Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest Anne McClintock (1995, 352) states, “All nationalisms are gendered, all are invented and all are dangerous.” McClintock clarifies that as “imagined communities” (Anderson,  2006) nations are not simply phantasmagoria but rather systems of cultural representation whereby people come to imagine a shared experience of identification with an extended community. Nations are historical practices through which social difference is both invented and performed. “Nationalism becomes as a result, radically constitutive of people’s identities through social contests that are frequently violent and always gendered” (McClintock, 1995, 353). Despite rhetorical assertions regarding the nation-state’s investment in equality, no nation in the world gives the same access to rights and resources to women as to men. While subsumed symbolically into the body politic, women are excluded from direct action as national citizens. “Nationalism is thus constituted from the very beginning as a gendered discourse and cannot be understood without a theory of gender power” (McClintock, 1995, 355). In light of the fact that all nations are gendered, just as all feminisms are inevitably nationalized, Caren Kaplan and Inderpal Grewal (2006, 66–81) propose the term “transnational feminism” as an appropriate replacement for the contentious, totalizing, and homogenizing concepts of “global” or “international” feminism. “Transnational” as a term is useful only when it signals attention to uneven and dissimilar circuits of culture and capital. Through such critical recognition, the links among patriarchies, colonialisms, racisms, and feminisms become more apparent and available for critique or appropriation. The history of the term “international,” by contrast, is quite different. Internationalism as a concept is based on existing configurations of nation-states as discrete and sovereign entities (Kaplan and Grewal, 1999). The concept of transnational feminism marks critical practices that bring the economic and governmental into cultural criticism. Such practices enable the interrogation, subversion, and disruption of globalizing capital. Feminist scholarship that is relational rather than comparative helps us critique the material conditions that construct and put in motion the production of feminist knowledge.
The Zionist narrative has multiple points of textual origins, and its interpellation—or production of agencies and subjects—is doubled by pedagogic texts and historical practices (Bhabha, 1994). The idea of a secular national collective return to Zion, the Jewish homeland, was articulated by Moses Hess ( 1945), who presented it as a necessary social and political step in the process of the normalization of the Jews and their inclusion in the family of nations. In response to the false emancipation of the Jews by the European nations, Leo Pinsker ( 1935) advocated self-emancipation. Theodor Herzl ( 1970) proposed an establishment of a Jewish state in collaboration with and under the auspices of established political powers, including the Ottoman regime and European governments. A nonpolitical cultural Jewish center in Zion was proposed by Ahad Ha'am ( 1961), who interpreted Zionism as a humanistic and moral responsibility.
Cultural Zionism was reenergized in the 1920s and 1930s by H. N. Bialik, the poet laureate who engaged in a massive modernization and recirculation of Hebrew classic sources (Schweid, 1971). The philosopher Martin Buber rethought Zionism as a theory of humanistic ethical Hebraism modeled on biblical prophetic traditions. In the early years of the state, after the establishment of Israel in 1948, Zionism emerged as the object of historical reconstruction and contested political interpretations. The triumphs and failures of Zionism were ironically represented by the novelist S. Y. Agnon, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1967 (Fuchs, 1985). In the 1960s and 1970s, Zionism became the object of academic analysis. The scholar Gershom Scholem (1971) insisted on scientific distance 