Sexing Political Identities-Nationalism as Heterosexism.pdf

and peace-loving, women have throughout history supported and participated
in conicts involving their communities (Jones 1997). They have provided
essential support in their servicing roles (feeding, clothing, and nursing
combatants), worked in underground movements, passed information and
weapons, organized their communities for military action, taken up arms
themselves, and occasionally led troops into battle. In short, women must be
recognized not only as symbols and victims, but also and signicantly, as
agents in nationalisms and wars. As both agents and victims (not mutually
exclusive categories), women are increasingly visible in processes of political
conict.
As agents, women have slowly but steadily increased their presence in
formal and informal political arenas. Always the primary activists at the
grassroots level, women are now more visible as these movements themselves
acquire visibility. But women’s agency in service to heterosexist nationalisms
is inherently problematic, as it necessarily entails the reproduction of hierarchical
difference, both within and between groups. 18 To be effective, women
are drawn toward masculinist strategies, including the denigration of ‘others.’
Hence, even as political agency transgresses gender ‘givens’ and may
empower particular women, in the context of heterosexism it also reproduces
difference and hierarchy. The complexity is captured in Basu’s description of
‘the three most powerful orators of Hindu nationalism’:
At their most benign, {Vijayraje} Scindia, {Uma} Bharati, and {Sadhvi}
Rithambara render Muslim women invisible; more often they seek to annihilate
Muslim women. Yet all three women have found within Hindu nationalism
a vehicle for redressing their experiences of gender inequality and for
transgressing sex-typed roles. 19 (1993: 31)
As victims, moreover, women have suffered new levels of violence in
recent wars. In the rst place, in contrast to earlier wars fought with different
technologies, women and children have become those most likely to lose
their lives in militarized conicts. 20 More generally, insofar as women are
responsible for maintaining homes, families, and their well-being, when
societies are militarized, the costs – economic, environmental, emotional – are
borne disproportionately by women. Finally, while rape has long been a
weapon of war, it has recently been deployed as a weapon of genocide. Here
women’s bodies are the battleeld.
For reasons alluded to earlier, women have historically been denied the
homosocial political bonding of public sphere activities. Although this is
slowly changing, women rarely appear in combatant or leadership roles and
in the top echelons of political power. Because conventional accounts of
nationalism and war focus on these activities, it is not surprising that women
appear only as ‘an off-stage chorus to a basically male drama’ (Enloe 1987:
529). Contemporary analysts continue to understand war as a ‘basically male
V. Spike Peterson/Sexing political identities 51