In the Name of Women's Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism Sara R. Farris (review)

A growing body of work in transnational feminism, postcolonial studies, and critical race theory addresses the ways in which people of color are marginalized in Western European countries as the perpetual "Other" regardless of citizenship status. Scholars such as Fatima El-Tayeb, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, and Lila Abu-Lughod have critiqued rescue narratives in Western European and North American countries. These narratives perpetually frame female and LGBTQ migrants of color as victims in need of rescue from patriarchal forms of violence committed by male migrants of color. They function to reify Western exceptionalism and perpetuate ongoing colonialism and imperialism. Particularly after the events of September 11, 2001, the quintessential migrant subjects in these rescue narratives have come to be Muslims.

Contributing to this body of scholarship, In the Name of Women's Rights, by sociologist Sara Farris, provides a timely and incisive analysis of the rise of what she refers to as femonationalism in France, Italy, and the Netherlands between 2000 and 2013. An abbreviation for feminist and femocratic nationalism, Farris coined the term "femonationalism" to describe the simultaneous invocation of women's rights by Western European right-wing parties and neoliberals seeking to institute xenomisic¹ and racist policies, on the one hand, and prominent feminists and femocrats who pit Islam as antithetical to women's rights, on the other. In other words, femonationalism is a form of European white saviorism that is justified through gendered, sexualized, classed, and racialized discourses of Western exceptionalism. Focusing on civic integration programs, Farris discusses femonationalism in three interconnected ways: as a convergence, as an ideological formation, and as a neoliberal political economy. She writes, "I suggest that femonationalism must be understood as an ideology that springs from a specific mode of encounter, or what I prefer to call a convergence, among different political projects, and that is produced by, and productive of, a specifically economic logic" (5). Ultimately, Farris contributes an understanding of an underlying economic rationale for the femonationalist narrative of Muslim and non-Western migrant men as perpetrators of violence against Muslim and non-Western migrant women in Western European national imaginaries.

Utilizing a diverse set of methods, including interviews, participant observation, content and discourse analysis, and statistical analysis, Farris surveys feminists, women's organizations, femocrats, and the most prominent right-wing nationalist groups in each of the three countries.² She demonstrates that the common denominator between these converging (rather than explicitly allied) groups is their shared belief in the superiority of Western values, including "emancipation, individual rights, and secularism" (55). Situating populism as "a political style or a rhetorical device whose conceptual signifier lies in nationalism and its historical (racist) institutions" (58; original emphasis) rather than an underlying explanation, Farris draws on postcolonial feminist and critical race theory in order to illustrate that femonationalism is a reenactment of unresolved Western European colonial and nationalistic fantasies.

Examining civic integration programs in France, Italy, and the Netherlands, Farris argues that the nationalist and liberal invocation of women's rights buttresses colonial, gendered, and racialized ideologies of migrant women. On the one hand, non-Western migrant women are incorporated into the nation "as victims to be rescued, injured and exotic subjects lacking autonomy to whom western countries promise shelter and liberation" (102). On the other hand, non-Western migrant women are excluded from the nation as "the main carriers of the non-western migrant culture itself, the depositaries and reproducers par excellence of its codes, especially on account of their roles as mothers" (102). Thus, civic integration programs are geared toward "the de-nationalization and re-nationalization" (103) of non-Western migrant women, especially Muslims. Paradoxically, non-Western migrant women's liberation is understood to be located in domestic and care work—what Western European feminists have often construed as a site of oppression for women. In this way, Farris contends that civic integration programs reify...