University as Nation-State: Transnational Remedies for Structures, Borders, and Binaries that Perpetuate the Gender Inequities Inherent in Globalization, Militarization, and the “Myth of Disposable Women”

• In Event: The University as Nation-State: Dismantling Boundaries through Border-crossings and Agency

Abstract

This paper investigates how gendered boundaries and practices in academia replicate nation-state conditions that perpetuate the gender asymmetries necessary to support globalization and militarization. It also proposes transnational feminist strategies that in academia can challenge the “nation-state’s taken for granted status” and disrupt the naturalization of “reactive and regressive” (Mohanty) either/or boundary setting. This paper also builds on Seema Kazi’s finding in Gender, Militarization, and the Modern Nation-State that Kashmiri “women pay an essentially political price for a military occupation centered on the humiliation and emasculation of men” to investigate how gendered boundary-making in academia also risks making the middle person in the hierarchy—female or male—complicitous with “nation-state” behaviors that, without the intervention of transnational strategies, keep people apart and seemingly pitted against each other, preventing institutional change.

Presenter

• Jody Lisberger, University of Rhode Island