Nationalism is Always Gendered

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Fri May 7 08:46:01 PDT 1999


rc-am wrote:


> . . . the promotion of the family as the privileged
> place of national identity, etc. it's not, as they say, a problem which is
> solved by 'adding women in', though I know you weren't saying exactly this,
> it's a problem of how women and men are defined.

"The Family" as envisioned in official ideology has been, in fact, disintegrating for a number of years, and while this drives self-identified conservatives of various stripes wild (witness the letters column of any small city newspaper as well as the WSJ editorial page) ideology is going to have to come to some sort of harmony with empirical actuality. This of course has happened before within capitalism, so it presumably will happen again. But what form the newer ideology will take, and how relationships between it and the older will be negotiated, is ???????

Of my parents' 9 grandchildren, the lives of only two really fit at all clearly into the older or official pattern.

Carrol



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