From Gender to Nation

The essays in this volume consider the significance of nation and gender in the context of post 1989 transitions in the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia and in the context of post partition India.
The texts critique the ways in which narratives of nationhood and womanhood naturalize and essentialize difference and hierarchy.
The authors explore uses of sexualized/gendered imagery in defining the space of the nation (e.g. feminized landscapes and battlefields) and sexualized/gendered metaphors of state fatherhood and motherhood in defining the distribution of power within that space.
The particular histories of nationalism and partition are different in the countries involved, but commonalities in the narrative structures, state and nation-building strategies, patriarchal patterns of control, and mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion are striking.
This is particularly so with respect to the ways in which exclusive national identities are constituted through gendered representations of the nation and its members.

Rada Iveković is a professor, philosopher, Indologist, and writer.
Among her numerous research interests, the most prominent are Comparative Philosophy (Asian Philosophy, particularly Indian, and Western), Feminist Theory and Feminist Philosophy as well as Political Philosophy.
Since 2004 she is a Program Director at Collège international de philosophie (Paris); since 2003 Professor in the Department of Sociology at University Jean Monnet - St.Etienne
Recent publications (in English)
2005: The Fiction of Gender Constructing the Fiction of Nation: On How Fictions Are Normative, and Norms Produce Exceptions. Anthropological Yearbook of European Cultures 2005 (Gender and Nation in South Eastern Europe), 19-38.
2005: : Borders and Partitions : Exception as Space and Time (Abstract for the conference Polemos, Stasis ... War, Civil War, 24-27 June 2005, National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan: Center for Humanities and Social Theory).

Director, Institute for the Humanities, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA, and Professor of Politics, specializing in Democratic Theory, Gender and Nation, Sovereignty and Citizenship, and the Politics of National Identity in a comparative perspective, with emphasis on Southeastern Europe.
She is the author of "Power, Process, and Popular Sovereignty in democratic theory", and "'Our Women'/ 'Their Women': Symbolic Boundaries, Territorial Markers, and Violence in the Balkans," reprinted in Women, Culture, and Society: A Reader, (Kendall/Hunt Publishing, Co., 2001).