Since the beginning of the twentieth century in the Spanish Basque Country, Basque nationalism has served as a unifying movement that encouraged women to participate in women’s associations. Women’s associations offered a metaspace in which public and private spheres overlap, where, women began to reconstruct meanings of nationalism and gender relations in distinct ways. As a result, the particular foci of these associations reflected each individual association’s specific understanding of gender relations and their relations to different interpretations of Basque nationalism. (...) This historical tradition has continued into the twenty-first century as women’s associations that are structured by distinct systems of gender relations provide a number of social services and educational services to promote gender equality. Through the examination of the metaspace of the women’s association Lanbroa, this article explores the ways in which the women’s movement and feminism have influenced the functioning of this association and the ways in which association members contest traditional Basque gender relations. (shrink)

This article discusses the link between women's involvement and identification with the so-called `Cyprus problem' and nationalism and how it may become problematic within the context of Cyprus's future accession to the European Union. The author argues for the need to analyse women's unexplored perspectives and feminist discourses, and that theoretical questions be addressed about Cypriot women's place within Europe.

Women-led political organizations that employ feminist and nationalist ideologies and operate as separate from, rather than associated with, male-dominated or patriarchal nationalist groups are both significant and under-explored areas of gender, feminist, and nationalism studies. This article investigates the feminist and nationalist vision of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA). RAWA exemplifies an effective political movement that intersects feminist and nationalist politics, where women are active, rather than symbolic, participants within the organization, and help to shape an (...) ideological construction of the Afghan nation. RAWA subsequently links its struggle for women's rights (through feminism) with its nationalist goals for democracy and secularism. This article also analyses RAWA's use of conservative nationalist methods to reproduce the future of the organization and to develop ‘citizens’ for its idealized nation, while countering existing patriarchal social and familial structures through a re-configuration of women's roles in the family, community, and nation. This inquiry is based on geographic and feminist examinations of RAWA's organizational structure, literature, and political goals obtained through content analyses of RAWA's political literature and through interviews with RAWA members and supporters living as refugees in Pakistan in the summer of 2003 and winter of 2004/05. RAWA is an instructive example of counter-patriarchal and nationalist feminist politics that questions patriarchal definitions of the nation and its citizenry by reconfiguring gender norms and redefining gender relations in the family as a mirror of the nation. (shrink)

This essay analyses how Australian postcolonial discourses, influenced by both Republicanism and Reconciliation, deploy the trope of woman to signify political change in both feminist and cultural debates about belonging, national legitimacy and sovereignty. I point out that white feminist rejection of the Queen in favour of embracing indigeneity is itself complicit with a history of ‘incorporating’ and assimilating indigeneity – a complicity that is sublimated in favour of a triumphant rejection of Imperial white womanhood. The essay looks at a (...) contemporary Australian novel, media depictions of Paul Keating's ‘embrace’ of Queen Elizabeth II (as a kind of captivity narrative), critical whiteness studies’ ‘rejection’ of the Queen and the misrecognition of Australia's distinct characteristics as a ‘settler culture’ (that incorporates indigeneity) within Australian feminist debates and claims of ‘transgression’ that are made for interracial relationships in Australia. (shrink)