Book Reviews editorial

From post-colonial Tunisia to the contemporary asylum system in the United States (US), the books reviewed in the Book Reviews section in this issue demonstrate the centrality of gender norms and policies to the governing strategies of the state. Rather than constituting a separate field of policy and governance, women’s rights are often instrumentalized as tools or symbols in the pursuit of other goals, such as development, modernization, state control, and regime legitimacy. Exploring such dynamics across space and time, the book reviews in this issue point to the importance of critically interrogating the ways in which feminist concepts and goals are continuously reinterpreted, adapted, and negotiated as they are institutionalized in various processes of governance, and made useful for various political agendas. However, the scholarship reviewed here also demonstrates that even instrumentalist appropriations of feminism or gender equality can nevertheless open up spaces for mobilization and change beyond state agendas.

Amy Aisen Kallander’s recent book Tunisia’s Modern Woman: Nation-Building and State Feminism in the Global 1960s provides a comprehensive account of how state feminism was mobilized as part of the project of post-colonial nation building in Tunisia. In her review, Senem Bayar emphasizes the book’s central argument that institutionalized feminism and discourses of modern womanhood are not peripheral to, but are at the center of, postcolonial state building and governance. In the case of Tunisia, they are instrumentalized to legitimate an authoritarian, single-party regime. The book thereby sheds light on dynamics common to many post-colonial states, but also makes important contributions to the literature exploring how contemporary authoritarian regimes draw on gender equality rhetoric and reforms to legitimate their rule (see for example Bjarnegård and Zetterberg 2022; Tripp 2019).

The interconnections between gender, state building, and nationalism are also evident in the case of Turkey, as Nazan Haydari notes in her review of Feminizm (Feminism), edited by Feryal Saygılıgil and Nacide Berber. In Haydari’s assessment, the book “presents a well-braided tapestry of historically diverse, conceptually multilayered, and theoretically complex accounts of feminist struggles and politics in Turkey.” As such, among other themes, it provides a multifaceted exploration of the gendered politics of the Turkish modernization process, and the complex relationships between diverse expressions of women’s activism and secular, Islamist, and Kurdish nationalisms over time. Importantly, the volume offers a corrective to English-language feminist historiographies of Turkey, which often impose external frameworks, such as the familiar wave metaphor, to interpret feminist politics and struggles in Turkey.

The third book reviewed in this issue interrogates the institutionalization of gender norms in US migration governance. Gendered Asylum: Race and Violence in US Law and Politics by Sara L. McKinnon examines how gender has been integrated and used in asylum law and policy over the past decades. While a result of feminist advocacy and engagement with refugee law, in the US and globally, the use of gender as one of the grounds for asylum has come to reinforce a male norm in asylum law and perpetuate racialized stereotypes and geopolitical power structures, and fails to recognize more complex, intersectional human experiences. In her review, Charlotte Dahin therefore emphasizes that the ways in which gender- and sexuality-related asylum claims are handled are inseparably linked to broader state strategies and governing regimes.

In the Book Reviews section, we focus on books that explore feminist politics and gender relations in a global frame. We aim to include multi-disciplinary, cross-border, and critical feminist scholarship. The section includes three types of contributions: book reviews, review essays, and essays that rethink the canon of feminist scholarship. Book reviews engage with an individual, recently published piece of work, briefly describing its content and critically evaluating and locating its contributions to global feminist scholarship and to particular bodies of literature. Review essays discuss several texts on the same theme and bring them into conversation with each other, aiming either to explore a recent debate or emerging research field that has generated a range of new publications, or to survey the best of the literature covering a more established area of research. Essays that rethink the canon aim to re-evaluate the canon of feminist global political scholarship and its boundaries, and provide the opportunity to also engage with books that are not recently published. These essays may aim to critically rethink the established literature on a particular topic in light of recent events or new publications, or to engage with books that have been marginalized by existing disciplinary boundaries and explain why these ought to be essential reading for feminists working on global issues.

If you are interested in submitting a review essay or a review, please contact the Book Reviews Editors, Elisabeth Olivius, Ebru Demir, and Katrina Lee-Koo. Reviews and essays need to be written in English, but the texts they review do not.

For further information, please refer to the journal’s FAQ page at https://www.ifjpglobal.org/submit-to-us/#anchor_book_reviews_shortcut.