politics of gender in the politics of hate.

Every year all of my studies seem to wrap up into one topic- I think I've mentioned before how this year it seems to be rights and implications of citizenship- and one thing that I've been focusing a lot on is the usage of the female body in affecting mass sentiment and inspiring rage and patriotism. This was outlined by Zarkov in her book, but in researching another paper I was most struck by what Audrey (?) Chenoy wrote about in her article Politics of Gender in the Politics of Hate. She spoke about the usage of female purity and honor in the Hindu Islamic conflicts of India.
I pulled two main themes from the two works that I see as hugely important and understudied. In Zarkov, propoganda was used as a way to mirror the rights, autonomy and purity of the state with the way we feel about women. The 'Mother land' feeds and protects us, we are her 'Sons' etc. This creates an archetype for a pure woman that is seperate from the actual female body but represents all patriotism and nationalism (think lady liberty/statue of liberty etc). As these are all done in a male voice (male artists, cartoonists, orators and writers predominantly), the woman is silenced. So to be a woman speaking out against this- you can not be placed on the same pedestle as our 'Mother' land.
In Chenoy's article she speaks about the attacks on the female body and how that is used in political agendas. The idea of 'all of our women have been raped' or our 'need to protect our wives, daughter etc' has multiple effects. First it rallys an alpha male movement that dominates over female society. Second, in it's hypersexualizing women, it ostracizes all women that either have been attacked, or society cannot accept the purity of. The rape of the woman- penetration by a forgein body- also becomes used politically in terms of the 'mother land'- the mother is raped by penetration of foreign forces.
A lot of focus has been done on how this effects the nation etc. But not nearly as much focus is given to the experiences of women. I feel that these tactics effectively silence all women who do not wish to threaten her rights of citizenship. In all types of conflict any sort of dissention is seen as not-patriotic, but the woman herself becomes dissent because she is not the same body as shown in propaganda. I never thought of this as an issue, but now that I am focusing on Palestinian women's movements, I see how this is a major unspoken obstacle that women who want to vocalize both their nationalism and dissent face during conflict.