Facing marginalization in the political context of the “new South Africa” and lost social and economic privileges under a Black government, South African Indians articulate the need to keep up culture. In so doing, they simultaneously extend the isolation fostered through apartheid and utilize newly available political language to assert a partially disadvantaged minority voice in a distinctly gendered and racialized way. Echoing the spirit of nationalism in colonial India that figured the bourgeois Indian woman as the essence of the (...) national culture, South African Indians reinvent a feminine icon of Indian culture for distinctly political ends. At the individual level, gendered participants in this project of cultural nationalism enact, resist, and reshape its meanings, exposing both the limitations and the possibilities for South African national identities. (shrink)

This article explores the gendered construction of South Korean citizenship through the lens of North Korean settlers' experiences in South Korea. Drawing on ethnographic research, the author delves into the citizen-making process, critically examining the impact of gendered modernizing projects on North Korean settlers' daily lives. North Korean settlers are expected to get rid of their ethnic markers and transform themselves into modern citizen-subjects of South Korea. The author demonstrates that the overall frame of perception of North Korean settlers is (...) deeply gendered, with modernity as a powerful ethnic marker. The notion of ethnicized citizenship in the context of two Koreas offers a concrete account of how ethnicities are created and employed in stratified structure of citizenship. (shrink)

Current research on construction of the female body focuses on non-Hispanic women in the United States. The idealized Latina body, however, is rapidly becoming commodified and objectified in global popular culture. Using standardized and open-ended surveys and group and individual interviews, the author examines the negotiation of sociocultural ideals and body image by adolescents at the intersection of gender, race, and beauty. These young women hold racist beauty ideals but are flexible when judging the appearance of real-life women. They perceive (...) two competing or complementary prototypes of beauty, one white and one Latina. This study fills a gap in the literature on beauty and the body by examining a non-U.S. sample that does not fit into the usual Black-white dichotomy of race. (shrink)

This article explores chemical skin bleaching practices in urban Ghana to demonstrate the ways that particular racialized understandings of meaning are deployed in a contemporary postcolonial African society. I argue that the processes of racialization indexed by skin bleaching in Ghana must be contextualized within global racial formations; specifically, they can only be understood by examining the interlinked local and global ideologies and practices of race. In elaborating this argument, the essay also engages with contemporary African diaspora theorization that tends (...) to foreground diasporic identity and experience at the expense of contemporary continental processes. By bringing a postcolonial African society into a dialogue about race, processes of racialization, and the interlinked transnational construction of black identities, this essay offers one way out of the ambivalent relationship that I believe diaspora theorization has with Africa. (shrink)

This book provides a unique social science reading on the construction of nation, gender and sexuality and on the interactions among them. It includes international case studies from Indonesia, Ireland, former Yugoslavia, Liberia, Sri Lanka, Australia, the USA, Turkey, China, India and the Caribbean. The contributors offer both the masculine and feminine perspective, exposing how nations are comprised of sexed bodies, and exploring the gender ironies of nationalism and how sexuality plays a key role in nation building and in sustaining (...) national identity. The contributors conclude that control over access to the benefits of belonging to the nation is invariably gendered; nationalism becomes the language through which sexual control and repression is justified masculine prowess is expressed and exercised. Whilst it is men who claim the prerogatives of nation and nation building it is, for the most part, women who actually accept the obligation of nation and nation building. (shrink)

Dress serves as a discursive daily practice of gender, and this article explains the dress practices of Bosnian Muslim refugee women living in Vermont. These dress practices tend toward elaborate, carefully cultivated styles for hair, makeup, and dress. Based on participant observation, in-depth interviews, and secondary historical sources, the authors seek to explain the meanings and practice of these dress practices. They argue that gendered dress practices reflect agentic processes that are situated within the flow of time and are rooted (...) in relational processes that occur at the macrostructural level of history and nation and at the micro world of social interaction and lived experience. (shrink)

Home and Harem is an interdisciplinary study of how travel shaped ideas about culture and nation in 19th century imperialist England and colonial India.