Gender, Race and National Identity

Nations of Flesh and Blood

Jackie Hogan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780415384766
• eBook ISBN: 9781134174058
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

All nations construct stories of national belonging, stories of the nation's character, its accomplishments, its defining traits, its historical trajectory. These stories, or discourses of national identity, carry powerful messages about gender and race, messages that reflect, reproduce and occasionally challenge social hierarchies.

Gender, Race and National Identity examines links between gender, race and national identity in the US, UK, Australia and Japan. The book takes an innovative approach to national identity by analyzing a range of ephemeral and pop cultural texts, from Olympic opening ceremonies, to television advertisements, letters to the editor, broadsheet war coverage, travel brochures, museums and living history tourist venues. Its rich empirical detail and systematic cross-national comparisons allow for a fuller theorization of national identity.

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Nations of Flesh and Blood

Gender and Race in the National Imaginary

Nations are more than geopolitical bodies, more than collections of people and institutions within defined sovereign territories. Nations are discursive constructs, created and sustained, in part, through “stories, images, landscapes, scenarios, historical events, national symbols and rituals which… give meaning to the nation” (Hall 1992, 293). To borrow Anderson’s (1983) aphorism, nations are “imagined communities,” and in this communal imaginary the nation is almost inevitably gendered and racialized. That is, the icons, experiences, traits, and contexts central to notions of nation-ness come to be symbolically linked to individuals and groups with distinct gender and ethnoracial identities.¹ The imagined community is, in other words, a nation of flesh and blood. While such meanings are most clearly distilled in national archetypes such as Uncle Sam or Britannia, gender, race, and ethnicity often more subtly inflect narratives of national belonging by portraying certain characteristics, activities, and affiliations as natural, normal, and preferred.

Such gendered and racialized imaginings are of consequence because they both mirror and mold material relations. Groups which are politically and economically marginalized on the basis of such characteristics as race, ethnicity, gender, class, or sexuality, tend also to be marginalized within the national imaginary. Their contributions, their histories, and sometimes their very existence are symbolically muted or disparaged. This discursive marginalization in turn helps reproduce long-standing inequalities by reinforcing the Otherness of such groups, and thereby sustaining material and symbolic barriers to their full and equal participation in the life of the nation.

It is crucial, therefore, to place national imaginaries under the microscope to expose their ideological inner-workings. The ultimate goal of such an undertaking is to chip away at mechanisms of oppression which, for the most part, remain hidden in taken-for-granted understandings of and attachments to the nation. It would be virtually impossible for a single volume to address all of the interconnections between symbolic renderings of the nation and the material inequalities they reflect and reinforce. The more modest aim of this work is to examine the complex ways nations are discursively gendered and racialized, and the grounding of such discursive processes in material relations.

To this end, in this volume I examine the linkages between gender, race, ethnicity, and national identity in a range of texts drawn from four nations, Australia, Japan, the UK, and the US. The book has a broad empirical base, with data from sporting spectacles, television advertisements, letters to the editor, national broadsheet reporting, travel brochures, national museums, and living history sites. Each empirical study included here is cross-national in scope, comparing constructions of national identity in two or more of the nations under consideration. This comparative approach is intended not only to provide rich empirical detail on a variety of national settings, but to contribute to a fuller theorization of the dynamics of national identity in contemporary societies.

While the texts selected for analysis here are largely drawn from the realms of the mass media and popular culture, these are not the only realms implicated in the articulation of national identities. Indeed, until relatively recently, scholars of national identity have focused their analyses primarily on grand state spectacles and on the texts of high art and academia: monuments, rallies, coronations, paintings, operas, official histories, and so on. Although such texts have much to reveal, particularly about elite constructions of nation-ness, in reality most people have only limited contact with such official discourses of national identity—an occasional trip to a national monument, a coronation perhaps once in a lifetime. By contrast, we encounter more mundane expressions of national identity on a daily basis, as we affix a postage stamp to an envelope, glance at billboards on our morning commutes, or watch the sporting highlights on the evening news. Mundane texts such those analyzed in this volume provide a window on everyday experiences of national identity. It is such concrete and quotidian articulations of national identity that most powerfully connect individuals to their nations, giving them a sense of national belonging.

I wish to stress that the aim of this volume is not to identify “true,” “authentic,” or somehow fraudulent discourses of national identity. Rather, the volume provides insights into the dynamic construction of national identity at particular points in time, in particular sociohistorical contexts. The empirical data analyzed here were collected in all four nations over a ten year period, from 1996 to 2006. While all of these nations have experienced considerable social changes over this period, the earlier data are as relevant as the most recent data to an understanding of national identity, for discourses of national identity are inherently unstable; they are constantly in flux, being reshaped by changing social conditions. This being the case, any particular textual articulation of national identity is dated the moment it is generated. For even as it takes a concrete form (as a photograph, a newspaper article, a museum exhibit, and so on), it is incorporated into the larger, and ever-changing flow of discourses of national identity.

Furthermore, I acknowledge that all research accounts are inherently partial, in both senses of that word: both fragmentary and incomplete, and shaped by the values and experiences of the researcher. It would be presumptive to suggest that any single volume could provide a comprehensive account of discourses of national identity in the four nations examined here. Such is not my goal. Likewise, it would be disingenuous to claim that my own value commitments to social justice have played no part in this research. I have quite consciously focused on the ways dominant and subordinate social groups are portrayed in discourses of national identity. While I hoped to find less powerful groups being presented in sensitive and balanced ways, and did indeed find some examples of this, the case studies here suggest that in the four nations examined discourses of national identity are still largely gendered and racialized in ways that naturalize the continued subordination of women and ethnoracial minorities.

CONCEPTUALIZING NATIONAL IDENTITIES

Over the last two decades, in the context of accelerating globalization and rising ethnic nationalism, there has been increasing scholarly interest in the subject of national identity. As a broad index of this change, the catalog of the Library of Congress shows more than a tenfold increase in publications on national identity in the last twenty years.² Nonetheless, despite this increased scholarly attention, the field still lacks a rich and explicit definition of national identity.

Some authors seem to assume that national identity is a kind of national essence that exists in the very fabric of the nation’s land, culture, and people. Others conceptualize national identity as an individual’s affective ties to a (sometimes subnational) social collectivity based on attributes such as shared ethnicity, language, or territory. National identity is also frequently conflated with nationalism and nationality, concepts which are related to national identity, yet analytically distinct. While there are numerous and varied definitions of nationalism, the term is generally taken to mean a devotion to the nation, a belief in the primacy of nations, and the actions designed to protect and promote the interests of a nation. Nationality, on the other hand, is the legal status of citizenship which is granted to individuals by the state.³

I argue that national identities are most usefully conceptualized as widely circulating discourses of national belonging: representations of what a nation is and is not; of the nation’s character, its accomplishments, its defining traits, and its historical trajectory. These discourses of national identity are neither top-down constructs imposed on the masses by controlling elites, nor spontaneous outpourings of popular sentiment. Rather, they are continually and collectively constructed in a complex process of discursive exchange. Discourses of national identity are not immutable, univocal, or unidirectional; rather, they are fluid and flexible, and always in the process of articulation. In fact, while I use the term “national identity” for the sake of brevity, it is less than ideal to speak in the singular, for multiple and competing discourses of national identity inevitably coexist.

This conceptualization of national identity is informed by a broad and diverse scholarly literature. Researchers from the social sciences, humanities, international relations, and fields such as postcolonial studies, gender studies, and cultural studies among others, have made valuable contributions to the study of national identities and nationalisms. While any overview of this vast literature can be only cursory, it can serve to attune the reader to ongoing debates about the nature of national identities.

National Identities as Social Constructs

For present purposes, I begin my review with three groundbreaking volumes: Benedict Anderson’s (1983) Imagined Communities, Ernest Gellner’s (1983) Nations and Nationalism, and Eric Hobsbawm and Terrance Ranger’s (1983) The Invention of Tradition. Each volume introduced significant theoretical innovations which have shaped the way scholars understand national identities today.

Perhaps no single work has done more to reshape our understandings of national identity than Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. Anderson argues that nations are constituted, in part, through representational practices, principally through the written word. He notes that in Europe, for instance, improvements in print technology led to the standardization of national vernaculars, to the rise of such early mass commodities as newspapers and popular novels, and to increased literacy. These developments facilitated the formation of national-level identities by giving the disparate groups within the nation a common language and shared knowledge that allowed them to both participate more effectively in broader collective action and to imagine themselves as part of a national collectivity, an “imagined community.”

I share Anderson’s conviction that nations are discursively constructed. Although we will never meet all the members of our national community, we are in some sense bound together by our shared symbolic system. However, while Anderson focuses primarily on printed texts, I argue that discursive constructions of the imagined community can be found in a wide range of cultural productions, from advertisements and television dramas, to folk dances, football matches, parades, and public statuary, among others. Because not all people read newspapers and novels, it is crucial to consider the ways other cultural forms articulate national identity.⁴

Like Anderson, Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism highlights the importance of common linguistic and cultural systems to the formation of national identities. Gellner argues that nationalism is essentially a modern phenomenon which arose in the context of industrialization. The industrial mode of production, he explains, requires a docile and dependable pool of workers with certain basic skills. Workers in an industrialized society, at a minimum, must be able to understand and convey information essential to their employment tasks, so they need a common language. They must follow basic workplace rules and procedures, so they need to respect authority and accept hierarchy. Depending on the particular workplace, they may also need at least basic literacy and numeracy skills. Gellner argues that modern states founded a number of institutions aimed at creating productive workers and responsive citizens to serve their industrializing nations. First and foremost, mass public education programs ensured that everyone spoke, more or less, the same language. Furthermore, elite state-supported institutions of higher learning and the arts gave official endorsements to particular forms of high culture and knowledge, setting standards to which all in the nation were meant to aspire.

In Gellner’s view, then, the state (responding to the demands of industrialization) laid the foundations of nationalism by stamping the citizenry with a common vernacular, common values and aspirations, and common experiences. These commonalities forged a sense of national belonging, indeed forged the nation itself, which did not exist and effectively could not have existed previously. Gellner’s work highlights the extent to which nationalism and narratives of nation are underpinned by material relations. Likewise, a key theme in this volume is that discourses of national identity matter because they reflect, contribute to, and sometimes even challenge material inequalities. Gellner’s work can be criticized, however, for an overemphasis on top-down constructions of national culture and national identity. In his formulation, state elites have a virtual monopoly on discourses of national identity, and the masses uncritically accept such dictates. My work, by contrast, suggests that narratives of nation emerge out of more complex interactions between elite and non-elite actors.

Gellner’s work also presents the student of national identity with an illustration of the ways scholarly treatises themselves both mirror and contribute to gendered and racialized discourses of national identity, as he consistently refers to the national citizenry in the masculine, the “man” or “men” of the nation. In an oft quoted passage he writes, “A man without a nation defies the recognized categories and provokes revulsion…. A man must have a nationality as he must have a nose and two ears” (1983, 6). One is left to wonder just where women fit into Gellner’s conception of nations and nationalisms. This is not mere semantic hairsplitting, as some might argue. Rather, Gellner’s work provides just one illustration of the ways nations are gendered—casually, implicitly, subtly, but in ways that make it clear that men are the natural proprietors of the nation; women are, at best, an afterthought.

Hobsbawm and Ranger’s The Invention of Tradition has obvious overlaps with the work of both Gellner and Anderson. T...

Table of contents

• Routledge Research in Gender and Society
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Tables and Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Nations of Flesh and Blood
• Part I
• Part II
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index