The author, Anne McClintock, criticizes the sexism of modern nationalism in her essay, titled, “Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism and the Family”. McClintock argues that, “All nationalisms are gendered .. All nations depend on powerful constructions of gender (61) and she also investigates how national political institutions and systems of cultural representation help support the “institutionalization of gender difference”(61). Mohanty says something very similar, “The assumption of women as an already constituted and coherent group with identical interests and desires, regardless of class, ethnic or racial location, implies a notion of gender or sexual difference or even patriarchy which can be applied universally and cross-culturally”(64). How we put women into categories of having similar interests or desires goes hand in hand with what McClintock is saying how our system that we are living in helps support gender difference.
McClintock argues that nations are created through the images of family saying that the word “nation” derives from the root “natio-,” which means, “to be born,” (63). She views family as the picture of a nation and describes nation as “the national family of man,” which institutes a “social hierarchy” where the subordination of women and children to men is naturalized (64). With this the man is favored and the…show more content… Women are taken as a unified 'powerless' group prior to the historical and political analysis in question (68).” Because of this women are placed in this “family” bubble and Mohanty agrees with that when she states, 'Women' are now placed in the context of the family, or in the workplace, or within religious networks, almost as if these systems existed outside the relations of women with other women, and women with men