Learning about Gender, War, and Nationalism from Movies

Abstract

Gender, Nationalism, and War: Conflict on the Movie Screen. By Matthew Evangelista. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 304 pp., $32.99 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-521-17354-4). Where feminists saw an obvious linkage between women's empowerment and peace, Matthew Evangelista's latest book contributes to the growing literature on how gender relations and armed conflict configure in different settings without any simple or predictable results. Drawing inspiration from Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas , he explores gender dynamics within nationalist conflicts, noting that some women resist nationalism in the name of their own liberation, while others embrace conflict and the opportunities it can create for them. In Evangelista's words, “The premise of this book is that we can learn much about the relationship that Virginia Woolf first explored in the 1930s between gender, nationalism, and war by watching movies” (p. 3). Noting that much of the early literature on gender and conflict ignored the particularities of nationalist struggles, he uses the Algerian war of independence, ethnic conflict in Bosnia, the two wars over Chechen secession, and the Quebecois nationhood campaigns as case studies. In each, he considers Woolf's assertions about the relationship between women and nationalism, using her observations as touchstones throughout the text. Where many scholars draw on films to support classroom teaching, or use them for purely pedagogic purposes (Drezner 2011), there are few IR scholars who analyze film as data. Those who do look at audio-visual materials frequently look at the ways that their story lines echo ongoing concerns in IR theory and political practice, as well as the political economy of popular culture products themselves (see the edited volumes: Weldes 2003; Nexon and Neumann 2006; Kiersey and Neumann in press, 2013). Gender, Nationalism, and War does something quite different, taking a position halfway between a pedagogical approach and narrative or discursive analyses. Evangelista does not use the films as …