This article critiques Australia's official discourse of multiculturalism, with its rhetoric of ‘celebrating cultural diversity’ and tolerance, by looking at the way in which this discourse suppresses the ambivalent positioning of ‘Asians’ in Australian social space. The discourse of multiculturalism and the official, economically motivated desire for Australia to become ‘part of Asia’ has resulted in a relatively positive valuation of ‘Asia’ and ‘Asians’, an inversion from the racist exclusionism of the past. Against the self-congratulatory stance of this discourse, this (...) article signals the operation of ambivalence at two levels: at the structural level, insofar as it points to the inherent contradictions in the idea of the ‘multicultural nation’ and its fantasy of a harmonious ‘unity-in-diversity’, and at the subjective level, in the sense that the ethos of multiculturalism doesn't erase the ambivalent relations of acceptance/rejection between majority and minority subjects. Several instances of such ambivalence pertaining to the positioning and representation of the ‘Asian’ woman are given. (shrink)

Focusing on discourses and practices of identity in an Italian organization in London, this article examines the relationship between the construction of the identity of places and the construction of terrains of belonging. Various forms of cultural practices that mark out spatial and identity boundaries for the London Italian population are discussed in relation to the deployment of gender and ethnicity. Advancing a corporeal approach to identity formation, it is argued that displays of the Italian presence in London operate through (...) the repetition of regulatory norms that produces the effect of materialization of cultural belonging through the ethnicizing and gendering of individual bodies. Gender and ethnicity are deeply embedded in one another and their entwinement is to be understood as the outcome of their construction along similar bodily lines. Also, the author shows that gender and ethnicity are mutually dependent on each other for their construction; imperatives of gender serve to stabilize a fluctuating and indeterminate ethnic culture, while ethnic conventions naturalize the different positions men and women occupy in social life. (shrink)

This article critiques the way in which three feminist authors reinscribe traditional liberal values when seeking new ways of thinking about the nation. It suggests that in rejecting affective or embodied metaphors, such as community or kinship, the authors fall into the trap of reinscribing values which have historically excluded women and ethnic or racial minorities from full participation in the polity. The article argues for a rejection of the affect/rationality model which underpins these arguments and suggests that new metaphors (...) for the nation will emerge as those who have been excluded claim a place in the polity. (shrink)