Well, after giving it the old college try, I think posting former papers from college in this format is way too much bother! If I refer to them in future reviews or Firestarters, I’ll upload them here as single, very long pages, rather than a kabillion short blog entries. That being said, as promised, here…
Possible Solutions It is a simple but appealing answer to say all that needs to be done to solve the problems delineated and explored above is to restructure the societies in the readings. Were this to occur, then by definition women and minorities would not be repressed any longer, but would instead be hegemonically considered…
In yet another essay which discusses violence against women, Kumar notes that it is the deliberately poor definition of what constitutes rape and wife-beating that allows it to continue in India, despite laws forbidding it. She notes furthermore that women are often blamed for the attacks against them due to their “easy virtue” or due…
It would make sense the society of the newly established nation-state would incorporate both its previous, ‘historical memory’ based power within itself, whether theoretical, religious, or physical, and that the struggle for power should occur between the varying discourses presented by each of these types of power. Also, by their very nature within the society…
Thus the current fundamentalist and nationalist mythologies insidiously create and define themselves in an essentialist fashion because they are needed in order to define boundaries and categories, to oppositionally create classes and hierarchies based on power through repression. Unfortunately these politicized religions frequently maintain much the same hegemonic thought patterns, albeit with different dominant players,…
These concepts of Anderson’s also seem valid today within the readings, and easily ‘borrowable’ in service of fundamentalism as well as nationalism. It is this very definition of time, in fact, that allows the use of politicized religion to bolster a nation’s beliefs and confirm its collective hegemonies, to claim a consistent religious or social…
In his book Imagined Communities, Anderson discusses the imagining and rise of nationalism. He lists several ideological changes that allowed the creation of this concept. First is the loss of the ‘sacred silent languages,’ which held together religious communities that spanned continents. These languages were believed to consist of meaningful symbols of essential truths, and…
It is fascinating to note the very same women who courageously and tirelessly worked side by side with men to bring their nation into existence are the ones who are now being, in a very real sense, colonized by the system now in power. In this particular case a fundamentalist perspective seems to be conflated…
One can also see how little effort it takes within the holy texts to generalize these recurrent motifs, and define as sacred the hypostatised cultural norm: ‘Man.’ This religious symbol of Man allows the male-defined community to create and worship itself, and justifies a collective effervescence that seems to always exclude women. Women may contribute…
Fundamentalism Why is there a growing fundamentalist movement in a wide variety of disparate cultures today? Why are women almost invariably the mediums on which this fundamentalism is expressed? It is not surprising to discover a reductionist and/or essentialist attitude towards women within cultures and societies wherein fundamentalist beliefs are gaining hold. In many, if…