Women give birth to babies, but according to patriarchal myth men give birth to nations. As the eminent political theorist Carole Pateman observed some time ago, literature is full of stories of men giving birth to nations, political orders, or political life itself, an explicitly male appropriation of procreative power. In the new discursive order of modernity, political creativity belongs to masculinity.
Nation, Memory, Myth: Gallipoli and the Australian imaginary by Steve Vizard
Melbourne University Press, $39.99 pb, 335 pp
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Non-fiction
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September 1986, no. 84
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