ABSTRACT
This chapter scrutinizes how gender constructs available in the fiction, journalism, and scholarship of the late twentieth century complicate any discussion of nationhood, modernity, and development because these narrate ‘women’ as an unstable signifier destabilizing established meanings. As sites of violence, resistance, and transformation, women’s bodies are central to any understanding of unequal gender relations. Recent feminist theorists have pointed to the feminization of the nation, which is narrated on the body of women. The language of honour within kinship relations functions to discipline these errant women through the subjugation of their bodies. Such disciplinary functions are not exclusive to the 1980s. In fictional works, there are middle and lower-middle-class women characters that do unpaid domestic work. Regardless of class, caste, or religion none of these women has direct control over resources. The language of nationalism singles women out as symbolic markers of the respectability and immutability of the nation.
