Transnational Feminist Rhetorics and Gendered Leadership in Global Politics: From Daughters of Destiny to Iron Ladies by Rebecca S. Richards (review)

Rebecca S. Richards's work, Transnational Feminist Rhetorics and Gendered Leadership in Global Politics centralizes transnational feminist concerns and offers an interdisciplinary examination of rhetorical acts and dominant representations of women world leaders. The book is driven by the paradoxical relationship of "woman leader" to national stability and the project of nationalism. It weaves a geopolitical genealogy of women world leaders to understand how elected women from divergent positions become part of a transnational rhetorical practice of gendered performance of leadership.

The book opens with a foreword by Rebecca Dingo that broadly charts the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches in the book. It notes how Richards's engagement of fields and theories within and beyond rhetorical studies (e.g., activism, feminism, and political economy) contributes to the depth and complexity of understanding dominant representations of women world leaders, and the discursive and material elements of such rhetorical performances. Proceeding from the foreword, the introduction is written in an intimate voice as Richards articulates a position as an "outsider" and works through how this seemingly objective position is suspect in terms of feminist methodology, which calls for critical analysis and deconstruction of only that by which we are deeply implicated. This chapter pushes readers to think differently and deeply about the mutual influence of gender and leadership to "work towards a day where the question is not about readiness or 'women leaders' but about how to enact social change that moves us towards a more ethical and equitable society" (xxii). Throughout the book, Richards enacts a transnational feminist approach by drawing upon an array of texts, individuals, and ideologies that are circulated through processes of globalization.

Chapter 1 traces the emergence of the nation-state as a rhetorical construct that unites heterogeneous populations under the banner of "nation," which perpetuates an inevitability and naturalness of the continuous masculinized leadership and the nation-state itself (2). A key element of this theoretical examination is a focus on how women national leaders at once represent a disruption to the national imaginary and also uphold the fixed understanding of the nation. Richards offers a definition for this phenomenon with the trope "woman world leader," understood as "not just a head of state but also a symbolic figure who both interrupts (heterodoxy) and reinscribes (orthodoxy) the doxa of the nation-state" (2). In short, these women move between heterodoxy and the orthodoxy of the rhetorical tradition that denies them access.

Women national leaders comprise a transnational collective that Richards examines in four case studies. In each case, the concept of "women world leaders" illuminates how women's gendered performances are influenced by ideology and generic expectations of what it means to be a woman head of state, and how the embodied practices of women also shape the doxa of the nation-state. As an imaginary collective, "women world leaders" function rhetorically as a transnational discourse (similar to and distinct from the way the U.S. presidency explicitly functions as a national discourse). Chapter 2 examines autobiographies of contemporary women world leaders, arguing that these heads of state use the texts to position themselves as predestined national leaders or "Daughters of Destiny." Richards brings into conversation the autobiographies of Benazir Bhutto, Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. Using narrative theory, Richards analyzes these autobiographical deus ex machina that perpetuate nation-state doxa, specifically how these narratives flatten each woman's political agency or personal will as they explain their ascendancy to the highest offices of their countries. Her narrative analysis works to "understand how women leaders reinscribe (un)intentionally the hegemonic structures that their election appears to interrupt" (45) and how the ideology and construct of women world leaders materialize and circulate across national borders and chronological time.

Chapter 3 examines three biopics, arguing that they all center on embodied mimicry...