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  • In the Name of Women’s Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism by Sara R. Farris
  • Brandi Lewis (bio)
Sara R. Farris, In the Name of Women’s Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism (Duke University Press, 2017) ISBN: 9780822369745, 273 pages.

Sara Farris’ In the Name of Women’s Rights illustrates how far-right nationalist movements in the Netherlands, France, and Italy promote Islamophobic laws and policies under the guise of protecting Nonwestern and Muslim women from Islam and Nonwestern men.1 She coins the term “femonationalism” as a shorthand for “feminist and femocratic nationalism” to describe how otherwise gender-conservative nationalist groups co-opt feminist and human rights concepts of gender equality to denounce Islam and marginalize Muslim men.2 Her argument contests the Western exceptionalist assumption that Nonwestern countries oppress women, particularly through religion. Western exceptionalism ignores the persistence of gender inequalities in Western countries. According to Farris, many Western state actors show little or no interest in women’s rights outside of promoting Islamophobic or xenophobic ideologies. Often, far-right conservatives maintain traditional views on family values and women’s roles within the family. A prime example of this stance is Marine Le Pen’s claim that “she defends women’s rights, which are threatened by Islam,” but she holds politically conservative values for women on topics such as motherhood.3 To understand how Western right-wing political parties and women’s rights organizations foster Islamophobia, Farris builds the book’s argument on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s apt criticism of the colonialist aim of “white men . . . saving brown women from brown men”4 and Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s rejection of essentialist notions of so-called “third world” women as all passive victims of their culture.5 Farris notes that far-right nationalist groups employ a typical Western colonial framework that asserts that Nonwestern religions and cultures neither respect nor value human rights and gender equality.6

Setting the stage for her argument in Chapter One, Farris introduces three right-wing political parties as prime examples of femonationalist politics: the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, the National Front in France, and the Lega Nord in Italy. These parties’ campaigns and practices, such as the push for a ban on veiling in France, treat Muslim women as victims whom Western policies will emancipate. Fueling the political culture of xenophobia, “well-known and outspoken [Western] feminists,” bureaucrats, and women’s organizations endorse legislation condemning Islamic practices as anti-woman.7 European feminist actors bolster the ideology of the far-right nationalist groups, producing femonationalism. In Chapter Two, Farris demystifies the femonationalist focus on anti-Islamic and xenophobic rhetoric and its positioning of the West as promoting women’s rights by tying its rescue narrative to populist movements. She explains how femonationalism differs from traditional [End Page 250] concepts of populism because gender is integral to the construction of femocratic nationalism and how it frames its policies.

Farris begins Chapter Three by theorizing why Westerners believe migrant women are worthy of rescue, while they disparage migrant men. She asserts this dissonance is due to Westerners’ sexist and racist assumptions about Islamic and Nonwestern people which imagines migrant women as acquiescent, “redeemable subjects” and migrant men as predatory.8 She astutely notes how changes in visa and permanent citizenship requirements have become more stringent in mandating migrants’ knowledge of national language and culture. These civic-integration policies also give primacy to migrants’ proficiency in individualism, human rights, Western women’s rights, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights. Farris calls civic-integration policies and their materials for new migrants—pamphlets, brochures, videos, and other integration informational resources—into question. In particular, she interprets European governments’ emphasis on gender equality in the private sphere—wives are equal to husbands in household decision making, and polygamy is illegal—as hypocritical because government policy simultaneously reinforces gendered stereotypes of migrant women as mothers and domestic authorities. Additionally, civic-integration materials pressure migrant women to adopt Western national identities and to enforce Western ideals of motherhood on their families.9 Because Europeans expect migrant women to become Westernized, migrant women are socialized to join the working class. Western policies portray the movement of migrant...

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