ABSTRACT
The nation/state, as an imaginative enterprise, encompasses multiple imagined subnational boundaries.1 A number of feminist theorists have argued that the ‘public/private’ boundary and its gendering are products of statelevel societies (Reiter, 1975; Joseph, 1975, 1983; Gailey, 1987). I argue in this paper that the public/private divide, central to classical Western constructs of citizenship and nation/statehood, is also constructed as an imaginative enterprise. Adapting Gauri Viswanathan’s (1995:31) phrase, I suggest that it is a ‘purposeful fiction’ constitutive of the will to statehood. Thus, not only does the site, porousness and shape of the public/private divide vary from state to state and time to time, but these configurations are impacted upon by institutions and forces competing with and within state-building projects.
