ABSTRACT
All nationalisms are gendered, all are invented, and all are dangerous— dangerous, not in Eric Hobsbawm's sense as having to be opposed, but in the sense of representing relations to political power and to the technologies of violence. Nationalism, as Ernest Gellner notes, invents nations where they do not exist, and most modern nations, despite their appeal to an august and immemorial past, are of recent invention (Gellner, 1964). Benedict Anderson warns, however, that Gellner tends to assimilate ‘invention’ to ‘falsity’ rather than to ‘imagining’ and ‘creation’. Anderson, by contrast, views nations as ‘imagined communities’ in the sense that they are systems of cultural representation whereby people come to imagine a shared experience of identification with an extended community (Anderson, 1991:6). As such, nations are not simply phantasmagoria of the mind, but are historical and institutional practices through which social difference is invented and performed. Nationalism becomes, as a result, radically constitutive of people's identities, through social contests that are frequently violent and always gendered. But if the invented nature of nationalism has found wide theoretical currency, explorations of the gendering of the national imaginary have been conspicuously paltry.
