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

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.     

A 'Female Columbus' in 1887 America: Marking new social territory {1}

As a self-styled 'female Columbus', E. Catherine Bates took a transcontinental journey across North America with a woman companion in the late 1880s and, on her return to England, published A Year in the Great Republic . This paper, following critical theory approaches to the study of travel writing, explores the ways in which several of Bates's many-layered social identities as a woman of the British e lite class came to the fore in her travel narrative. I argue that Bates constructed her narrative primarily around her shifting gender identities- as 'feminine' and 'feminist'- and suggest that imperialistic writing was less apparent because she was travelling to a place that had an 'empire-to-empire' rather than a 'colony-to-empire', relationship to Britain during its 'Age of Empire'. In this paper I am searching for a middle ground between what I have termed 'modernist' interpretations of women's travel writing and the more recent post-structural interpretations. I make the case that Victorian women travellers' revisionist commentary on gender roles, as well as their observations of domestic scenes, should remain in focus as we continue to mark them for historical study.     

The China factor in US alliances in East Asia and the Asia Pacific 1

Any discussion of the United States' alliances in East Asia and the Pacific should include an understanding of the role that China plays in regional security in general, and the influence of such a role on the alliance system in particular. The 'China factor' in the contemporary US alliance system can be understood by asking the following questions: (1) what are China's perceptions of and concerns regarding the US alliance system as a whole and regarding specific bilateral military alliances of the US?; (2) where does China figure in the American post-Cold War worldview, and what role does the United States itself see its alliances playing in relation to China?; (3) to what extent are the current bilateral alliances of the US directed against China, in the view of US allies; and (4) how might the reshaping of the international security environ ment following the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States affect China's perceptions and attitudes towards future alliance developments?     

In These Days of Female Evangelists and Hallelujah Lasses: Women Preachers and the Redefinition of Gender Roles in the Churches in Late Nineteenth-Century Australia

The presence of two women amongst the seventeen international revivalists who visited Australia in the period 1863 and 1912 has been seen as unremarkable by religious historians, or read as evidence that the Christian churches were outside, or perhaps even in advance of, the nineteenth-century struggle for women's rights. However, only representations of their performance remain, representations which, this article argues, attempted to normalize both their presence and their message. A more critical reading of contemporary reports would suggest that the way in which female evangelists were reported should be seen as intrinsic to the attempt by church leaders to contain and control women's expanding role. The success of their endeavours rendered female evangelists largely invisible but the lengths to which they went to discount the challenge the female evangelists mounted to conventional constructions of gender, provide evidence of its power.