Gender and nationalism : the subaltern woman in a war commemorative museum.

• Main Author: Chua, Min Yi.
• Other Authors: School of Humanities and Social Sciences
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2013
• Subjects: DRNTU::Social sciences
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/51629
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This paper examines the possible relationships between gender and nation in the context of a physical war commemorative landscape, Memories at Old Ford Factory. Drawing on the methods of textual analysis, interviews with visitors and reading other ethnographic data, I explore the gendered portrayals of war within the site, and the specific ways in which women have either been removed or stereotypically represented. Using Gramsci’s notion of the ‘subaltern’ (later adapted by postcolonial theorists), I argue that the state assumes and enforces the subaltern status of women within its national narratives regarding the Second World War and the Japanese Occupation. Gender, then, appears to be dominated and overwritten by nationalism, and the gendered subaltern subject becomes merely a representational category in the hegemonic patriarchal representational system.