Gendered Nations: Nostalgia, development and territory in Ecuador {1}

Abstract

Drawing upon original substantive research, the paper argues for a consideration and analysis of the imagined geographies of gendered nations. Drawing upon Anne McClintock's work on temporality, the article proposes that a gendered spatiality underlies discourses of nationhood. Focusing particularly on national press and government reports over recent years in Ecuador, it is suggested that women appear in the national discourses around nostalgia, development and territory. While previous work has frequently noted the ambivalent position of women in the modern project of nationhood, the way in which this ambivalence is structured around place (and also significantly around 'race' and class) has not received as much attention. Geographers and feminists have not been as attuned as they might to the complex gendered imaginative geographies of the nation, and the multiple ways in which the nation constitutes gendered subjectivities.