Until recently, few scholars outside of Ecuador studied the country’s history. In the past few years, however, its rising tide of indigenous activism has brought unprecedented attention to this small Andean nation. Even so, until now the significance of gender issues to the development of modern Indian-state relations has not often been addressed. As she digs through Ecuador’s past to find key events and developments that explain the simultaneous importance and marginalization of indigenous women in Ecuador today, Erin O’Connor usefully deploys gender analysis to illuminate broader relationships between nation-states and indigenous communities. O’Connor begins her investigations by examining the multilayered links between gender and Indian-state relations in nineteenth-century Ecuador. Disentangling issues of class and culture from issues of gender, she uncovers overlapping, conflicting, and ever-evolving patriarchies within both indigenous communities and the nation’s governing bodies. She finds that gender influenced sociopolitical behavior in a variety of ways, mediating interethnic struggles and negotiations that ultimately created the modern nation. Her deep research into primary sources—including congressional debates, ministerial reports, court cases, and hacienda records—allows a richer, more complex, and better informed national history to emerge. Examining gender during Ecuadorian state building from “above” and “below,” O’Connor uncovers significant processes of interaction and agency during a critical period in the nation’s history. On a larger scale, her work suggests the importance of gender as a shaping force in the formation of nation-states in general while it questions recountings of historical events that fail to demonstrate an awareness of the centrality of gender in the unfolding of those events.

A Nation of Women provides a history of the significance of gender in Lenape/Delaware encounters with Europeans, and a history of women in these encounters.

Groundbreaking historical scholarship on the complex attitudes toward gender and sexual roles in Native American culture, with a new preface and supplemental bibliography Prior to the arrival of Europeans in the New World, Native Americans across the continent had developed richly complex attitudes and forms of expression concerning gender and sexual roles. The role of the "berdache," a man living as a woman or a woman living as a man in native societies, has received recent scholarly attention but represents just one of many such occurrences of alternative gender identification in these cultures. Editors Sandra Slater and Fay A. Yarbrough have brought together scholars who explore the historical implications of these variations in the meanings of gender, sexuality, and marriage among indigenous communities in North America. Essays that span from the colonial period through the nineteenth century illustrate how these aspects of Native American life were altered through interactions with Europeans. Organized chronologically, Gender and Sexuality in Indigenous North America, 1400–1850 probes gender identification, labor roles, and political authority within Native American societies. The essays are linked by overarching examinations of how Europeans manipulated native ideas about gender for their own ends and how indigenous people responded to European attempts to impose gendered cultural practices at odds with established traditions. Many of the essays also address how indigenous people made meaning of gender and how these meanings developed over time within their own communities. Several contributors also consider sexual practice as a mode of cultural articulation, as well as a vehicle for the expression of gender roles. Representing groundbreaking scholarship in the field of Native American studies, these insightful discussions of gender, sexuality, and identity advance our understanding of cultural traditions and clashes that continue to resonate in native communities today as well as in the larger societies those communities exist within.

This pathbreaking book documents the transformation of reproductive practices and politics on Indian reservations from the late nineteenth century to the present, integrating a localized history of childbearing, motherhood, and activism on the Crow Reservation in Montana with an analysis of trends affecting Indigenous women more broadly. As Brianna Theobald illustrates, the federal government and local authorities have long sought to control Indigenous families and women's reproduction, using tactics such as coercive sterilization and removal of Indigenous children into the white foster care system. But Theobald examines women's resistance, showing how they have worked within families, tribal networks, and activist groups to confront these issues. Blending local and intimate family histories with the histories of broader movements such as WARN (Women of All Red Nations), Theobald links the federal government's intrusion into Indigenous women's reproductive and familial decisions to the wider history of eugenics and the reproductive rights movement. She argues convincingly that colonial politics have always been--and remain--reproductive politics. By looking deeply at one tribal nation over more than a century, Theobald offers an especially rich analysis of how Indigenous women experienced pregnancy and motherhood under evolving federal Indian policy. At the heart of this history are the Crow women who displayed creativity and fortitude in struggling for reproductive self-determination.

Women Speak Nation underlines the centrality of gender within the ideological construction of nationalism. The volume locates itself in a rich scholarship of feminist critique of the relationship between political, economic, cultural, and social formations and normative gendered relations to try and understand the cross-currents in contemporary feminist theorizing and politics. The chapters question the gendered depictions of the nation as Hindu, upper caste, middle class, heterosexual, able-bodied Indian mother. The volume also brings together interviews and short essays from practitioners and activists who voice an alternative reimagining of the nation. The book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of gender, politics, modern South Asian history, and cultural studies.

For almost half a century, the Miss India competition has been a prominent feature of Indian popular culture, influencing, over time, the conventional standard for female beauty. As India participates increasingly in a global economy, that standard is gradually being shaped by forces beyond the country’s borders. Through the unexpected lens of the 2003 beauty pageant, Susan Dewey’s Making Miss India Miss World examines what feminine beauty has come to mean in a country transformed by recent political, economic, and cultural developments.

Nira Yuval-Davis provides an authoritative overview and critique of writings on gender and nationhood, presenting an original analysis of the ways gender relations affect and are affected by national projects and processes. In Gender and Nation Yuval-Davis argues that the construction of nationhood involves specific notions of both `manhood′ and `womanhood′. She examines the contribution of gender relations to key dimensions of nationalist projects - the nation′s reproduction, its culture and citizenship - as well as to national conflicts and wars, exploring the contesting relations between feminism and nationalism. Gender and Nation is an important contribution to the debates on citizenship, gender and nationhood. It will be essential reading for academics and students of women′s studies, race and ethnic studies, sociology and political science.