Issue 42 2005 Kiwi Blokes Recontextualising White New Zealand Masculinities in a Global Setting By MATTHEW BANNISTER [1] Writing in issue 38 of this journal, Debali Mookerjea-Leonard suggested that Hindu nationalists in pre-Independence India engaged in "a process of myth-making whereby feminine sexual purity was endowed with the status of the transcendental signifier of national virtue … embedded in a mosaic of macrosociological dynamics of colonialism and culture". In this essay I examine how a parallel or complementary set of cultural dynamics produced a similar association of gender with emergent national identity in another (post)colonial culture, Aotearoa/New Zealand. However, the dominant iconography of New Zealand identity is masculine. Explaining this requires an examination of the different experiences of colonisation in relation to emergent nationalisms: India was a colony of "limited settlement" or occupation, where a small group of white Western colonists dominated a large indigenous population; whereas New Zealand is/was a "settler" society marked by mass migration of usually white settlers (Pearson 2001, 4-5; Ashcroft et al, 211). The emergence of dominant narratives of nationalism is thus associated primarily in the former case with indigenous groups' struggle to throw off foreign domination; in the latter more to settler attempts to assert an identity distinct from both the coloniser and the indigenous peoples. These differing narratives of national identity in turn generate sets of gendered identifications: India and a number of other anti-colonial nationalisms established "a correlation between feminine purity and the vulnerable nation", Hindu woman as "uncolonized sacred national space" (Mookerjea-Leonard). But for settler societies it was the opposite – national identity was associated with the act of colonization, with "stamping" an identity on the land (and marginalising its indigenous inhabitants in the process). However, both schemes are patriarchal in their association of masculinity and femininity with divisions of activity and passivity, and public and private space. Both work as highly charged cultural signifiers that seek to reconcile the many paradoxes and tensions in emergent cultural formations of identity, and produce unified narratives of nationalism (often repressing alternative narratives in the process) through gender. [2] In an autobiographical passage of his 1987 history of masculinity in New Zealand, A Man's Country?, Jock Phillips refers to "a powerful legend of pioneering manhood ... a model of courage and physical toughness" that shaped his view of what a man should be (3). This model, as described on the book sleeve, is of a "rugged practical bloke - fixes anything, strong and tough, keeps his emotions to himself, usually scornful of women". It is based on a puritan work ethic allied to an ethos of exclusive masculinity based on "mateship" - the male camaraderie of pioneers united by common physical struggle against the elements, in war or sport, all cemented in the pub. Both men and women have attested to the power of this archetype. Prominent New Zealand feminist author Sandra Coney writes of her Copyright ©2005 Ann Kibbey. Back to: Genders OnLine Journal - Presenting innovative theories in art,... http://www.genders.org/g42/g42_bannister.html 1 of 24 16/08/12 6:32 PM