ABSTRACT
All nationalisms are gendered, all are invented and all are dangerous dangerous, not in Eric Hobsbawm's sense of having to be opposed but in the sense that they represent relations to political power and to the technologies of violence. Nationalism becomes in this way constitutive of people's identities through social contests that are frequently violent and always gendered. A feminist theory of nationalism might thus be strategically fourfold: investigating the gendered formation of sanctioned male theories; bringing into historical visibility women's active cultural and political participation in national formations. Nations are frequently figured through the iconography of familial and domestic space. As male theorists of nationalism go, Frantz Fanon is exemplary, not only for recognizing gender as a formative dimension of nationalism but also for recognizing and immediately rejecting the Western metaphor of the nation as a family. Gender runs like a multiple fissure through Fanon's work, splitting and displacing the Manichean delirium' to which he repeatedly returns.
