Staging a new South Sudan in the USA: men, masculinities and nationalist performance at a diasporic beauty pageant

Abstract

This article explores the gendering of cultural nationalism at a South Sudanese beauty pageant with a focus on the promotional work, organizing efforts and performances of men. Through a visual and textual discourse analysis of materials related to the event, as well as a series of interviews with participants, promoters, judges and audience members, I argue that these male participants articulate a distinctly masculinized form of South Sudanese nationalism. They do so by promoting notions of both a shared, militarized and oppressive past and a peaceful, proud and celebratory future. Central to the production of this nationalist imaginary is an emphasis on the healing of past ethnic-regional conflicts within the South and an image of South Sudanese unity and brotherly, non-violent masculinity. However, whilst pageantry emcees, speakers and musicians call on men to build and nurture the 'New South Sudan', the event itself emerges as a site for conflict both online and in incidences of physical violence amongst young male attendees. Members of the community understand this conflict to be bound up with a sense of ethnic-regional allegiance as well as a collective crisis experienced by many young men following the war and amidst the challenges of life in the diaspora. In this way, the pageant works to promote South Sudanese nationalism through the efforts, performances and bodies of young men and the scripting of peaceful nationalist masculinities -even as these are contested and contradicted behind the scenes.

Affective nationalism: Banalities of belonging in Azerbaijan

“…Examining the political "through the scale of the body" (Dowler & Sharp, 2001, p. 169) and asking how "citizenship is embodied" (England, 2003, p. 615), feminist political geographies have interrogated how the nation is "affected by and reflected in embodied practices" (McDowell, 1999, p. 35). They have investigated how the nation is embodied in such diverse sites as reproductive politics in India (Smith, 2012), women's gender performances in Israeli's occupation (Mayer, 1994), rape as an embodied form of warfare in former Yugoslavia (Mayer, 2004), gender performances in Ecuadorian electoral politics (Schurr, 2013a), and the staging of the new nation South Sudan through beauty pageants (Faria, 2013). While not always focusing on the nation as the main scale of analysis, feminist political geographies advance our understanding of the importance of embodied practices in shaping the national body.…”

“…Revealing how these everyday national practices are tied to bodies, feminist political geographers have developed the notion of "embodied nationalism" (Mayer, 2004;McClintock, 1995;McClintock, Mufti, & Shohat, 1997;Radcliffe, 1996). They have studied dancing (Nash, 2000), dressing (Nelson, 1999), or styling (Faria, 2013(Faria, , 2014 to understand how the nation unfolds through embodied gender performances.…”

Articulating an Indian diaspora in South Africa: The Consulate General of India, diaspora associations and practices of collaboration

“…As Kleist (2008) and Faria (2011) found in their studies of, respectively, Somalian and South Sudanese hometown groups, people engage with diaspora associational life in order to project of a range of different kinds of gendered and classed subjectivities. In KZN, constituting oneself as a global Indian is increasingly a status symbol (Singh, 2010), whether that is through public sphere participation (Hansen, 2012) or via consumption practices that include Indian Satellite TV, trips to India, religious pilgrimage, and participation in Indian classical language, education and dance classes (Vahed and Desai, 2010).…”

Killing the joy, feeling the cruelty: Feminist geographies of nationalism in Azerbaijan

“…Nationalist narratives, however, often naturalize heterosexualized and gendered bodies. “Nationalism is emotively gendered, relying on a traditional gender regime that constructs women/land as objects to be saved and young men as patriotic, as heroes of the past struggle and as builders of a future [nation]” (Faria, 2013: 97).…”