In the global post-9/11 conjuncture, the defense of women's rights against the barbarism of non-Western others (and Muslims in particular) has become an unabashed concern for European right-wing nationalists, neoliberals, femocrats, and feminists. Why and how have such different actors become radical partisans of divisive issues that seem to contradict some core aspects of their political agendas? Or, in other words, why have right-wing nationalists been making women's freedom a crucial value for contemporary societies in spite of their conservative social views? And why have neoliberals been embracing nationalist rhetorics in the name of women's emancipation? Finally, why have feminists and state advocates for gender equality been adopting racist and Islamophobic discourses to denounce violence against women?
Sara R. Farris's book is a successful attempt to raise and answer these questions by exposing and critically analyzing the “femonationalist turn” (54). Farris's notion of femonationalism not only provides a name for this controversial ideological fabric that is informing both contemporary discourses and policies on women's rights, Islam, and migrant labor, but also it elaborates a robust theoretical framework for understanding the genealogy of the phenomenon and its modes of operation. Focusing on three case studies—France, Italy, and the Netherlands—during 2000–2013, the book conceptualizes femonationalism as a complex formation that has emerged “from the very specific reconfiguration of the labor market, migration, and workforce movements as well as the nationalization of political life produced by the dynamics of neoliberal globalization of the last thirty years” (182).
In order to decipher the troubling resonance of nationalist, feminist, and neoliberal stances about Muslims and non-Western migrants, Farris proposes the notion of convergence. Indeed, femonationalism happens at the paradoxical intersection of divergent and competing, or even antagonistic, political projects. Such a peculiar rapprochement can be considered neither as an accidental coincidence nor as a deliberate alliance. Instead, the convergence model offers a fruitful heuristic tool for unpacking this apparently contradictory constellation by pointing out a common “enemy”—the pervasive threat of Muslim patriarchy and sexism—and a common background—the global chain of production and reproduction along which Western and non-Western women occupy quite distinct positions.
Chapter 1 reconstructs and contextualizes from a historical perspective the “Figures of Femonationalism” that sustain the three case studies examined in the book: nationalist parties (the PVV [Party for Freedom] in the Netherlands, the FN [Front National] in France, and the LN [Lega Nord] in Italy) that are increasingly instrumentalizing gender issues in support of their xenophobic politics; women's organizations and lobbies as well as feminist intellectuals and politicians; and, lastly, both European Union (EU) and national policy makers who are accountable for the invention of neoliberal integration programs for non-Western migrants. In the age of the war on terror, Farris argues, these three heterogeneous political camps ended up sharing the contagious hostility against Islam and Muslim culture and adhering to the global civilizing mission of (in the words of Gayatri Spivak) “saving brown women from brown men.” For different purposes, from the early 2000s onward, Muslim women have been turned into the victims par excellence of non-Western male violence, becoming a synecdoche for the neocolonial stereotype of the female Other—one that closely echoes the old colonial Orientalist one of the nineteenth century. Therefore, their bodies materialize the very issue at stake, or rather incarnate the very stake of a harsh ideological and material confrontation between the Global North and the Global South across the international division of labor.
Precisely because of the intricate entanglements of nationalist ideologies, colonial tropes, and historical figurations of women qua social reproducers, chapter 2, “Femonationalism is no Populism,” suggests avoiding any simplistic reductionism of femonationalist features to populist trends. By distancing herself from Ernesto Laclau's formalistic theory of populism—which for Farris merely identifies a political style rather than a political content—the author mobilizes postcolonial conceptual resources to elucidate the selective procedure that foregrounds the Muslim (or non-Western) woman as the privileged target of EU civic integration policies through both the sexualization of racism and the racialization of sexism.
Chapter 3 illustrates in detail the implementation of such policies in Italy, France, and the Netherlands between 2006 and 2013, shedding light on the ideological premises underlying the institutionalization of femonationalism. On the one hand, Farris highlights that neoliberal civic integration programs for “third-country nationals” have been increasingly stressing gender issues and emphasizing women's rights as shared values that all migrants should respect. On the other hand, the author convincingly shows that migration policies have been promoting ad hoc gender-selective strategies for encouraging non-Western female migrants—perceived as culturally permeable and socially redeemable subjects, hence as key vectors for integration—to come to Europe.
Along these lines, chapters 4 and 5 delineate the premises for a thorough critique of the political economy of femonationalism yet to be developed. In order to specify the distinctive location of non-Western women workers in contemporary capitalism, Farris returns to the classical concept of “the reserve army of labor” that Marx notoriously used in volume 1 of Capital to explain changes and adjustments within industrial capitalism. Farris applies the Marxian scheme to the current patterns of female migrants' labor that insert (and confine) non-Western women into the domestic and care sectors in the name of their alleged emancipation through employment. Because of the peculiar features of reproductive labor—its supplying mechanism, its affective component, its spatial fixity that does not allow relocation strategies, and, above all, its inexhaustibility—Farris emphasizes the complementary rather than competing status of non-Western migrant women in the global job market with respect to Western women. Thus, she suggests speaking of a regular army of labor “to describe what happens to migrant women engaged in commodified socially reproductive labor” (177) in contrast with their male counterparts engaged in productive sectors.
By proving the necessity to ground the comprehension of femonationalism in the global circuits of the gendered labor market of social reproduction, the book convincingly argues that “confronting femonationalism thus requires not only ideological refutation but also a concrete analysis of its political-economic foundations” (182). Moreover, it laudably highlights the fragility of the femonationalist ideology by pointing out its performative contradictions, best epitomized by femonationalist feminism. As Farris argues, the convergence with anti-Islam and racist voices in the name of women's rights is a losing game for feminists. Risks do not amount to mere ideological betrayal but have a strategic relevance, since the short-sighted underestimation of sexism in the West (and of the urge to fight against it), as well as the active sabotage of the chance to establish transnational and transcultural feminist alliances, cannot but weaken the power of women's struggles.
