Anti-colonial Feminist Ramblings About Everything and Anything

Taylor, Diana. Dissapearing Acts. Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina's "Dirty War." Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. Taylor's book is key to my research about militarism and neoliberalism as gendered spectacles, as it does several things at the same time: 1. It outlines a definition of spectacle as a central component of national imaginations. Spectacles offer universal canonical narratives for interpreting specific historical situations, they present a version of the world as inevitable and natural, and they interpellate the audiences in a way that it shapes what are the viable subjectivities in that context. Spectacle, performativity and theatricality are not terms opposed here to "reality," but rather have very real effects. Who is in control of the production of national public spectacles is what matters, who holds the power to manipulate desire and control the gaze. 2. It describes the ways that masculinity is performed in the contex...

McClintock, Anne. " No Longer in a Future Heaven": Gender, Race and Nationalism in Dangerous Liaisons. Gender, Nation and Postcolonial Perspectives. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1997. "All nationalisms are gendered; all are invented; and all are dangerous —" (89) McClintock argues that nationalisms as historical practices are invariably built in the institutionalization of gender difference and that the nation is prefigured by the image of the family in order to legitimize power relations as natural. For example, when militarism and authoritarian regimes draw on notions of father's authority. Moreover, she describes how national time was domesticated under the European Enlightment, a process in which "history, especially national and imperial history, took on a character of a spectacle." (92) National time projected onto national space created national history in the shape of a spectacle. McClintock is convinced that national collective...