Feminism and the Possibility of Transnationalism in Between Woman and Nation

Caren Kaplan, Norma Alarcón, and Minoo Moallem, eds. Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. 416 pp.

In the coauthored introduction to their edited anthology Between Woman and Nation, Caren Kaplan, Norma Alarcón, and Minoo Moallem lay out for the reader the terrain the essays will explore and propose a number of critical turns the book will make. The terrain—the current crisis in modernity—is both well trodden and well worth revisiting. This crisis is occurring in national political communities and is generated, according to Kaplan, Alarcón, and Moallem, by the contradiction between the denial of sexual or racial difference on the one hand, and the universalization of difference by the project of equality on the other (2). The site of difference under examination in this anthology, as the title indicates, is “woman” in all of her vicissitudes. One of the many strengths of this anthology is that none of the contributors takes up the universal figure of woman or any particular group of women as the site of unambivalent resistance. Instead, Kaplan, Alarcón, Moallem, and the contributors examine how “the woman/feminine signifier continues to serve as an alibi or figure of resistance in the fraternal struggles for control of the nation-state and the national project” (6). This is one of the new critical turns offered by this anthology, and it opens discussion in two ways.

First, it places the margins under critical examination. Most of the essays examine the multiple and shifting deployment of the figure of woman in the consolidation of counterhegemonic nationalisms: Chicano, Quebecois, and Palestinian nationalisms, for example. This is certainly not the first time that counterhegemonic nationalisms have been subjected to critical examination. Nevertheless, this anthology is unique in its contributors’ insistence on going beyond a gendered critique of nationalism to examine the consistent complicity of the figure of woman, and of particular women, with these nationalist constructions of female sex-gender. Of course, not all of the essays are of equal strength in this regard, but nevertheless there is little room in this anthology for zealots in search of redemption in the figure of the native woman, or for those seeking the celebration of the liminal space women occupy. The voice that speaks from the margins is no longer the progenitor of truth in these essays on feminism, nationalism, gender, and race. Instead, in their introduction Alarcón, Kaplan, and Moallem destablize the very category of the margin by revealing its double nature, suggesting, as most of the essays successfully demonstrate, that “to speak from the margin is to be already complicit with the discourse of the nation-state, which, moreover, appears to be unavoidable in contemporary life” (8). It is this unavoidable complicity that animates the tension between woman and nation in these essays and provides the new ground for critical evaluation.

Woman qua margin is not the focus of Alarcón, Kaplan, and Moallem’s theoretical introduction. Their interest is how to read the opposition between woman and nation through Derrida’s double concept of the border or, as they also suggest, through his notion of differance. The editors invoke Derrida’s concept of the border both as a boundary designating the content of a thing (i.e., language, nation, culture) and as a boundary constituting an opposition between things (5 [Derrida 1973, 17–18]). The border, then, in a Derridean sense, would be that which gives apparent autonomy to what resides on either side of the border, but also that upon which such autonomy depends. Thus Alarcón, Kaplan, and Moallem situate woman within this double concept of the border, as she exists in opposition to the nation, but also as the differance of nation.^{1 Woman is simultaneously inside and outside the nation form, that which allows a...}