continue expressing a dialogue within and between

women, women of color, and among outsiders of

various sorts, but also to expand visions and theoret-

ical spaces in general. ‘‘Mestiza’’ consciousness or

outsider-within space provides a perspective pro-

found in its ability to envision and enact challenges

to boundaries, and to imagine and inspire new shifts

and alliances. The community that emerges in this

outsider space can stretch, complicate, and newly

enflesh language and ideals as wide-reaching as

home, love, nation, and history.

In her impassioned explication of the unique

oppression experienced by indigenous North Ameri-

cans, contributor Deborah A. Miranda reminds U.S.

readers ‘‘if. . .the literature of the aboriginal people ofNorth America defines America. . .this means that the

erasure of aboriginal literature defines you. You are

constituted by an erasure; you negotiate not just your

own histories and oppression, but a huge national

fantasy on which those histories and oppressions rest,

a fantasy that surrounds you in every detail of your

daily life.’’ (p. 201)

In undergraduate women’s studies classrooms,

literature seminars, and any effort to make sense

of contemporary America, this book offers a small

remedy for this erasure. But readers must take this

book off campus as well in order to put these voices

onto larger maps, registers, and agendas.

In an email exchange about exile, gender and the

current intifada, Palestinian sisters Reem Abdelhadi

and Rabab Abdulhadi close their contribution with

these words:

No categorical conclusions can be reached at this

point; only a tentative tapping on the surface. We

are, therefore, grateful to have this hospitable

environment in this bridge, which allows us to

grieve for all those who lost loved ones, to

recognize our humanity, the complexities of our

lives, and the shifting sands of our respective

experiences without being forced to engage in

the arrogant exercise of categorical conclusions.

(p. 175)

We are all grateful for this bridge.

Barbara Burton

Women’s Studies

George Washington University

837 22nd Street, NW

Washington, DC 20052, USA

doi 10.1016/S0277-5395(03)00027-X

A PROMISE AND A WAY OF LIFE: WHITE ANTI-

RACISTACTIVISM, by Becky Thompson, 482 pages,

University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis/London.

US$19.95 soft cover.

When international readers wonder why White Amer-

ican feminists continue to ignore the integral con-

nections between five centuries of colonialism and its

attendant racism, and women’s worldwide subordi-

nation, they might read Becky Thompson. The Bos-

ton sociologist did not set out to study the latent

racism within White Western feminism, but rather to

create ‘‘a social history of White antiracist activism

from the 1950s to the present in the United States’’

(xiv). By recovering a history of White antiracist work

as an inspiration for White people to ‘‘develop a white

identity that is not based on subjugating others’’(xx),

she implicitly (and in chapters on the U.S. women’s

movement, explicitly) critiques a women’s movement

that puts White women’s experiences at the center of

analysis and treats the political insights of nonwhite

women as peripheral and partial. Except for a dis-

cussion of 1980s Central American refugees aided by

a U.S. sanctuary movement, the book examines only

U.S. citizens, but it highlights the social norms and

legal penalties that discourage White American

women from putting race at the center of feminist

analysis within and outside the U.S.

The book divides into a set of disparate political

efforts from the 1950s to now: civil rights struggles of

the 1950s through the mid-1970s; women’s movement

organizing of the late 1960s through the early 1980s;

sanctuary work for Central Americans in the 1980s;

prison protests in the 1980s and 1990s; and power-

sharing in multiracial NGO groups in the 1990s—

choices seemingly determined by the witnesses she

located (whose biographical sketches helpfully fill the

final pages of the book). The racial spread is similarly

haphazard. Thompson stresses the importance of

white activism against multiple American racial

groups, but most of the instances are of collaboration

with African Americans, Latinos, and a few Native

Americans, and Asian Americans are barely visible.

White antiracists embraced the early civil rights

vision of an integrated country, but by the late 1960s

had to stand against the killing violence directed by

the U.S. government and urban police forces against

nationalist movements like the Black Panthers,

Brown Berets (Chicano), and American Indian

Movement (AIM). In the early 1970s, Whites who

chose to ‘‘stand in solidarity’’ with the harassed,

instead of adopting the typical White stance of ‘‘help-

ing,’’ took up guns and bombs as tools for liberation.

White activists who ended up entrapped by the

Book reviews 195

federal government’s surveillance projects to destroy

racial militancy include political prisoners like Mari-

lyn Buck, currently serving an 80-year sentence for

aiding the Panthers, who continues to make alliances

within a U.S. prison system filled with Black, Latino,

and Native American inmates. Buying guns didn’t

work, Thompson implies, and the question remains:

‘‘What steps do white people need to take to genu-

inely use their white privilege to undermine the

system that has created it?’’ (111).

In the book’s second section, Thompson rewrites

the standard American history of the women’s move-

ment and the respective roles of White women and

women of color. Why do historians assign the term

‘‘radical’’ only to the White, antipatriarchal feminists

of the late 1960s and early 1970s,’’ she asks, when

one of the early feminist classics, This Bridge Called

My Back is subtitled Writings by Radical Women of

Color (133)?1 By the early 1980s, lesbian women of

color were forcing the sexual issue in nationalist

communities, and Jewish lesbians were articulating

identities different from Christian-dominant feminist

groups. Thompson claims that lesbian, White, Jewish

women like Irena Klepfisz, Adrienne Rich, and Ruth

Frankenberg, whom Thompson interviewed, began to

theorize White women as both oppressed and oppres-

sors. ‘‘What some Jewish feminists brought to the

table in working with women of color was a sense of

having come from a people. . . who had fought to

survive.’’ Learning from the radical women of color

and their White, Jewish allies, Thompson now

teaches feminist theory ‘‘with the Civil Rights and

Black Power Movements (first, and then) the emer-

gence of multiracial feminism, on the basis of which

liberal, socialist, and radical feminism can be eval-

uated’’ (366).

In the sections on sanctuary, prisons, and antiracist

training, Thompson shows White activists constantly

having to relearn the lesson that genuine antiracist

work occurs only when ‘‘people of color are repre-

sented at every level of authority’’ (301). White

people unlearn their (our) inevitable racist complicity

only through working and living outside the persis-

tently typical patterns of racial hierarchy and exclu-

sivity. Thompson concludes that White people can’t

escape a racial identity and become something else,

but they can act consciously and consistently against

White racial privilege. The histories of her admirable

activists provide some practical inspiration.

ENDNOTE

1. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical

Women of Color, edited by Cherrie Moraga and

Gloria Anzaldua. Watertown (MA): Persephone

Press, 1981.

Phyllis Palmer

American Studies Department/

Women’s Studies Program

The George Washington University

Washington, DC 20052, USA

doi 10.1016/S0277-5395(03)00022-0

MOMMY QUEEREST: CONTEMPORARY RHETOR-

ICS OF LESBIAN MATERNAL IDENTITY, by Julie M.

Thompson, 177 pages. University of Massachusetts

Press, Amherst and Boston, 2002. US$29.95 hard-

cover.

In her feminist study of the discourses related to

lesbian motherhood, Julie M. Thompson argues that

the lesbian mother is an oxymoron. That is to say,

common responses to the lesbian mother are, on the

one hand, ‘‘you can’t be a mother if you’re a

lesbian,’’ and, on the other hand, ‘‘you’re not really

a lesbian if you have children’’ (2). In her examina-

tion of the discourses that predominated in America

from 1970 to 2000, Thompson contends that various

and competing voices have struggled to negotiate and

regulate the meaning of ‘‘lesbian mother.’’ In partic-

ular, she contends that there are three key public

forums in which these multiple voices contest the

meaning of lesbian motherhood: the mass media, the

law, and the academy.

In her analysis of the mass media, Thompson

demonstrates how American feminist and lesbian

publications both documented lesbian custody cases

and called for support for women who were em-

broiled in costly and lengthy litigation. According to

Thompson,

lesbian periodicals constituted a crucial resource

for lesbian mothers and their advocates, who

needed to remain current on other cases in order to

prepare their own. This information-sharing

function was especially important in light of the

fact that straight periodicals seldom publicized

custody disputes, and those that were publicized

were atypical rather than representative. (p. 42)

Feminist and lesbian periodicals also offered an

important counter to the ways in which ‘‘[s]traight

journalism marked the lesbian mother as a threat to

traditional family values’’ (p. 56) in that the ‘‘menac-

ing’’ lesbian parent was characterized as evidencing

Book reviews196