Mother India/ Mother Ireland: gendered dialogues of nationalism and colonialism

In this comparative analysis of the anticolonial movements in India and Ireland in the first half of the 20th century, we explore the complexities of the connections between gender, nationalism, and colonialism. We engage with feminist theories of nationalism and suggest that women's involvement in nationalism has been complex and diverse. In this article, we highlight the political negotiations through which women colluded, confronted, and challenged nationalism. Nationalist discourses constructed the symbolic roles of men and women, which best served the nationalist project as well as inverted the British colonial imagery of the “feminized” nations. The most popular imagery was of the desexualized national images of “Mother India” and “Mother Ireland”. However, we suggest that some women successfully negotiated these symbols to carve political spaces for themselves during the anticolonial movement. Nationalist conflicts brought about a blurring of the boundaries between public and private, home and battlefield, the domestic sphere became a site of resistance, confrontation, and politicization of women's consciousness. We also suggest that women's active negotiation continued in post-Independence India and Ireland

Methodological Dilemmas: Gatekeepers and Positionality in Bradford

This paper explores the ever-evolving relationship between gatekeepers and the researcher, and the ways in which it may facilitate, constrain or transform the research process by opening and/or closing the gate. We explore the methodological issue of positionality and discuss the ways in which gatekeepers drew on different axes of the researcher's identities religion, ethnicity, gender and age - in ambiguous and contradictory ways. In analysing this relationship, we locate the discussion within its historical context, as we contend that contextuality influenced the way gatekeepers positioned the researcher. This paper draws on the field experiences of the first author in four inner-city neighbourhoods in Bradford, West Yorkshire, a northern city with a well-established Pakistani Muslim community that has become synonymous with the Rushdie affair and the 1995 and 2001 urban disturbances.</p