Power Lines: On the Subject of Feminist Alliances (review)

Interested in coalition and alliance work across lines of power and privilege? Do you wonder why it is so hard to cultivate multiracial community, theory, and practice within Women's Studies? Aimee Carrillo Rowe's book Power Lines is a must read. It offers provocative and forward-moving insights into the failures and possibilities of multiracial alliances. Using the context of Women's Studies in the United States, she explores the shape and significance of differentiated alliances within and across raced power lines. She does this through an analysis of the interviews she conducted with twenty-eight self-identified "academic feminists" (ten women of color and eighteen white women) who shared stories about their "academic careers, alliances, feminist struggles, and identifications." She illuminates the question of the racialized institutionalization of women's studies as a predominantly hegemonic white liberal project, operating from a gender-exclusive paradigm, with the simultaneous and persistent antiracist critique of feminists of color and white allies producing intersectional theory and praxis. By exposing the relational conditions of Women's Studies' institutionalization, she offers a vision of how multiracial alliances may generate new and transformative futures in the field of Women's Studies.

At the heart of Power Lines is Carrillo Rowe's own yearning for a coalitional feminist politics grounded in love, community, and belonging. She introduces and closes the book with stories about her own search for identity and community in the context of historically racialized binaristic power structures. With a mother who is of Mexican descent, and a father who is of French descent, Carrillo Rowe lays bare the in-between-ness of her body and her consciousness. She is one of the many, she says, who have grown up "white" by erasure, by a "kind of forgetting that comes from knowing more about what you are trying to become than who you are leaving behind … the wages of whiteness: economic, cultural, and psychological well-being" (xi). In the preface she asks the questions that underlie the rest of the book: "Who are you when your ancestors have convinced the world of their whiteness? And who do you become when you betray this conviction?" (xi). Across the powerlines she herself embodies, she demarcates the conflicting conditions of belonging: "Las mestizas, las vendidas, the race traitors, the halfies, those who tremble at claims to authenticity. People who are brown and black and Native by blood or by belonging, but who look white. Whose hues are read in ways we cannot predict, cannot control—by white people as the color of 'one of us,' by people of color as the color of dominance" (xix). Carrillo Rowe's struggle to envision a politics that recognizes the body's social location, and at the same time yearns for a wholeness ruptured by history, leads her to articulate another form of identity politics; she writes, "There's the color of the body, and then there's the color of the commitment that burns like hot blue flame in our hearts… Our work is to turn ourselves inside out. To locate ourselves through our loyalty and our bravery and our willingness to fight for radical visions" (xix). It is this politics of loyalty and identification, as reflected in failed and productive multiracial alliances, that Power Lines seeks to map out.

Carrillo Rowe takes her struggle of blood and belonging, against the backdrop of white supremacy, colonialism, patriarchy, and compulsory heterosexuality, into her conversations with academic feminists. Firmly grounded in the theoretical groundwork initiated by radical feminists of color of the 1970s and 1980s, Power Lines deepens feminist understanding of the relationship between identity and politics, shifting us from a politics of location to an identity politics rooted in relationships, allegiances, and community. She approaches identity as a process of becoming by drawing attention to how our identities, experiences, knowledge, and consciousness are shaped and potentially transformed through our relationships with others. What she is suggesting is that who we are and who...