ABSTRACT
Nations are more than geopolitical bodies, more than collections of people and institutions within dened sovereign territories. Nations are discursive constructs, created and sustained, in part, through “stories, images, landscapes, scenarios, historical events, national symbols and rituals which . . . give meaning to the nation” (Hall 1992, 293). To borrow Anderson’s (1983) aphorism, nations are “imagined communities,” and in this communal imaginary the nation is almost inevitably gendered and racialized. That is, the icons, experiences, traits, and contexts central to notions of nation-ness come to be symbolically linked to individuals and groups with distinct gender and ethnoracial identities.1 The imagined community is, in other words, a nation of esh and blood. While such meanings are most clearly distilled in national archetypes such as Uncle Sam or Britannia, gender, race, and ethnicity often more subtly inect narratives of national belonging by portraying certain characteristics, activities, and afliations as natural, normal, and preferred.
