Like the complex systems of man-made power lines that transmit electricity and connect people and places, feminist alliances are elaborate networks that have the potential to provide access to institutional power and to transform relations. In Power Lines, Aimee Carrillo Rowe explores the formation and transformative possibilities of transracial feminist alliances. She draws on her conversations with twenty-eight self-defined academic feminists, who reflect on their academic careers, alliances, feminist struggles, and identifications. Based on those conversations and her own experiences as an Anglo-Chicana queer feminist researcher, Carrillo Rowe investigates when and under what conditions transracial feminist alliances in academia work or fail, and how close attention to their formation provides the theoretical and political groundwork for a collective vision of subjectivity.
Combining theory, criticism, and narrative nonfiction, Carrillo Rowe develops a politics of relation that encourages the formation of feminist alliances across racial and other boundaries within academia. Such a politics of relation is founded on her belief that our subjectivities emerge in community; our affective investments inform and even create our political investments. Thus experience, consciousness, and agency must be understood as coalitional rather than individual endeavors. Carrillo Rowe’s conversations with academic feminists reveal that women who restrict their primary allies to women of their same race tend to have limited notions of feminism, whereas women who build transracial alliances cultivate more nuanced, intersectional, and politically transformative feminisms. For Carrillo Rowe, the institutionalization of feminism is not so much an achievement as an ongoing relational process. In Power Lines, she offers a set of critical, practical, and theoretical tools for building and maintaining transracial feminist alliances.
Editorial Reviews
Review
“For twenty years, those of us who came of age through multiracial feminism and teach feminist studies have been talking about alliance building as key to liberation struggles. Yet time and again, I have heard students understandably ask what alliances look like, how they can be part of them, and how they will know whether the alliances are working. With theory that is both nuanced and sophisticated, relevant and provocative, Aimee Carrillo Rowe gives us answers to these questions.”–Becky Thompson, author of A Promise and a Way of Life: White Antiracist Activism
From the Back Cover
“For twenty years, those of us who came of age through multiracial feminism and teach feminist studies have been talking about alliance building as key to liberation struggles. Yet time and again, I have heard students understandably ask what alliances look like, how they can be part of them, and how they will know whether the alliances are working. With theory that is both nuanced and sophisticated, relevant and provocative, Aimee Carrillo Rowe gives us answers to these questions.”–Becky Thompson, author of A” Promise and a Way of Life: White Antiracist Activism”
About the Author
Aimee Carrillo Rowe is Associate Professor in the Rhetoric Department and the Project on Rhetoric of Inquiry program at the University of Iowa.
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