Reproducing the State is a stunning and original rethinking of justice and the politics of difference. Stevens draws attention to Rawls's understanding of political society “as the location that settles differences, rather than the form that gives rise to them” (p. 4). Her challenge is this: “People starving to death in Ethiopia, dying in cattle cars en route to the United States from Mexico, and losing their homes for want of the right ethnicity in Bosnia…all of these necessarily follow from the prerogatives of political societies to regulate membership according to family ties. These events are not accidents in a world system of familial-based nation-states, but rather are their bases and outcome” (p. 7). The state constitutes and then regulates the intergenerational family form, and this grammar of membership underwrites the nation and reinforces the rules of affiliation and the racial taxonomies of political society.

Methodologically, Stevens draws from Foucauldian forms and practices, Hegelian sense-certainty, and Derridean deconstruction. She is critical of Marx (who somehow forgot intergenerational wealth) and Foucault (who dismissed the sovereign power of the state). Politically, Stevens draws from Rosa Luxemburg and turn-of-the-century anarchists, who “understood that the façade of ‘citizenship’ which follows from the state obliterated the rights of human beings around the world” (p. 41). Theoretically, she positions herself “critical, neo-Hegelian” (p. xiii). Practically, she urges us “to think through ways of reproducing political societies so that kinship principles would play a diminished role. Two means for accomplishing this would be the elimination of any state involvement in marriage and the curtailment of citizenship requirements based on birth or ancestry” (p. 280).

In contrast to other feminist scholarship, Stevens takes up the role of states in creation of gender rather than the role of gender in the creation of states (e.g., see Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract, 1988). Certainly, this book is a phenomenology of affiliation, not a philosophy of birth (e.g., see Mary O'Brien, The Politics of Reproduction, 1981). Stevens is concerned with the traffic in kinship, not the traffic in women (Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Rayna Rapp Reiter, ed., Toward an Anthropology of Women, 1975). For Stevens, gender is constituted through, rather than constitutive of, political societies.

In the context of critical studies of racism and nationalism, this work is unlike the materialist approach to the racist appropropriation of labor power represented by Colette Guillaumin (Racism, Sexism, Power and Ideology, 1995). As Stevens tells us, the book is “largely about the heuristics of certain forms of being” (p. 280). Contrary to those who contend that racism creates race, she argues that “race always entails race-ism” (p. 173). Indeed, race is “the culmination of political society, family, nation” (p. 173).

An exercise in meticulous scholarship, Reproducing the State unravels the complexities of categories of being and belonging. Same-sex issues are clearly of interest to Stevens, and their importance is raised throughout the book. Chapter 4, on race and the state, and chapter 6, on religion and fundamentalism, are rewarding reading. Stevens challenges all origin stories and racial taxonomies based on geographical territories and outlines how they are reproduced through birth certificates and laws of miscegenation and legitimacy.

I am ambivalent about the contribution made by Reproducing the State. Often, feminist critical race theory and lesbian/queer scholarship are not fully engaged. A discussion is begun but not sustained or is relegated to the footnotes—truly moved to the margins, and in excruciatingly small type. This is odd in a wide-ranging collection by a well-read scholar who can balance discussions across the Norman conquest, surrogacy adoptions, and an equal rights complaint about Kozy Kitten cat food. The effect is to shortchange these critical analyses, and this diminishes the significance of her contribution. Yet, she challenges some of the key notions of these literatures.

This attempt at a political theory based on how the state reproduces and recognizes populations is situated too narrowly in a structural analysis of discourse with phenomenological longings. In the end, Stevens returns to Hegel rather than hegemony, or at least centered and not scattered hegemony (e.g., see Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, eds., Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, 1994). Emphasizing how identity is tied to the state, Stevens has little room for communities of resistance, social movement praxis, or oppositional imaginations. One clipped and unsatisfying paragraph on “what is to be done” concludes the book. Perhaps it could not be otherwise if transnational feminist practices and literatures are not critically considered. Work on racialized boundaries and democratic futures that could have been analyzed includes M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, eds., Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures (1997). Nevertheless, her book would be well considered alongside transnational feminist cultural studies that confront liberal theory (e.g., Caren Kaplan, Norma Alarcon, and Minoo Moallem, eds., Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State, 1999).

This is a dense and challenging work that nevertheless maintains strong thematic coherence as it ranges across political theory, philosophies of language, a phenomenology of belonging and otherness, cultural anthropology, and the legal histories of naming, inheritance, migration, and kinship. It is beautifully prefaced with a fabulously engaging story of the author's work in a library in Croatia, her own genealogy of belonging and classification. Overall, it offers intriguing insights into urgent intellectual and practical problems and provides careful empirical evidence to illustrate how normative claims are substantiated. Jacqueline Stevens has produced a rich and profound work of scholarship that deserves serious attention.