On the notion of spectacle, part 2

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 identity is experienced and transmitted through spectacle, a theatrical performance of invented community:

"...the single power of nationalism since the late nineteenth century, I suggest, has been its capacity to organize a sense of popular, collective unity through the management of mass, national commodity spectacle. " (102)

In this sense, nationalism is lived through fetishism, and a pending task is to examine how women participate and resist male fetish rituals of national spectacle.

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