Book Reviews 317

women who protested the taking of husbands, sons, and brothers by marching in front of the presidential palace carrying photographs of 10s desaparecidos. Indeed, the similarities of events in Guatemala, Argentina, and Chile can confuse those not steeped in Latin American politics.

Agosin, known primarily for her poetry, weaves his- tory, politics, and women’s testaments into a fine work that shows how women’s resistance in Chile led to the formation of arpilleru cooperatives. She chronicles the “discovery of a mass grave in an abandoned mine,” which spurred women to organize the 1979 hunger strike in downtown Santiago where women chained themselves to the fence surrounding the National Congress Building and were subsequently arrested and imprisoned through both spontaneous and organized protests. Women who came together began to create arpikrus that were spirit- ed away to be sold outside Chile (where they are prohib- ited) in order to raise money for food.

The tapestries depict the precarious situation of Chi- leitos. Names, photographs, records of arrests, beatings, and the clandestine burial of bodies at night -all are still stitched into and thereby documented on burlap. The disappeared are brought back in living color, their lives retold in urpillerus. Art imitates life in all its complex- ities and horrors, and in Chile, it gives sustenance to women and children who still today mourn.

MERRIHELEN PONCE UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO, U.S.A.

PR~MISSORV NUTES: WOMEN IN THE TRANSITION TO So- CIALISM, edited by Sonia Kruks, Rayna Rapp, and Mari- lyn B. Young, 395 pages. Monthly Review Press, New York, 1989. US $36.00 cloth, US $18.00 paper.

Promissory No/es addresses the question how socialist movements around the world have grappled with the woman question. Taking as a point of departure the attention paid in Marxist theory to “the necessary con- nection between social transformation and social justice for women,” the editors have assembled scholarship re- flecting both uniformity and diversity among socialist attempts to translate that theoretical connection into practice. From Mozambique to the German Democratic Republic, from the Soviet Union to Vietnam, socialists in power (chiefly men) have taken their cues from classic Marxist texts, notably Engels’ Origin ofthe Family, Pri- vate Property, and the State, to argue that the abolition of capitalism would necessarily solve the woman ques- tion and to connect women’s emancipation above all with female entry into the labor force.

According to the authors of the case studies included here, socialist governments have tried to ease women’s entry into the paid labor force by providing day care, subsidizing public canteens, and offering maternity leave. But with very few exceptions (Cuba foremost among them), socialist policymakers have simply as- sumed that women and not men would continue to bear responsibility for household and children, thus leaving women with the burden of the double day. In all cases where socialists have gained national control, women’s interests have been seen as secondary to larger national goals.

The authors of the national case studies that make

up the greater part of the book take different views of the party and state policies they describe. Some, like Barbara Einhorn, who writes about the German Demo- cratic Republic, are sympathetic to the dominant party line. Others take more critical perspectives. Amrita Ba- su’s essay on Bengali women and Marilyn Young’s piece on China are worth singling out for their subtle cultural as well as institutional analyses.

Taken together, the case studies reflect the interna- tional persistence of productionist bias in socialist prac- tice. Yet they also demonstrate the necessity of seeing the problems and possibilities that socialism offers for wom- en’s emancipation in all their diversity. Most obviously the material and cultural challenges women in Vietnam face require different strategies and policies from those desirable in Hungary or Germany. More importantly, as contributors Delia Aguilar and Christine Pelzer White argue, socialist-feminists have to throw out the idea of constructing a theory around a universal subject and admit that different groups of women have diverse and sometimes contradictory interests. The evidence present- ed here demonstrates that feminists need to come to terms with the significance of race, of militarism, and of international economic exploitation for women’s local dilemmas and their relations with one another across borders.

Teachers of undergraduate Women’s Studies courses will find useful material here for introducing students to the variety of state policies toward women in the social- ist world. Instructors may also want to use data collect- ed here to study such topics as childcare, divorce, job segregation, and workforce participation, comparing women’s experiences in socialist and nonsocialist coun- tries. The concluding roundtable section, subtitled “To- ward a Feminist Socialism?,” introduces lively theorizing (including Zillah Eisenstein’s brief and brilliantly clear excursion into deconstruction) about the ways in which confronting difference between women and men, and among women, will invigorate both socialist and femi- nist theory.

VIRGINIA SCHARFF UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO, U.S.A.

PLOTTING WOMEN: GENDER AND REPRESENTATION IN MEXICO, by Jean France, 235 pages. Columbia Univer- sity Press, New York, 1989. US $30.00 cloth.

As Western modern feminism further develops its theo- retical formulations, it is evident that in general these formulations continue to lack an adequate understand- ing of Third World feminism. Plotting Women contrib- utes significantly to the analysis of the specificity of struggles for interpretive power by gendered subjects in the Third World. By centering her study on the geopo- litical confines of the Mexican nation and applying a historical approach, Franc0 is able to examine closely the calculated interventions of women in the rigid mas- ter narratives and symbolic systems of Mexican soci- ety-religion, nationalism, and modernization. France’s well-researched and ambitious project is a major addi- tion to the growing body of less ethnocentric feminist theories.

Taking into account Michel Foucault’s “theories of discourse,” Raymond Williams’ “structures of feelings,”

378 Book Reviews

Jiirgen Habermas’ “life forms,” Peter Stallybrass’ and Allon White’s “politics and poetics of transgression,” and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s writings, Franc0 reads and interprets the Mexican social text from a his- torical approach. She studies different discursive posi- tionings of women in Mexican society-from colonial New Spain through the formation of the Mexican inde- pendent nation to revolution and then to contemporary modernity-in an attempt to discover and trace those incandescent movements when the struggle for interpre- tive power erupts. Instead of continuity, she finds iso- lated individual “pre-feminist” interventions in a social text marked by violence, conquest, colonization, and therefore inorganic “forms of life.” When all other dis- cursive space has been monopolized by official institu- tions, Franc0 argues, women have resorted to “subter- fuge, digression, disguise, or deathly interruption” to “plot” their own stories.

Plotting Women is divided into two major parts: “The Religious Narrative” and “The Nation.” In order to tell the stories of struggles for interpretive power, Franc0 relies on noncanonical genres such as letters and life stories, as well as novels, poetry, painting, and cinema. The first part centers on the question of rationality with regard to the feminine culture produced by mystical nuns in the convent and by ilusus-deluded women- who lived outside the recognized estates. In spite of the Church’s mapping of knowledge and gender, Franc0 holds that nuns and ilusus of the 17th century created their own discursive space and “plotted themselves into a narrative in which self-effacing heroines and the feminized figure of Christ displaced the epic hero and militant clergy.” Whereas the mystical nuns claimed in- tuitive and unverifiable knowledge through mystical trances, ifusas claimed the right to publicly perform “private” events in women’s lives. Their stories nonethe- less were appropriated and distorted by their confessors or the courts of inquisition. Franc0 focuses on the 17th- century poet-arguably the most famous Latin Ameri- can writer until the 20th century-Sor Juana lnes de la Cruz, whose work symbolically trespasses upon and de- fies the court and Church’s domains of discourse and accepts the potential of non-male rationality within women’s discourse. Franc0 renders a distinct reading of Sor Juana’s corpus which reveals how Sor Juana tres- passes into the pulpit, produces a new kind of neuter subject, and proposes the female body as the matrix that gives birth to the logos.

In the second part of Plotting Women Franc0 traces the 19th~century displacement of the religious onto the national in which male intelligentsia control the domes- tication and cornmodification of women and construct a national identity based on male domination. Centering on the postrevolutionary period, she scrutinized the messianic spirit of the times by focusing on the life sto- ries of painter Frida Kahlo and journalist Antonieta Rives Mercado to reveal dialectically their acceptance of the national hero myth while they simultaneously forged their own identities in a discursive space outside history and the nation. In the contemporary period, novelists Elena Garro and Rosario Castellanos present female heroines, but they fail in their attempt to write women into the national narrative, Franc0 contends, when they “appropriated the then hegemonic genre-the novel as national allegory.” The construction of a “heroine” with-

in the master narrative of the nation, she asserts, is im- possible.

As part of the new “modern” discursive practices of culture industry, cinema interpolates the masses to cre- ate a national iconography that simultaneously revises the Oedipal myth, constitutes a mythic family of the nation, and reveals the limits of this myth. But, Franc0 claims, cinema does not allow women to tell their story as well as ethnography. The dissident gendered voice of Consuelo Sanchez in the ethnographic account The Children of Sanchez narrates “her story,” yet discloses the discourse of modernization speaking through the subaltern gendered subject.

With the last chapter, Franc0 notes that 1968, when massive labor and student movements developed outside the official parties, marks the transition into a contem- porary feminism of antinational allegory which under- mines patriarchy and rewrites the family. This feminist public sphere develops, however, in a time when not only is women’s identity challenged but their lives are at stake.

Although Third World women may take issue with France’s assessments of the “failures” of the “pre-femi- nist” plots, as an English woman, Franc0 is very con- scious of attempting to avoid what Spivak calls “knowl- edge retrieval.” She asks, “Do we allow [these women] to fade back into the ephemerality of oral lore, or do we bring these stories into public debate by writing them down?” With the talents of a literary historian, a storytell- er, and a feminist critic, Franc0 has taken the challenge not only of writing some of them down but of contribut- ing to the rewriting of Western feminist theories. This book makes a valuable contribution to Women’s Studies, Latin American studies, and cultural studies.

CLARALOMAS

THECOLORADOCOLLEGE, U.S.A.

WOMEN As HEALERS: CROSS-CUIIURAI. PERSPECTIVES, edited by Carol Shepherd McClain, 274 pages. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ, 1989. US$36.00 cloth, US$14.00 paper.

Gender and health care are intertwined in the real world, everyday lives of everyday people. McClain’s Women as Healers reminds us to consider these interrelationships through 11 case studies that focus on one or more of the following: women as informal healers, women as formal healers, female metaphors for healing, and women heal- ers and culture change. These four topics form the ma- jor subdivisions of the book, each of which is intro- duced by the editor in a way that clearly integrates the essays that follow. McClain has done a good job of

guiding us through the individual contributions so that each is valuable not only in isolation but also as part of the whole.

In her introductory essay, McClain adds gender to the study of healing roles. Traditionally, she argues, medical anthropologists have disregarded the gender of healers and the healed when they consider healing tradi- tions. The familiar constructs of producer/consumer, public/domestic, universal/particular, and cultureina- ture which are frequently considered by feminist schol-