emphasized the agency and acts of people, and the
materiality of violence, rather than the active or
abstract lessons of history and rules of geopolitics.
Like that of Thrift (2000), then, this position
argues for the need to think of bodies as sites of
performance in their own right rather than simply
simple surfaces for discursive inscription.
Discourses do not simply write themselves
directly onto the surface of bodies as if those
bodies offered blank surfaces of equal topography.
Instead these concepts and ways of being are
taken up and used by people who make meaning
of them in the different global contexts in which
they operate. This will bring women and other
marginalized figures back into the sight of criti-
cal geopolitics. Although women’s bodies are
inherently caught up in international relations,
this is often at mundane or everyday levels, and
so they are not written into the texts of political
discourse. Women’s places in international poli-
tics tend to be not as decision-makers but as
international labourers and migrants, as images
in international advertising, and as ‘victims’ to
be protected by international peacekeepers.
However, this does not mean that women have
no role in the recreation of international orders,
simply that their agency is hidden from the tra-
ditional gaze of geopolitics. As Enloe argues in
her attempt to make feminist sense of interna-
tional politics, ‘if we employ only the conven-
tional, ungendered compass to chart international
politics, we are likely to end up mapping a
landscape peopled only by men, mostly elite
men’ (1989: 1).
This is not to suggest that to understand the
nation and international it is necessary to abandon
discourse; instead, it is necessary to see it in a
broader way that is less dominated by represen-
tation alone and more attuned to actual practices.
Political geographies can be regarded as emerg-
ing from the textualized practices and discourses
that actually draw people in as subjects. Women,
caught up in different forms of international traf-
fic, are especially vulnerable to racialization and
eroticization of their bodies and labour. National
security defines women’s bodies as requiring
protection, but this is often defined from a mas-
culinist position. Women’s bodies become quite
literally a part of making ‘the international’
(Pettman, 1991; 1996); for example, in the recent
conflict in Kosovo, NATO went to war to protect
some of the most patriarchal kinship structures
in Europe.
A culturally informed but nevertheless still
resolutely political take on nation and inter-
national relations could consider the practices
and institutional locales of international relations
and nations. This would involve continuedengagement with the discourses and narratives
which structure these geographies (it is important
to deconstruct common sense, to stop it from
working without thought), but would also go fur-
ther to see how these discourses actually work in
everyday life and how they make subjects of
people.
Thus, for example, an understanding of how
the media work to incorporate people as subjects
would require examination of the representa-
tional content of the media texts but also the
‘content of the form’, the ways in which people
are drawn into the media’s representation of the
world to become complicit with it – how they
become active political citizens. Certain media
institutions, such as the Reader’s Digest(Sharp,
2000b), actively constitute the reader’s identity
as an American citizen through the form of
address of its articles in addition to the actual
topics being discussed. This structures a sense of
what all ‘good’ American citizens must know:
‘What is being planned for you?’, ‘Are we worthy
of our destiny?’ (Sharp, 2000b). This ties the
individual reader into the narratives and identi-
ties of international and national politics in
exactly the ways theorized by Billig and Shotter
mentioned earlier. In addition to the representa-
tions of the world, here there is also a sense of
how the readers are supposed to make sense of
these global geographies: how they are to incor-
porate them into their daily lives in the constant
reproduction of self as a national citizen. Of
course there is still the question of the extent to
which people will follow these ‘instructions’.
Sparke (1998) works the relationship between
representation and practices through the layers of
his analysis of the construction of the politi-
cal subject, Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma
bomber. McVeigh, Sparke argues, was the sub-
ject of American discourses of inside–outside, of
the safety and value of American culture and
identity, and of the threats from those others
beyond the boundary who sought the destruction
of America. McVeigh was interpolated into these
discursive practices as a consumer of American
culture throughout his life but also most
extremely in his experience in the military in the
Gulf War. He was in fact awarded a medal for his
actions in the conflict and so regarded himself as
a patriot. On his return to the US, McVeigh
apparently developed a sense that America had
lost its way. He was a loner, feeling marginalized
by the dominant society which, he thought,
was unable to see the rot that had set in.
Reconstructed through the narratives of warrior
masculinity articulated in Rambo films, this
subjectivity merely reinforced his sense of
patriotism. With the representations of AmericanGENDER IN A POLITICAL AND PATRIARCHAL WORLD 4813029-ch25.qxd 03-10-02 11:04 AM Page 481