Lives of In-Famous Women: Gender, Political Economy, Nation-State Power, and

Persuasion in a Transnational Age

Author(s): Rachel C. Riedner
Source: JAC , 2013, Vol. 33, No. 3/4, Rhetorics Regulating Childhood and Children's
Rights (2013), pp. 645-669
Published by: JAC

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 Lives of In-Famous Women:
Gender, Political Economy, Nation-State Power,
and Persuasion in a Transnational Age

Rachel C. Riedner

Reading and writing, as I am in Washington, D.C. - a place that Jamie

Peck and Adam Tickwell call in their description of neoliberalism
"structurally privileged center of persuasion" (48), the capital of globa
capital (I work literally several blocks away from the World Bank and
IMF headquarters) - texts and images about women are disseminate
fromnumerous media, scholarly, and activist sources. 1 In D.C., as in other
persuasive centers of neoliberalism, the rhetoric of globalization has a
particular focus on representations of women's agency, women's au
tonomy, and women's freedom (from cultural patriarchy). That focus on
women's agency, autonomy, and freedom takes the form of texts tha
position women as victims of cultural patriarchy and negligent nation-
states.

In global and local contexts such as D.C. that are overdetermined by

neoliberal intentions, desires, and affects, news stories about women
have a particular gendered rhetorical function.2 News stories tell us about
efforts to improve women's lives through aid and help from Western
agencies, political institutions, businesses, and benevolent individuals.
These stories are circulated as accounts by New York Times columnists,
reports by the World Bank (right across the street from my current
classroom), UN conferences, through university freshman reading pro-
grams, and through other powerfully authorized venues. These narratives
claim that agents, organizations, and governmental policies generated in
the West have benefited women by intervening into cultural patriarchies

jac 33.3-4 (2013)

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 646 jac

and giving women o

this rhetoric, the "f
they have been excl
the first world (bo
women (from both v
persuade inattenti
Specifically, neolib
featured stress the
in both the private
first-world agents
global citizens" (Di
Elsewhere, Kevin M
"strong" rhetoric, a
tions with neoliber
operates as a pedag
subjects. As Rebecca
and as a many trans
transnational excha
keted and given v
circuits" (Desai et
For feminists, the p
heroic stories about
(either we saved her
concerns about what "third-world women" stand in for and whose

interests they are used to represent. As Gayatri Spivak argued two

decades ago in "Can the Subaltern Speak?" women are caught in the
conjuncture of cultural patriarchy, globalizing economy, nation-state
power, and benevolent modernization offered by first-world institutions
and agencies.4 In a 1990 J AC interview, Spivak notes that narratives
about women that circulate through complex network of powerful rela-
tionships are part of a global system of value, a rhetorical system which
extends deeply gendered social and labor relations further into cultural
and social life through paths and processes of their circulation (Sipiora
and Atwill). In this framework, news stories that position women as
recipients of first-world benevolence shore up neoliberal economic
processes and sovereign power as they circulate.

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 Rachel C. Riedner 647

What is to be done? How do feminist rh

systems of circulation that both elide an
complex conjunctions of power, and econ
can feminist analysis counter a neoliberal
stories of women are used to shore up e
state power, and to produce cultural conse
texts that promote the alignment of neo
authority and extend the reach of neolibera
How can we turn writing and signifying pr
into "socially useful knowledge" (212)?
voices from afar that are already (thanks to
midst but that do not announce them
sanctioned by institutions, nations, or re
My strategy here is to return to news
mediated by powerful neoliberal interests
read and circulated in neoliberal contexts
national interests and desires shape repr
Bedford argues, policy documents, publi
munication by the World Bank tell a s
rhetorically central to World Bank argu
create inclusive development (7). Indeed,
ened" rhetoric about women and marriag
documents is characteristic of the Worl
previously invisible population increases
The news stories may be saturated with n
also be read to uncover complex and con
and to read the economics at work. Like a
a genealogist) who works with archives
their time and context, I read contempor
robust analysis of nation-state and neoli
seemingly ordinary, everyday context. T
focus on rhetorical processes that exte
labor relations further into cultural and
The method of reading I lay out here
stories that circulate the values of neoli
neoliberal governmentality. Most simply,

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 648 jac

work does not accoun

stories. Building on
bits and pieces of tex
values in which the
pieces of everyday l
As I read them, new
are defined and ma
well as reveal the
political economy. Ne
identities (race, eth
and social practice
nation-state politica
and analysis sugge
women's lived expe
tives of news stories
textuality as a mea

Transnational Feminism

Before I move into an analysis of the news story, I first fill out the context
in which my transnational feminist analysis of gendered power, nation-
state power, and political economy is located. Transnational feminists
argue that neoliberal contexts are shaped by dense (and contradictory)
conjunctures of multiple forms of power that operate simultaneously and
reinforce each other. In these contexts, the ideas and practices that
organize the way a society defines truths for itself are fraught and
contested as are the ideologies that organize social institutions and
practices (Stevens and Paterson). As several scholars have argued, in
neoliberal contexts the authority of the nation-state, inequality, oppres-
sion, exploitation, and violence is overdetermined by race, gender,
sexuality, citizenship, ability, class, and other categories (Duggan 15).
In these fraught and contradictory contexts, transnational feminist
scholars respond by analyzing how gendered power operates across and
within local, regional, state, and global contexts. This project makes
visible how events are overdetermined by gendered intentions and

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 Rachel C. Riedner 649

ideologies and reveals how economic and

state interests shape intentions and ideologi
feminism looks at how multiple forces -
social practices, historical legacies, and n
gether and reinforce each other in comp
Analyzing dense conjunctures (what In
Dingo call networks) between gendered e
sovereign power, and cultures in order to id
and contestation has been taken up recent
scholars who are interested in creating a
the global operations of neoliberal power
state power. Scholars track relationships
tures, institutional arrangements, nation
and gender that operate across and am
Networking). As a method of analysis, an
looks at unexplored linkages between all
In examples such as the news stories, thes
text themselves. They are present in th
addressed or explored within the narrat
transnational analysis is to draw attention t
scales that are visible on the surface of
operate in conjunction with each other a
ideological frameworks that shape their o
news stories I explore present evidenc
political economy, and gender are imb
though the narrative itself does not draw

Analysis of Neoliberal News St

On March 2, 201 0, 1 received an article e

Koya, 'My Parents and Neighbors are
Longer a Prostitute.'" I received this a
distributed by the W omen In and Beyond t
Washington University. The listserv pro
reports, news articles, commentary, a

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 650 jac

organizations, femi
via transnational ne
lives in different l
explicit feminist pu
women's struggles a
listserv makes visib
nomic, political, cul
and mixes of it - as
the conditions of th
and organizations th
the prison. The list
time, extend the vis
cultural, governmen
and negotiate, the g
In the news story,
worker turned peer
a short news artic
news service of th
Networks. Ms. Koya
work choices that im
sex workers and th
families, and commu
of a female sex wor
effort to convince ot
government grants
with the growth of
about either of these events.

This bit of text is best described as a news story because of its brief,
rapid circulation, because it references events and interactions that are
current, and because it relies upon a familiar narrative structure of its
genre: a human story that is used to dramatize a social problem. The
presentation of this story is an affective drama of everyday life, an
everyday event that forms what Foucault calls "the dramaturgy of the
real" ( 1 60): "real" local stories about marginal social figures, individuals
whose lives are immersed in the present, that briefly rise to the surface of
public attention.

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 Rachel C. Riedner 651

As the article reports, Ms. Koya became

family was unable to afford education fees an
unbearable after she finished school. She left sex work when she was

offered training by government officials to start a small business. Well

aware of the physical dangers of sex work, she says she has tried to
convince other young women to quit the trade. As Ms. Koya's testimony
suggests, efforts to persuade women to leave sex work are difficult
despite daily violence from clients, the constant threat of incarceration,
and the social stigma attached to sex work. She says, "I have tried to get
many girls off the streets but it's really hard. So far I have managed eight,
but I am told two have already gone back. Girls with children are the most
difficult to convince." This is as far as the "plot" of the news story goes.
This text's gendered intensity resonates forme as historical archives
of legal cases did for Foucault. Gender (not to mention gendered vio-
lence) does not register for Foucault as an aspect of power, whether
disciplinary, symbolic, governmental, or biopolitical (as many feminists
have pointed out), yet I find his descriptive language of the rhetorical
force and intensity of archives useful for this reading of gendered
structural violence in the news story. Ms. Koya's testimony registers for
me what Foucault describes "flash existence" (159): a brief textual
moment where we see gendered power operating through the interactions
and experiences of every day life. This is a moment when one individual's
life embodies the gendered intensity of the current conjuncture through
which economic systems and patriarchal relationships are structured and
managed. Ms Koya's interactions with the police, her family, and clients
as well as the physical violence that she is subj ected to tell a story in which
individual women and women as a class are targeted when they transgress
powerful gendered boundaries. Her work tells us how economy is
organized and its particular relationship to the nation-state.
The details of Ms. Koya's life as a sex worker, including her
descriptions of dangers that sex workers face, her negotiation with the
state, her invocation of military power, and her discussion of ho w cultural
patriarchy restricts her economic options, provides both a rich, evocative
text that speaks to the particular contingencies of sex workers in Kenya
as well as a broad context in which to understand gendered oppression and
exploitation. These details are present in Ms. Koya's testimony, active

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 652 jac

and pressing in her w

narrative structure
words gives details a
children face, and th
critical potential of
words to generate a
work and their capa
complex situations.
track systems and
analysis is a means o
which women live,
looking for women's
cultural activities,
Raymond Williams c

Gendered Structural Violence

The fully articulated narrative framework of this news report has a

teleological pattern similar to that of other news stories. A social crisis
(sex work) is reported, which is followed by a renegotiation of the
parameters of social participation through government intervention, and
is resolved so that society remains whole. Ms. Koya leaves sex work and
is no longer a threat to the social and national order. Yet, this narrative
does not fully resolve the problem of gendered violence. As Ms. Koya
says, despite her new employment status, her family still does not accept
her because she has been a sex worker. Her words suggest a deeply
traditional society where women are not forgiven; a family structure
where women cannot redeem themselves; a deeply entrenched cultural
patriarchy where women who are outside the family are vulnerable. The
problem of violence against women persists because sex work marks
women as outside the social.

This gendered cultural violence contained within the family structure

is compounded by other gendered social violences. As Ms. Koya sug-
gests, sex workers are vulnerable to violence by clients and by the police.
They are exposed to harsh physical conditions. They are at risk for

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 Rachel C. Riedner 653

contracting HIV/AIDS. Women with ch

presumably because sex work, despite it
enables them to support their families. Th
as Ms. Koya negotiate their lives is circu
what feminist anthropologist Patty Kelly
lence. For Kelly, "this form of violence
historically given (and often economical
that conspire - whether through routine,
the case, the hard surfaces of life - to co
While the details of Ms. Koya' s testim
tural violence, the narrative itself does n
fraught contexts. The news story presents u
in which drama takes place, but it does no
why Ms. Koya speaks and acts. When I re
by questions the text itself does not a
interested in helping women leave the sex
of the trade routes and military bases t
with state efforts to give women altern
tions about the material contexts of gend
to investigate the nation-state's depende
wives, and dutiful daughters as well as a
women play in the national economy an
femininity that resound with concepts of
To explore and extend these questions,
Foucault's notion of governmentality, th
that social coherence (that is, following r
for a stable, successful nation and in w
equipped to achieve social and cultural
coherence and social stability are claimed
role.7 As Foucault suggests but does n
particularly concerned with the prope
because women symbolize the coherence
household).
For Foucault, the model of governmentality is the patriarchal house-
hold: a good government manages the nation-state in the same way that
a good father governs a household. Although Foucault doesn't use the

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654 jac

term "patriarchal ho
managed household
nated by socially po
particularly conce
members, significan
This management of
choices members of t
the economic well-
of the family. Read
at work. Ms. Koya no
because she hasn't c
Governmentality
national communit
society). Like the
project that produ
sanctity and goodnes
Good governments
relations" in the sam
relations of his wif
behavior, followin
wealth of the house
prosperity and weal
socialized and wel
women, who uphold
the family. Similar
people" with shared
place and proper ro
(read: it justifies po
Police monitor the
as the "national peo
coherent nation-sta
of the family and th
and police harassme
The well managed
hold as a model for
emphasis and relia

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 Rachel C. Riedner 655

Sunder Rajan argues, the nation-state co

roles, and symbols that produce governm
symbolize the coherence and respectab
economic stability of the nation-state, g
women. They are the object of concern
subject of concern in public debates, a
monitoring by the police. Thus, women
objects of concern. As Sunder Rajan ar
attention to women.

In the framework of the news article, the patriarchal state treats

prostitution in two contradictory but well-established ways. First, accord-
ing to Sunder Rajan, prostitution serves as an instance of deviant or
criminal female sexuality, an activity the state monitors and controls. The
state is deeply invested in controlling individuals and populations,
especially those who exceed norms of gendered behavior. To demon-
strate its capacity to secure a coherent population, the state wants to
remove any sign of unsanctioned behavior from the public sphere. The
state monitors sex workers through institutions, including the police, the
courts, and social welfare bodies. Sex workers are vulnerable to the
violence of incarceration and the violence of the police. As Ms. Koya
says, "Sex work is risky work. I was a frequent visitor to the police station;
last year, I spent two months in prison."
Second, prostitution as female sex work is an aspect of the economy.
In a situation where nation-state wants to produce and secure livelihoods
through active trade routes, sex workers are seen as "necessary" for men
to be good workers. In this mode, views of men's sexuality (in service of
the nation) creates an economy for sex workers (with the presumption, but
probably not the exclusive practice, that these sex workers will be
biological women). For example, the state builds military bases to protect
the physical borders of the nation-state, and sex workers are seen as
"necessary" for the well-being of soldiers. Thus, the nation-state relies
upon women to enter the sex trade to preserve national economic security
and military security. Ms. Koya's statement captures the structural
situation in which women enter sex work: "Girls are all flocking to Isiolo
because there is a ready market for sex work: it has four military camps
and a transit route to northern Kenya."

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 656 jac

Yet, to go back to
events that are not
support her educati
after she leaves school. She enters sex work because there's a market for

it. At the same, the state, her family, and the community stigmatize
women who violate sexual norms by participating in sex work. Stigma-
tization means that women are outside the protection of the family and
community as well as outside the protections citizenship. Outside these
protections the violence that sex workers face are multiple. As Ms. Koya
reports, women are vulnerable to violent clients and at risk of developing
addictions to drugs they use to cope with their difficult and dangerous
lives. They face danger from clients and the police and are vulnerable to
exposure to the weather. As Ms. Koya says, "It is very cold at night, most
of the time you go home without getting a client, sometimes you take the
risk and allow a customer with good money - KSh500 [$6.60] or so - to
sleep with you without a condom." An expanded discussion of
governmentality where women are central to understanding how nations
manage populations emerges from the specific and contingent gendered
contradictions that Ms. Koya describes.9
By rereading Ms. Koya' s testimony with attention to gendered
structural violence and gendered governmentality, we see that such
violence is part of everyday life for women, not extraordinary or
exceptional, mundane rather than dramatic. Violence appears in the
narrative of the news story as part of normal operations of everyday life,
events that are part of the normalized routine for sex workers. The
violence of the police, violence of clients, violence of culture, and
violence of abandonment by the state appears normal in as much as it does
not appear as violence as such. As Kelly explains, "The violence here is
diffuse and quiet, and not very dramatic" (5). It does not appear as
violence as such because it is part of the normal way in which society,
culture, the state, and the economy work in tandem. Thus, a reading of Ms.
Koya's testimony challenges the opaqueness of the news story; this
reading tells us about the gendered material and structural conditions and
contradictions. These conditions and contradictions can be made vis-

ible through analyzing gendered governmentality at work that has not

been visible on the surface of texts.

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 Rachel C. Riedner 657

Persuasion

The second group of questions that the text leaves unanswered emerges
from Ms. Koya's failure to convince young women who have children to
leave sex work. Why do young women reject offers of training and
employment that would turn them into legitimatized workers? Why is it
difficult to persuade young women who have children to leave sex work?
Ms Koya says that there are few economic opportunities for women
because of the belief that women should be supported by their families.
From Ms. Koya's statement, gendered economic opportunities are the
context in which the "available means" of women's persuasion takes
place. Cultural constraints about gender and women's role and behavior
circumscribe her capacity for persuasion. And persuasion is complicated
by the real and immanent dangers of sex work that Ms. Koya describes
(violence of police, violence of clients, exposure to HIV/AIDS, exposure
to weather, and social ostracism). How might we understand the failure
of persuasion in the context of structural violence that sex workers face
as well as the specific forms of disciplinary power and governmental
power that Ms. Koya's testimony suggests? What do we make of efforts
to include gendered others who are outside of the protections of the
nation-state and their refusal of these efforts?

The news story tells us that Ms. Koya is given a small government
grant and training to open a second-hand clothing story that enables her
to leave sex work. From this position, she tries to convince other women
to leave sex work. However, as Ms. Koya says, "I have tried to get many
girls off the streets but it's really hard. So far I have managed eight, but
I am told two have already gone back. Girls with children are the most
difficult to convince." We learn that for women who are responsible for
children, the state's economic modifications and adjustments are insuf-
ficient. Ms. Koya's failure to persuade women who have children to leave
the sex trade is produced by women's economic responsibilities to their
children, their limited economic choices, and their vulnerability and
exploitability. And this insufficiency becomes particularly vivid in the
context of normalized violence of police, threat of HIV/AIDS, violence
from clients, and dangers of substance abuse. Where vulnerability to the
violence of the state and civil society is not enough material incentive for

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 658 jac

women to leave sex

social options that
Recast through Fou
Kelly's emphasis o
makes visible the
options for wome
Caught between th
stability through it
the nation-state's in
on ideologies of ma
ideological investm
protections of the n
able to prevent vio
within the state's go
as upholders of nat
tional subjects: stru
state power are the
situations they hav
women act, commu
rejection of sex wor
and violence. As M
persuasion - a comm
ers - must be und
Trimbur argues that
for the forces that
understand persuasi
and economic role of women within the nation-state.

From the news story, we don't know much about the specific
communicative practices that Ms. Koya deployed in her discussion with
sex workers who have children and sex workers who do not have children.

Ms. Koya's failure to persuade women who have children to leave sex
work can be understood through constraints that I outlined in the previous
section. The article suggests that Ms. Koya's efforts, with the backing of
the state, to convince women who have children to leave sex work fails
because sex workers are responsible for children and perhaps other
dependents. Sex work becomes one of the few areas of employment

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 Rachel C. Riedner 659

where women can adequately provide for

well-being.
Ms. Koya is given a small grant and tr
clothing store that enables her to leave sex
children the state's economic modifications are insufficient. Persuasion

is constrained because of internally competing and contradictory aspects

of national stability. This insufficiency becomes particularly vivid in the
context of structural violence Ms. Koya describes, including police
violence, threat of HIV/AIDS, violence from clients, and dangers of
substance abuse.

To recap, in the context of the withdrawal of state protections for

women, limited economic choices, social stigmas around sex work, and
the nation-state's contradictory position on sex work (on the one hand, an
aspect of economy, on the other, a site of gendered surveillance), the
study of persuasion must consider the powerful symbolic and economic
relationships between women and the nation-state as well as the cultural
ideologies of gender that influence the terms and conditions of women's
work. Communicative practices are both fraught and contradictory,
caught up with women's symbolic role as members of the national
community and, at the same time, caught up with women's specific roles
in bolstering national economy. Persuasion must account for women as
objects of exchange in every kind of transaction: social, economic,
familial, national, and sexual. It is too innocuous if it doesn't provide an
explanation for women's reproductive role in securing the health and
well-being of dependents and the contradictory interests of the nation-
state.

Mapping Negotiation

In the previous sections, I brought to the surface the operations of

gendered governmentality that are centered on sex worker's economic
contributions to nation-state and gendered structural violence. Persua-
sion is both shaped by and takes place within this context. Ms. Koya's
grant from the state suggests that it, or its agents, have an interest in
expanding women's economic opportunities and givingthem an entrance

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 660 jac

into hegemony. M
participate in symb
showing how it est
enables a national ec
national economy a
tion). If we look at d
als who work for i
improve individual
class. As Ms. Koya
[government's] Arid
Isiolo stadium. W e w
of business we wan
budgeting, keep a r
HIV testing. I was lu
as if there's a state-
economic alternativ
it was undertaken or what kinds of resources women were offered. The

absence of these specificities suggests that the news story's purpose is not
to understand how material changes in women's lives take place. Rather,
the news story wants to tell - without attention to such important de-
tails - rewarding stories about women's agency.
As Sunder Rajan points out, the state isn't a monolithic structure. It
is made up of different institutions and individuals who do different,
sometimes competing, things. While one arm of the state might be
securing its national economy by enabling sex workers to have access to
military bases, another arm of the state might be securing grants to give
women training so they have a wider range of economic opportunities.
As Sunder Rajan argues, "Any understanding of state-citizen rela-
tions requires . . . attention to the microlevel workings of state
regimes" (6).
Ms. Koya's efforts to transform her own life and the lives of other
women, to work for freedom from violence and a better life for herself and
for others, tells us about what women are negotiating. In some locations,
because of their economic contributions and their perceived social role of
servicing male sexual needs, sex workers have been able to emerge as a
collective and make demands on the state.10

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 Rachel C. Riedner 661

A transnational feminist approach tha

structural violence as well as contradictory
through the family, the community, the na
social imaginaries, and economic structur
tant work. So is paying attention to wom
efforts "transform the conditions of their
might not be articulated within a narrati
promoted through neoliberal interests. W
victims of material forces, state power,
aligned with cultural patriarchy. Women
tions where they must choose between da
children and negotiate within choices
situations, women actively seek to work f
their families, their children, other women
context of structural constraints, we see wo
negotiating, working, and, even, organiz
Here, the failure of persuasion in th
forces - social stigma against sex work,
for women, and an expanding market for
and reading practices that consider cont
and struggle and look for the capacity of w
circumstances: a reading practice that loo
Ms. Koya does speak and act; she does cal
grants to women.12 Ms. Koya' s says, "I
prostitution is going to get worse and H
unless the government and NGOs assist
At the same time as Ms. Koya's story ca
a nation-state's focus and reliance on wo
exception, it tells about women's efforts
families, communities, and individuals. M
about women's efforts at communication
efforts to imagine and enact different s
efforts to convince other young women
discussion of persuasion as individual
rhetor and audience, an effort to explain, co
is structurally and materially situated. Th

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 662 jac

emphasizes, is "cult
violence within a n
system in which se
expanding markets.

Transnational

As I've discussed, tr
tions of governmen
draws to the surfac
political economy th
the purpose of such
and nation-state po
Mohanty argues, "f
just in terms of m
generating adequate
form the hypermasc
corners of the gl
gendered power, m
and finding econom
responses?
My point of departure has been a very short news story. Despite its
brevity, textual traces that the reports include have a resonance that their
brief presentation of information and the compositional structure of the
news story belie. I'm drawing from Spivak's feminist rhetorical approach
that she calls "social textuality," reading historical archives and contem-
porary archives for the "the neglected details of everyday life" to see how
fragments of text and visual images could work as meaning ( Critique
238). Like Spivak, I looked for fragments of testimony, asking what
context this testimony might refer to ("Harlem" 114). My interest in
fragments is that they suggest events and contexts that are on the edge of
narrative. They tell us about economic relationships and relations with
the state that are present, on the surface of the narrative, but not analyzed
by the news story. News stories include fragments of texts and bits of
discourse that reveal contingent situations that belie the hegemonic

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 Rachel C. Riedner 663

narratives in which they are contained. T

of discourse can be used rhetorically to e
in which news stories are understood. The rhetorical work is to recast the

content and compositional structure of news stories, bringing to the

surface a range of women's responses to power, negotiation with agents
of the state, and efforts at persuasion; and to see the economic bubbling
beneath the surface of narrative. This reading is an attempt at what Spivak
calls teleopoiesis , a reaching for the lived contexts of neoliberal
globalization through a reading of textual fragments, by filling in
analysis of the operations of political economy and state power
("Harlem" 116).
My attention to bits of speech acts and fragments of text is informed
by a cultural studies reading practice that looks to textual details to
recuperate cultural activity in excess of dominant meaning (Trimbur;
Johnson). In this feminist mode of reading, news stories, despite their
hegemonic function, do not quite contain their given meaning or narrative
coherence. Women's speech acts can gesture to different intentions,
desires, and critical moments and can be used to map gendered value at
work or to map sovereign power. As such, textual traces from a closed
rhetorical system - even at the level of the sentence - can be drawn
through different feminist intentions, desires, and critical literacies
(Butler 10).
In addition to attending to economics/power, transnational feminist
reading practices are an effort to keep our focus on traces of heteroge-
neous cultural activity that are already in our midst thanks to transnational
networks, drawing hegemonic narratives through different intentions and
critical moments, keeping a close eye on bits of discourse that exceed the
hegemonic . Such a transnational feminist reading practice maps gendered
power, the authority and contradictions of the nation-state, and the
operations of political economy with an eye toward the heterogeneous
and excessive. Transnational feminist reading emerges from a frag-
mented, ordinary discourse that is already in our midst thanks to
transnational networks. Such reading is a refusal to allow news stories to
be read through neoliberal interests. It puts them in contact with analyses
of nation-state power in order to show cultural activity that might not
appear or present itself as political but might be read that way.

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664 jac

This effort at read

iams calls the pre-e
and pedagogical gest
Sinha calls in her g
scope of available la
material conditions
include their testim
feminist response
women's lives are i
the specific possibil
same time, speech ac
such, they can be d
women's quotidian a
gendered situations
In other words, re
enables feminists to
in even short, ordin
ideas could arise, h
could be formed. Tr
praxis could arise a
power, generates p
work suggests a new
Luc Nancy calls "wo
gogy emerges from t
rearticulating mate
relations and for fi
more complex discu
Thus, news stories c
(Spivak, Death 22): fr
communicative rela
could be visible, lab
activity that could
writing that the te
stories can become
distance," an effort b
of available analysis

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 Rachel C. Riedner 665

power are already entrenched, must be

changed, and can be recast. This transnat
focuses on textual moments that put us
"responsive political and pedagogical str

George Washington U
Washington , D

Notes

1 . Neoliberalism, as many scholars have argued, is an economic and political

system which is written into the social fabric and extends market relations even
more deeply into the social realm (Riedner and Mahoney 19. For further
discussion, see the work of David Harvey, Lisa Duggan, Aiwha Ong, Robert
Mcruer, and David Eng. Most broadly, neoliberalism concerns the upward
redistribution of wealth which, in the US, was a response to downward redistri-
bution of wealth in the 1960s and 1970s. Globally, neoliberal policies extend
capitalist interests, extending both the reach of markets and policies into
untapped "resources" and the influence of neoliberal ideologies and rhetorics.
To accomplish this upward of redistribution of wealth, both in the US and
globally, neoliberal economic policies are supported and adopted by nation-
states which - whether through policy or through social influence - supported
these economic policies. Nation-states offer not just political support but help
create cultural conditions in which people and populations identify with neoliberal
policies.
2. 1 use the term "overdetermined" in its cultural Marxist sense to capture the
multiple forces that work together rather than isolate forces and events.
Overdetermination, as Raymond Williams explains, is a way of "understanding
historically lived situations and the authentic complexities of practice" (88).
3. I'm referring here to Nicolas Kristoff and Sheryl WuDunn's book, Half
the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide , which
was excerpted in the New York Times magazine in the summer of 2009.
4. Gayatri Spi vak famously observes in "Can the Subaltern Speak?" that
women are absent in the rhetoric of modernity and in cultural patriarchy:
"Between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and object-forma-
tion, the figure of woman disappears, not into pristine nothingness, but into a
violent shuttling that is the displaced figuration of the 'third-world woman,'
caught between tradition and modernity, culturalism, and development" ( Cri-
tique 304).
5. Thanks to Dolsy Smith for suggesting this phrasing.
6. Cynthia Enloe's Bananas, Beaches , and Bases and Maneuvers remain the

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 666 jac

seminal texts for disc

femininity with natio
7. The centrality of
text. This discussion i
Aiwha Ong and Patty
Nancy Fraser, and ma
theory.
8. As Foucault notes, "Governing a household, a family, does not essentially
mean safeguarding the family property; what it concerns is the individuals who
compose the family, their wealth and prosperity. It means reckoning with all the
possible events that may intervene, such as births and deaths, and with all the
things that can be done, such as possible alliances with other families; it is this
general form of management that is characteristic of government" (208-09).
9. Spivak makes a similar claim about her reading of Jamaica Kincaid's
novel, Lucy ("Thinking" 336).
1 0. As Cynthia Enloe points out, there have been efforts by women in Kenya
and in the Philippines to create networks of women in countries that host
American military bases. This is a step towards addressing and dismantling the
global gender structures on which military bases depend. There are other
transnational and local efforts, including surviving by daily growing gardens and
recycling waste; organizing gender forums; occupying leftist organizations that
don't address gender and gendered labor; fighting back through state institutions
and on the streets; organizing unions; reporting issues as women's issues;
reporting issues as more than just women's issues; telling stories; saying
"enough"; and engaging many other activities for dignity and well being.
1 1 . As Laura Agustin points out in her research on women who migrate in
search of work in the sex industry, there are discursive histories and relations of
power that shape how women are represented and positioned in policy, in public
documents, by agencies, and in the social sector. The discourse of social help,
Agustin argues, often "den[ies] the agency of large numbers of working class
migrants, in a range of theoretical and practical moves whose object is manage-
ment and control: the exercise of governmentality" (8). Yet power is not just
location of constraint; it can also be enabling. As Agustin explains in a discussion
of a woman who had purchased fake papers, "she was a victim, but she had made
choices and felt responsible, and I would not want to take this ethical capacity
away from her. She was caught in global forces, but she also wanted to be" (4 1 ).
12. If we look closely, we see women actively participating in public life.
Women are at the forefront of resistance movements in places such as Honduras
and South Africa; women protest the failure of the state to investigate the
systematic murder of women in Vancouver and Cuidad Juarez, Mexico; women
challenge the meaning of public space and public mourning in Argentina and
Iran, women organize feminist media in Costa Rica. And there is the more quiet,

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 Rachel C. Riedner 667

everyday work of women to improve the dai

and their families to survive in the face of eve
(this, we could say, happens just about everywh
leť s point to Port-a-Prince, Haiti as one place
13. Doreen Massey talks about an ethic
responsibility for reading words, stories, an
authorized networks.

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