The Men's Movement: Eastern Nationalism vs. Western Colonization

In what is now considered the Third World (sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and Asia), the present exemplifies the past indiscretions of political, economic, and societal takeover. Throughout certain countries with the aforementioned world, governments are run by corrupt patriarchal bodies, poverty is rampant, and the fight for social equality remains. The main artery of the issues lies in British colonization of various native peoples throughout the Western and Eastern hemisphere. The reconstruction of indigenous societies, namely India, initially affected colonized women. The effect of the maltreatment of these women was that the social role of colonized men was adversely affected-the result became nationalism.

In South America, with the Spanish introducing a form of mercantile colonization in the 1600s, women who ascended to higher social positions began losing their positions and roles in their previously defined ways of life (Colonialism handout). In early twentieth century-areas of Africa, native women also lost their "pre-colonial rights to participate in [the] political sphere" as a direct result of industrial colonialism (Colonialism handout). Due to the loss of indigenous women's agencies in their own societies, their roles (which worked hand-in-hand with their male counterparts) ceased to exist in the fulfilling capacities that were once known. Because of the lack of definition in the role of the native women, the role of the indigenous men in the aforementioned world regions was left disheveled by colonization as well.

Because the European customs of the male colonist were defined by the relative nature of Victorian treatment of women, the native of men from various countries of the Third World, in particularly India, were emasculated. "In India British commentators created the idea of the "effeminate" Bengali male, only to berate him because he wasn't manly enough to recognize his obligation to protect and revere women." (Enloe 48-49) In turn, as mentioned, the loss of feminine identity in women thereby led to the embarrassment and eventual rising up of native men to establish themselves as a force to be reckoned with; indigenous men were to assume a new identity in the form of a quasi-Western ideology, where the male population would present themselves as a superior being to the woman in the eastern states of society-this would be in what would be known as nationalism.

It is said that "nationalism is a commitment to fostering...beliefs and promoting policies which permit the nation to control its own destiny," which is notably why much of the present Third World is male-dominated in its political, global, and socio-economic affairs (Enloe 45). The transformation of masculinity into its current state of sadistic dominance of women in Third World-society is a direct result of the British notion of ethnocentrism; as British colonists made their Victorian society the standard canon of Eastern beliefs and traditions (Handout 2). One example that highlights this is the marital rape laws, which were an attack on the masculinity of Indian men (India lecture handout). Another viable example would be the Blackface or Zip Coon minstrel figures of African American men in the 19^th and 20^th centuries; while not totally parallel in the colonialist system, the transfiguration of "inferior" masculinity is comparable to that of colonized men in the Third World.

All in all, the colonization of indigenous peoples in various sections of the Third World transformed the gender roles of men, through the elimination of women's rights. Having thrown off the social position of women in those very societies, the male role was left with unanswered questions in how to function in newly-reestablished communities of Western European rule. The colonists' abuse of trust and understanding in the relations of the various native people of Asia and Africa (particularly) undermined the status of men in those communities. In turn, the indigenous male population evolved to form various forms of revolutions against European establishments in colonized territories out of the desire for positions of authority and power that were shared or solely held by women of days past. The assertion of the indigenous man to high position became the groundwork for the nationalism that is known today.