How to belong: Women's agency in a transnational world.

• Author: Earle, Elizabeth R.
• Position: Book review

How to belong: Women's agency in a transnational world, by Belinda A. Stillion Southard, University Park, Pennsylvania, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018, pp. ix-148, $79.95 (Hardback), $32.95 (Paperback), ISBN: 978-0-27108201-1

On January 15, 2019, a business was launched that will support women in leadership roles and propel more women into those positions. The company, Chief, facilitates a network for women leaders, linking them online and in person through workshops, dinners, meetings, a phone app, and more. In a way, this endeavor accomplishes some of the things that Belinda A. Stillion Southard writes about in her book How to Belong: Women's Agency in a Transnational World, including reimagining belonging for women, teaching new rhetorical practices to female leaders, and giving rhetorical agency to women. While Chief takes up these tasks in the corporate landscape, Stillion Southard's book investigates these questions in the transnational political arena. More specifically, she examines how women can reimagine belonging when national citizenship is not an option, and she presents rhetorical strategies for gaining agency in these circumstances.

After Stillion Southard lays the framework for the book in the introduction, she documents three case studies to illustrate her argument, demonstrating how women in different contexts have creatively reimagined belonging through the use of new rhetorical practices. A literature review linking concepts such as citizenship, belonging, rhetorical agency, and transnational feminist theory leaves the reader situated to understand the case studies that follow. Navigating these terms and definitions illuminates the book's central problem: in a global and transnational world where women are often denied full national citizenship, how have they reimagined belonging to community and achieved rhetorical agency? The main tension in the book deals with the question of the nation-state's power. On one hand, it "reaffirms the power of the nation-state" as a place of belonging, but on the other hand, it "spotlights [the nation-state's] vulnerability to undergo transformation" (52). It is this vulnerability to undergo transformation that is important to scholars of rhetoric because this is where rhetorical practices can intervene to change the nation-state. The book highlights some of the rhetorical strategies found at the locus of national citizenship, agency, and belonging.

The three case studies...