Abstract
Most theories of nation and state have excluded gender as an analytic category. This article will demonstrate how the nation and the state are gendered. It will examine how nation and gender are shaped by capitalist and patriarchal structures, two powerful ideologies that impact the state. Analyzing an Iluko novel which constructs in the context of urban squatting the nation as a social space, the article will detail how it is impacted by the state, by class and gender, and how people and identities as well as the social and political spaces they inhabit are classed and gendered. It will locate these classed and gendered identities and spaces in the class struggle for the nation as well as in the conflict that exists between the nation and state. The article therefore will illustrate how nation, state, class, and gender are inextricably bound up.
