Transnational Feminism in the United States: Knowledge, Ethics, and Power by Leela Fernandes

protecting one class of human beings from the private use of lethal force” (pp. 69-70). Nonetheless the fact that embryos and fetuses, like slaves before them, are living beings creates problems for the very justices who regard them as mere property. Testimony in the partial-birth abortion cases, Dyer reminds us, made it difficult to deny that “bones were breaking” (p. 102). Such sobering doses of reality left euphemisms like “potential life” difficult to maintain (p. 101). In those cases justices were left to decide whether the right to the private use of force against fetuses was absolute. In a similar way, Dyer argues that the humanity of slaves forced justices to confront a similar question. “Did a legal right to the services of slaves,” justices once asked, “also imply a right to use whatever means necessary to force the slave to render those services?” (p. 99). “As it became more and more difficult to sustain Blackmun’s facile assertion that it is merely ‘potential’ life at stake in these surgeries,” Dyer observes, “it has become therefore necessary to defend what honest observers can only describe as killing” (p. 98). And this violence, he concludes, “cannot ultimately be reconciled with American liberalism.” The result, Dyer’s believes, is a “Constitutional disharmony” between America’s deeper principles and Constitutional law. Dyer might have reflected more deeply on the possible discontinuities between slavery and abortion. Abortion, for example, is the only controversy in American history that has pitted activists against one another who sincerely believe they are defending basic human rights. Perhaps Dyer would grant that pro-choice activists, unlike slaveholders, are driven by egalitarian ideals. Even so, his view seems to be that pro-choice activists have strayed from the American liberal tradition by abandoning “the moral principle that human beings have certain rights simply by virtue of their humanity” (p. 151). To be sure, many pro-choice thinkers have embraced competing egalitarian principles. Peter Singer, for example, argues that equality should depend not on membership in the human species, but on possessing the requisite psychological traits to have interests, especially sentience and self-awareness. His arguments have enjoyed even greater influence in the animal rights movement, which blames barbarism against animals on the very egalitarian principles that Dyer celebrates. Such philosophical ruptures in the liberal tradition have led to reasonable disagreements over how to understand and apply the principle of equality. This reality, moreover, makes today’s moral battles over personhood quite different from the struggle over slavery. But how does someone like Dyer advocate for his favored egalitarian principle? Dyer, after all, acknowledges that the past acceptance of his conception of egalitarianism rested on “dogmas” that “could not be logically or rationally demonstrated” (p. 151). Dyer does not address this question directly. Instead, he gently reminds us that a common understanding of egalitarianism animated the campaigns against slavery and abortion. And if this is right, how can we celebrate the principles of the abolitionists, but not those of the right-to-lifers? Perhaps Dyer’s pro-choice critics will answer that abolitionists were right to conclude that slavery is immoral, but they based it on the mistaken notion that humans are inherently valuable. They might even grant that this older liberalism, informed as it was by the Christian belief that humans alone were made in the image and likeness of God, worked well enough in the struggles against slavery and segregation. The post-civil rights contests for reproductive freedom and animal liberation, such critics might add, highlight the limits and contestability of the old liberalism. A brief review cannot do justice to a work as nuanced, original, and provocative as Slavery, Abortion, and the Politics of Constitutional Meaning. I hope it enjoys the wide, contentious, and fair-minded hearing that it deserves. Transnational Feminism in the United States: Knowledge, Ethics, Power. By Leela Fernandes. New York: New York University Press, 2013. 256p.$75.00 cloth, $24.00 paper. doi:10.1017/S153759271400005X — Hollis France, College of Charleston Leela Fernandes weaves a powerful cautionary and instructive narrative regarding the fate of new interdisciplinary studies, focusing on transnational feminism in particular as these issues seek institutional belonging in the U.S. academy. The author is concerned that as the transnational feminist paradigm achieves an institutional presence, there has been less of a systematic attempt lately to “interrogate the limits of the paradigm” and the accompanying “disciplining of interdisciplinary scholarship” (p. 12). But while Fernandes strikes a cautionary tone concerning the limits of the transnational feminist paradigm, she is not content to leave her analysis within the realm of critique. She also attempts to build upon transnational feminist scholarship and demonstrate “ways in which [it] can and has served as a productive approach to feminist thought” (p. 24). Hence, this book highlights both the “limits and possibilities” of feminist knowledge practices toward eliminating injustice and inequality and transforming power hierarchies. Employing transnational feminist scholarship as a case study, the author goes to impressive lengths to familiarize readers with the vast body of interdisciplinary scholarly contributions to the transnational feminist paradigm. To date, her work is perhaps one of the best to carefully and successfully unpack the category of transnationalism and its prominence in terms of framing feminist knowledge in regard to cross-border issues. However, the rigorous theoretical attention and detail that provides this book with its strengths simultaneously makes it less accessible for March 2014 | Vol. 12/No. 1 195 Book Reviews | Gender and Politics undergraduates, but it definitely should be required reading for women and gender studies graduate students. At the core of the author’s work are three interrelated questions regarding transnational feminism. First, “in what ways is the dominance of this paradigm shaped by national imaginary?” Second, “in what ways is transnationalism an idea that is shaped by a national public in the United States as much as it is a concept that is grasping historical processes that have in fact unsettled the nation-state?” And third, “in what ways has the idea of transnationalism begun to discipline research and writing in interdisciplinary fields of knowledge?” (p. 11). To address these questions, Fernandes takes us on a somewhat circuitous but nonetheless valuable and enlightening journey. As any strong introductory chapter should accomplish, Chapter 1 provokes and tantalizes the reader to find out more about how national imaginings shape and act as a disciplinary mechanism on interdisciplinary scholarship. However, Chapters 2, 3, and 4, while no doubt valuable as stand-alone chapters, leave the reader a little frustrated as to how central they are in addressing the interrelated questions posed here. On their own, Chapters 2, 3 (explorations of the power implications of visual representations of language and film in both national and transnational circuits), and 4 (knowledge regimes) offer powerful conceptual terms such as “economies of emotion” (p. 64), “politics of citationality” (p. 125), “ethics of control” (p. 131), and “the ethic of risk” (p. 131), to name a few. It is in Chapters 5 and 6 that the real import of Fernandes’s work is made visible, and they are also the chapters that may generate the most debate among transnational scholars. Here, the author interrogates the canonical set of knowledge practices underlying and distinguishing transnational paradigms from other (inter)disciplinary studies. Central to transnational approaches is the claim of “moving beyond and past” the state-centric, traditional lenses of international and comparative studies. Hence, transnational paradigms seek to decenter the state (particularly the U.S. nation-state). Fernandes takes issue with the moving-beyond claim. On one hand, while transnational scholarship embraces this claim, little attention is given to the way in which this body of work inadvertently reproduces U.S. statecentric interests. This is often achieved in ways that are both “instrumental”—funding available for certain kinds of research and course offerings based on students demands to know about conflicts and crises—and “accidental”— critiques of U.S. state power that end up recentering the state. On the other hand, in their efforts to sustain legitimacy and credibility, interdisciplinary programs invariably employ the moving-beyond claim to represent a sense of newness, difference, and discontinuity in order to set it apart from other established disciplines. As a result, this is where the author makes perhaps her strongest and most provocative assertion in the entire book—that what is 196 Perspectives on Politics often perceived to be a foundational knowledge base of the transnational interdisciplinary paradigm is in fact style parading as substance. To clarify, this is not to suggest that interdisciplinary studies lack content, but rather to highlight that these studies tend to achieve prominence based on their stylized practice of “linguistic innovation and categorical discontinuities that become the foundation of interdisciplinary knowledge” (p. 153). One of the far-reaching pedagogical implications of the moving-beyond claim for transnational feminist scholarship regards the knowledge gaps experienced by students in both graduate-level and undergraduate programs that study women and gender outside of the United States. Here, Fernandes’s keen observations may resonate with many of us engaged in teaching interdisciplinary approaches. She is not convinced that interdisciplinary studies, and particularly transnational feminist scholarship, “is adequately training students to research and have expertise on gender/sexuality/women in places outside of the United States” (p. 149). This deficiency of adequate training and intellectual depth emerges from a lack of a systematic approach that leaves students unversed in this area. In other words, before students can go on to theorize about gender in other parts of the world, they have to be grounded in the political, historical, economic, and cultural context out of which women’s experiences in those countries emerge. Therefore, Fernandes warns that failure to engage in deeply rich, contextual, area/ country-specific studies will only result in “producing new generations of U.S. centric conceptions of feminist thought and practice” (p. 149). Overall, Fernandes’s work pushes all of us engaged in transnational feminist scholarship to reflect on the limits of the “rigid attachment” to “moving beyond” as the canonical set of knowledge practices representing interdisciplinary studies. However, while these limits often concern finding and maintaining institutional belonging, which in turn produces the disciplinarily, Transnational Feminism in the United States provides liberating possibilities that may enhance reflection and interrogation. Marriage at the Crossroads: Law, Policy and the Brave New World of Twenty-First-Century Families. Edited by Marsha Garrison and Elizabeth S. Scott. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 358p. $103.00 cloth, $35.99 paper. doi:10.1017/S1537592714000061 — Priscilla Yamin, University of Oregon The editors of this volume begin with a number of complicated phenomena that define marriage today. Across the industrialized world, the rates of cohabitation and nonmarital births are increasing while the rate of marriage is decreasing. Although marriage rates are at records lows, some gays and lesbians are fighting for the right to marry. At the same time, there is a growing racial