Power Lines: On the Subject of Feminist Alliances, by Aimee Carrillo Rowe, Duke University Press (2008), 272 pp., $23.95 (paperback)
Between 1999 and 2001, literary theorist Aimee Carrillo Rowe interviewed 28 self-identified academic feminists, asking them to talk about their careers, struggles, identifications, and especially- their alliances with other women. The aim of this study—a “rhetorical analysis” that links her subjects’ stories to debates in feminism and cultural studies—is to explore the question of “transracial feminist alliances” between women of color and white women. Unlike calculated, often temporary coalitions, Carrillo theorizes, “alliances are affectively charged sites of connection in which intimacy and power become entwined.” How and why do such alliances form? To what end? When do they work and when do they fail?
As a queer woman of Anglo and Chicana heritage, Carrillo notes that she has spent her life straddling cultural divides, explaining differences to people in her various worlds. “I thought it would be useful,” she writes, “to speak directly to feminists about what this divide looks like from here.” To this end, she uses a hybrid writing style, mixing theory with a more easygoing narrative nonfiction voice. The stories she analyzes reveal that “women- who restrict their primary allies to women of their same race tend to have limited notions of feminism, whereas women who build transracial alliances cultivate more nuanced, intersectional, and politically transformative feminisms.”
Speaking From the Body: Latinas on Health and Culture, edited by Angie Chabram-Dernersesian and Adela de la Torre, the University of Arizona Press (2008), 264 pp., $24.95 (paperback)
Motivated by the untimely death of renowned Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa of diabetes, this edited volume brings together 13 first-person essays written by Latinas about their experiences with serious illness as patients, family member, caregivers, or friends. The 11 contributors, including the two editors, are a mix of scholars (Latino/a studies, women’s studies, Spanish, ethnography) and health practitioners (a clinical psychologist, an epidemiologist, a public-health medical officer, and a medical doctor/researcher). Eschewing the case study format, these personal essays bridge the gap between health and culture, simultaneously foregrounding “Latina expressive speech, cultural representations, and health stories.”
Speaking From the Body covers some of the most common, and debilitating, ailments facing Latinas. The stories show how identity and community intersect, affecting how Latinas interpret their illness, whether they comply with treatment, and if they choose to use traditional healing methods. In so doing, this book promotes the idea of disease as experienced through narrative, providing “a greater appreciation of the sociocultural knowledges and contexts that Latinas themselves produce outside of clinical settings . . . and within the context of the underrepresentation of Latinas in the health literature.”
Feminist Agendas and Democracy in Latin America, edited by Jane S. Jaquette, Duke University Press (2009), 272 pp., $22.95 (paperback)
Whither feminist politics in Latin America? As the editor of this essay collection notes, women’s movements played key roles in the fight against the region’s military dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s, but today they are “not seen as significant actors in Latin American politics.” The last two decades, to which the book is addressed, have been a time of feminist fragmentation. State institutions have taken over issues like reproductive freedom and violence against women, while popular attitudes toward gender–based inequalities seem to have changed remarkably (women’s legal subordination to men no longer taken as a given, support for domestic abuse legislation, women elected to high offices, and so on).
The essay authors, most of them scholar-activists, focus on how women’s movements have adapted to these changing circumstances, shifting strategy and revising agendas. The book is divided into three thematically defined parts: women and the state, legal strategies, and feminist internationalism. The topics cover a broad range of issues in a variety of locales, including the election of Chile’s Michelle Bachelet, gender quotas in Argentina and Brazil, the women’s movement in Bolivarian Venezuela, feminist participation in the World Social Forum, and cross-border organizing to address femicides in the Ciudad Juárez–El Paso region.
