Making Feminist Politics: Transnational Alliances Between Women and Labour by Suzanne Franzway and Mary Margaret Fonow (review)

MakingFeministPoliticsis a study of why and how women workers have organized within their unions, labour federations, and international labour organizations, and through them in broader alliances, to advance feminist concerns, particularly as they intersect with labour rights in globalizing contexts. The authors argue that women’s capacity to participate in the politics of struggle for economic justice in unions and elsewhere is central to shaping and enacting women’s right to work and to secure livelihoods and that, therefore, unions remain a powerful and productive site for feminist politics. Unions provide women members with organizing structures, opportunities and discourses that enable them to make contact and build alliances with feminists in other unions and in feminist ngos on common agendas. They provide working-class women with opportunities for political agency on issues and at scales that would not otherwise be accessible to them.

The major contribution of this book in my view is in its understanding of feminism as a set of discourses and practices that exceeds specifically feminist organizations or women-only movements. Drawing on feminist conceptions of intersectionality, the book successfully transcends sectoral notions of movements that plague many analytical discourses about social movements and the relations among them. The authors see multiple contemporary social movements as overlapping, inter-penetrating, and mutually constituting. Feminism is thus inside the labour movement and is itself a current of labour politics. Union feminists likewise advanced labour politics in spaces beyond sui generis labour organizations. A second major contribution of the book is in its documenting an alter-history of transnational feminism as including an important working-class current, both in its social composition and in its orientation to labour movement politics. This is a significant contribution to scholarship on transnational feminism as a social movement, which has heretofore largely focused on the middle-class, professionalized, and often liberal culture and politics of feminist ngos. A third important contribution is in the authors’ theorizing of the “sexual politics” of the labour movement and the notion of the “laboring body” of the union feminist. I discuss these more fully below.

Franzway and Fonow argue that combating the negative effects of globalization has demanded the expansion of transnational and cross-movement alliances and that participation in such networks has created opportunities for women in male-dominated workplaces and labour unions to more effectively challenge gendered power and to advance feminist claims therein. Transnational social movement networks under conditions of globalization therefore constitute a “political opportunity structure” for union feminists advancing a women’s rights agenda in labour movements.

Constructing these broader alliances requires the development of shared “discursive frames.” Human rights discourses are particularly powerful in this regard, although the authors view these as not altogether unproblematic. Franzway and Fonow advance the concept of “discursive alliances” in speaking of the social construction of shared frames across movements and issue areas previously viewed as discrete. The book thus stretches the concepts of the resource mobilization approach in social movement studies in productive ways which are less statist and more appreciative of discourses as political resources.

Franzway and Fonow document the myriad ways that union women use labour movement structures to forge alliances with other feminists in ways that strengthen their position in labour organizations that remain deeply masculinist in culture and politics. These feminist alliances at multiple scales are significant sites in which labour politics are advanced at the same time as feminist discourses are strengthened and return to circulate in more potent ways within labour organizations. The authors argue that this dynamic of exchange makes unions stronger and more effective as they increasingly incorporate issues and perspectives important to their growing numbers of female members while building essential pro-labour alliances with other movements. Overall, the book testifies to the expanded reach and dynamism of both feminist and labour discourses through multiple and overlapping networks and alliances, as well as...