reproduced the notion of America’s manifest
destiny as ‘land of the free’. These different social
locations converge in the everyday constructions
of national identity.
Here then was the creation of a particular
geopolitical model. A particular image of the
USSR was created which had direct conse-
quences for the nature of US identity and what
was expected of its citizens. Like the orient to
Said’s (1978) occident, then, this international
representation told us more about how those who
created the representations imagined America
than it did the material realities of the Soviet
Union. Into this alternate space was projected all
that America refused to see in itself. The bound-
aries between inside and outside were ‘the result
of domesticating the self through the transfer of
differences within society to the inscription of
differences between society’ (Campbell, 1990:
273). As a result, then, the creation of a clearly
defined space of difference is also ‘about stifling
domestic dissent; the presence of external threats
provides the justification for limiting political
activity within the bounds of the state’ (Dalby,
1991: 172). The practices of security are inherent
in the production of a coherent sense of national
identity (Dalby, 1990a). There is an inherent link
then between the scales of international and
national in that the images of threats and dangers
outside the nation offer a reason for national
unity to resist them and, in their negative image,
project a positive alternative to which the
national citizens should aspire.
This suggests then that fairly mundane, every-
day actions and identities might be significant to
the construction and reconstruction of the nation.
Feminist theorist Judith Butler (1990) offers
inspiration here. She considers the ways in which
gendered identities are reproduced through the
repetition of mundane activities rather than there
being any essentialist biological definition of
gender, or any stable identity established through
social construction. It is the deed and not the doer
that is of significance. The notion of a coherent
and independent identity – the subject – is the
effect of constant performance. On the whole, she
argues, repetition works to reinforce the norm of
heterosexuality. It is only through the constant
repetition of heterosexualized actions that the
illusion of a heterosexual norm can emerge.
Minor practices – advertising images, soap opera
storylines, pictures of families on office desks –
unselfconsciously reproduce heterosexuality as
the norm, which queer politics resists. From a
mass of possible sexual performances emerges
a conceptual map on which clear and distinct
lines can be drawn dividing ‘straight’ from ‘gay’,
‘normal’ from ‘deviant’.^1This has direct implications for the notion of
border formation and political identity in politi-
cal geography and related fields, in that it would
appear that we are interested in ‘the constitution
of political community, not something that takes
place within it’ (Mouffe, quoted in Yuval-Davis,
1997: 73). Following Butler, the boundary of one
nation-state and the next is not the innocent
marker of the spatial extents of different cultural
groupings but is instead integral to the construc-
tion of the identities it nominally illustrates.
International relations, then, is not so much about
protecting an identity which already exists, but
about constantly creating and recreating identi-
ties. Through the repeated insistence that those
outside the national boundary – those who
occupy other spaces – are different or other,
national identity can be reproduced as a coherent
and universal form. National identity, rather than
something that is retrieved from the past or pro-
tected from modernity, is in fact the effect of the
modern practice of national rituals of reading
national newspapers, singing national songs,
waving flags at sports events and so on. It is the
unthinking reproduction of these ideas that
ensures the maintenance of distinct national
identities (Billig, 1995).
This more cultural approach to national identity
illustrates that the incredible power of national
identity stems from its mundaneness, or banality.
Shotter and Billig suggest that it is not the
spectacular or conscious acts which underpin
national identity but the minor events. They
argue that the enunciation of the definite article
in certain terms and phrases heard each day
assumes the nation’s boundaries:
It points to the homeland: but while we, the readers or
listeners, understand the pointing, we do not follow it
with our consciousness – it is a ‘seen but unnoticed’
feature of our everyday discourses. (Shotter and Billig,
quoted in Thrift, 2000: 384)This challenge to the public–private divide
suggests a broadening of the possibilities of
what politics is and where it occurs. This has
been used to define the political away from the
other events of daily life which, in contrast, are
assumed to be apolitical. Much of the political
map is thus hidden from analysis that focuses on
the formal acts of political citizenship or on the
pronouncements of political leaders. Theorists
influenced by Gramsci (1971) highlight the power
of culture and have stressed the importance of
the civic sphere in the maintenance of state
power. For Gramsci (1971: 245), it is here that
a complex set of cultural dominances forms
the norms regulating social behaviour, the
creation of hegemonic values. Hegemony isGENDER IN A POLITICAL AND PATRIARCHAL WORLD 4753029-ch25.qxd 03-10-02 11:04 AM Page 475