ABSTRACT
It has demonstrated the deeply constraining, always problematic and sometimes deadly effects on women of their symbolic and strategic positioning as resources for the reproduction of particular versions of community belonging. The author argues that the exclusionary and absolutist models of community belonging that fuel ethnic and racialized conflict are underpinned by a notion of reproduction-as-stasis that ties female embodiment and women's reproductive activities to a logic of sameness. And yet, if the people only stay within the terms of such a model of power, they leave too much unsaid about women's relationship to community identities, and they propose theoretical and political alternatives that have a number of problematic consequences. Politically, it can lead to strategies that aim to separate gender out from national, racial, ethnic identities, with the result that key aspects of their complex interrelationship is lost from view.
