The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves: How Feminism Travels Across Borders (review)

More than fifteen years ago when I was still living in Argentina, my home country, a Spanish version of Our Bodies, Ourselves (OBOS) landed in my arms as part of the teaching portfolio that young women, like myself at the time, had to master in order to be acknowledged as aspiring feminists. And if the idea of a collective undertaking to learn about sex and reproduction by using a gynecological speculum seemed to me as odd then as it does today, my enchantment with this book's overall empowering message is still alive and well.

By deconstructing the creation, evolution, and uneven trajectory of OBOS and its fluid authorship, Kathy Davis does much more than offer a "book about a book," as she modestly claims in the introduction (p. 1). Based on oral history and countless interviews, Davis's piece disentangles the dialectic liaisons between two related phenomena: the book's domestic history, including its trajectory in the hands of the founders of the Boston Women's Health Book Collective and the travels of the book itself. To that end, Davis delves into the genealogy of OBOS's discursive and practical transformations (to paraphrase Foucault¹) without entertaining us with postmodernist discourse.

Davis conspicuously explores how the book surpassed its creators' most ambitious dreams, by retracing how it actually ended up becoming the best-selling book among women of all time. Indeed, the author provides a unique contribution to critical feminist theory while showing how OBOS's place as the ultimate feminist "success story" was made possible through its global appropriation by women's local epistemological projects. As an organic force then followed by its own unscrambling nature, Davis examines how OBOS was engendered by the contrasting voices of hundred of translators and adaptors from all over the word, which led to more than thirty foreign-language editions. If OBOS became the landmark of feminist success in the twentieth century, the author argues, it is not only because it effectively contested hegemonic medical and patriarchal zeal, but also because it supported women's grassroots efforts and agenda-setting on the basis of their own reproductive and sexual needs and demands. Rather than turning into a vehicle of cultural imperialism, the hermeneutics of the book's shifting nature helped strengthen transnational feminist alliances. And in fact, OBOS's travels did not lead to direct translations but to changeable pieces that would reflect the diversity of beliefs, values, and needs of women worldwide.

Davis wittily navigates the ethnoscapes² of place, race, and class for the sake of deconstructing the delicate tensions between discursive myths and harsh contested realities. By weaving the convoluted story through which the OBOS's collective evolved from a fluid group of young (white) women into a formal nonprofit organization, Davis challenges the epic tale that sustained the "original myth" of the book's founding mothers. In fact, the author critically engages into an ethnographic endeavor of thick description that exposes the layers of tensions between that original group and an increasingly heterogeneous, and mostly nonwhite, staff.

Davis' book brilliantly brings together the debates on contemporary body theory and women's health activism as complementary corpus of knowledge that merged into concrete feminist agendas. Going full circle, in the end Davis tells us how OBOS finally got back home reconstituted through the voices of a myriad of women who are different from the original group of white baby boomers, but similar in their hopes of making the world an empowering place for women of all sorts.