, have been employed, transformed, and re-deployed to make sense of particular national events. Connecting these narratives and historic events to contemporary Korean society, Jager reveals how these "sites" - or reference points - were also successfully re-deployed in the context of the division of Korea and the construction of Korea's modern consciousness.


Women and the UN

Women and the UN

Author: Rebecca Adami

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-07-28

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 1000418820

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This book provides a critical history of influential women in the United Nations and seeks to inspire empowerment with role models from bygone eras. The women whose voices this book presents helped shape UN conventions, declarations, and policies with relevance to the international human rights of women throughout the world today. From the founding of the UN up until the Latin American feminist movements that pushed for gender equality in the UN Charter, and the Security Council Resolutions on the role of women in peace and conflict, the volume reflects on how women delegates from different parts of the world have negotiated and disagreed on human rights issues related to gender within the UN throughout time. In doing so it sheds new light on how these hidden historical narratives enrich theoretical studies in international relations and global agency today. In view of contemporary feminist and postmodern critiques of the origin of human rights, uncovering women’s history of the United Nations from both Southern and Western perspectives allows us to consider questions of feminism and agency in international relations afresh. With contributions from leading scholars and practitioners of law, diplomacy, history, and development studies, and brought together by a theoretical commentary by the Editors, Women and the UN will appeal to anyone whose research covers human rights, gender equality, international development, or the history of civil society. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003036708, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.