ABSTRACT
National borders seem so common-sensically self-evident as a defining fact of contemporary life that we only become aware of them in the (often policed and restricted, always political) movement across them. Despite the variety of utopian claims asserted in the name of globalization and the apparent ease of movement of information and goods across these national thresholds, the enduring political and economic conditions of nations mean that subjects of national address find themselves caught in a dual ideological bind of identifying themselves as part of a nation while also discovering the traffic of representations of themselves as national “others.” Nowhere is this more pressing than in the situation of women, who in many national rhetorics become the defining emblem of national idealizations of what constitutes appropriate and obedient citizenship-in the making of new national subjects (children), in the production of the household as the model of efficiency and affective stability, and in the willingness to take on subordinate spheres of labor within the larger matrixes of industrial production.
