Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics

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To make reliable sense of today's (and yesterday's) dynamic international politics calls both for acquiring new skills and for redirecting skills one already possesses. That is, making feminist sense of international politics necessitates gaining skills that feel quite new and redirecting skills that one has exercised before, but which one assumed could shed no light on wars, economic crises, global injustices, and elite negotiations. Investigating the workings of masculinities and femininities as they each shape complex international political life-that is, conducting a gender-curious investigation-will require a lively curiosity, genuine humility, a full tool kit, and candid reflection on potential misuses of those old and new research tools. Enloe Cynthia (2004). "Gender is Not Enough: The Need for a Feminist Consciousness". International Affairs. 80: 95–97. doi: 10.1111/j.1468-2346.2004.00370.x. Having retired from Clark, Enloe is a research professor in the Department of International Development, Community, and Environment and is still a frequent and energetic lecturer. In addition to serving on the editorial board for scholarly journals such as Signs and the International Feminist Journal of Politics, Cynthia Enloe has written fifteen books, mostly published by the University of California Press. [10] Much of Enloe's research centers on women's place in national and international politics. Her books cover a wide range of issues encompassing gender-based discrimination as well as racial, ethnic, and national identities. She is also a member of the academic network of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. [11]

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Ethnic Conflict and Political Development, Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1973 (repr. University Press of America, 1986). As influential as these past and present local and international feminist media innovations were-and still are-in offering alternative information and perspectives, they did not and still do not have sufficient resources (for instance, for news bureaus in Beijing, Cairo, Nairobi, London, Tokyo, and Rio de Janeiro). Nor can they match the cultural and political influence wielded by large well-capitalized or state-sponsored media companies-textbook publishers, network and cable television companies, national radio stations and newspapers, Internet companies, and major film studios. These large media companies have become deliberately international in their aspirations. They are not monolithic, but together they can determine what is considered "international," what is defined as "political," what is deemed "significant," and who is anointed an "expert."Maha's Story" talks about an Iraqi woman who, as well as many others, found themselves in a situation where their husband is either dead, divorced, detained, or missing, with children to care for, no social safety nets, meager finances, and no working papers. Maha finds herself caught in between an ethnic cleansing which Enloe terms, "the wielding of violence and intimidation for the sake of driving people of one ethnic or sectarian community out of a region...for the sake of securing that space for members of another ethnic or sectarian community." [22] A new edition of Bananas, Beaches and Bases is cause for cosmic good cheer. This trailblazing treatment of the gender politics of global market and military projects is a feminist classic. Always ahead of the curve, before globalization had achieved cache in academic circles, Enloe was there, cajoling Western feminists out of our politicial parochialism. There is no more creative, insightful, engaging feminist guide to international politics." Judith Stacy, author of Brave New Families - from cover At the beginning of her career, Enloe mainly focused on studying ethnic and racial politics. She completed her dissertation in Malaysia on a Fulbright Scholarship from 1965-1966. There, she researched the country's ethnic politics. Ten years after receiving her PhD, Enloe had written six books on the subject of ethnical tensions and its role in politics, however she had yet to look at any of these subjects from a feminist angle; something she admits she is “embarrassed of.” [8] It wasn't until she first began teaching at Clark University, in the middle of the U.S.-Vietnam war, that Enloe really began to develop her feminist thought. Enloe spoke with a colleague at Clark, the only man on the faculty who was a veteran, about his experiences during the Vietnam war. He mentioned that Vietnamese women were hired by American soldiers to do their laundry. She began to wonder how history would be different if the entire war had been told through the eyes of these Vietnamese women. In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Natures Natural, a fiber that contains 30% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (R 1997) ( Permanence of Paper). Activists of the International Domestic Workers Network lobbying in Geneva, 2011 PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

Bananas, Beaches and Bases: A Twenty-five years of Bananas, Beaches and Bases: A

Book Genre: Feminism, Gender, History, International Relations, Nonfiction, Politics, Social Justice Although understanding IR from the perspective(s) of diversely situated women (and men) is crucial for making sense of global politics, these women have a long history of being ‘out of sight’. Not only are they invisible but, perhaps more importantly, they are also denied agency in the sense that they do not define the key ‘problematics’ of IR. In IR scholarship (as well as in ‘the real world’) women tend to be impacted upon rather than being actors in their own right. However, “[t]here is an alternative incentive for delving into international politics,” Enloe argues. A feminist approach is distinctive in three major aspects. Epistemologically, it challenges the traditional understanding of IR knowledge. Methodologically, it involves genuine curiosity that takes women’s lives seriously. And politically, it is driven by emancipatory goals to bring about social change. Ultimately, feminist investigation of how the ideas of masculinity and femininity have formed the lives (and deaths) of all these women exposes unequal, international power relations that are neither essential, nor inevitable A feminist gender analysis calls for continuing to ask even more questions about the genderings of power: Who gains what from wielding a particular form of gender-infused power? What do challenges to those wieldings of that form of power look like? When do those challenges succeed? When are they stymied? a b Enloe, Cynthia; Lacey, Anita; Gregory, Thomas (2016). "Twenty-five years of Bananas, Beaches and Bases: A conversation with Cynthia Enloe". Journal of Sociology. 52 (3): 537–550. doi: 10.1177/1440783316655635. S2CID 151463187. Does Khaki Become You? The Militarization of Women's Lives, London, Pandora Press; San Francisco, Harper\Collins, 1988 (editions have been published in Finnish and Swedish).

So when I say that one thing that doing this latest digging has led me to conclude is that patriarchy is remarkably adaptable, I do not want to imply that it’s the same old, same old. Quite the contrary. Making patriarchy sustainable has, I think, taken a lot of thinking and maneuvering by those who have a vested interest in privileging particular forms of masculinity to appear modern and even cutting edge while simultaneously keeping most women in their subordinate places. They have not used only intimidation and outright coercion—though certainly some of those who feel endangered by challenges to patriarchy have wielded both. They have also used updated language ( our sons and daughters in uniform), the arts of tokenism (two women in a cabinet of twenty), and the practices of cooptation (consumers offered low-cost clothes so they will lose interest in Bangladeshi factory women’s working conditions). To investigate how any patriarchal system’s beneficiaries try to sustain that system of gendered meanings and gendered practices requires not smug world-weariness. It calls for renewed energy, refueled collaborations. Oh, and a readiness to be surprised. Some women, of course, have not been treated as furniture. Among those women who have become visible in the recent era's international political arena are Hillary Clinton, Mary Robinson, Angela Merkel, Christine Lagarde, Michelle Bachelet, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and Shirin Ebadi. Each of these prominent women has her own gendered stories to tell (or, perhaps, to deliberately not tell). But a feminist-informed investigation makes it clear that there are far more women engaged in international politics than the conventional headlines imply. Millions of women are international actors, and most of them are not Shirin Ebadi or Hillary Clinton. What do we miss if today we persist in portraying this important early international political movement as an all-male affair? First, we grossly underestimate how much racialized gendered power it took for proslavery advocates to sustain the slave trade and systems of slave labor for as long as they did. If those with vested interests in maintaining slavery had faced only male opponents, without the energy, political innovations, and knowledge of domestic consumption that women abolitionists contributed, they might have been able to sustain the exploitive racist system longer or at lower political cost. Maybe, if any of your aunts or grandmothers have told you stories about having worked as domestic servants, you can more easily picture what your daily life would be like if you had left your home country to take a live-in job caring for someone else's little children or their aging parents. You can almost imagine the emotions you would feel if you were to Skype across time zones to your own children every week, but you cannot be sure how you would react when your employer insisted upon taking possession of your passport. Enloe continues to illustrate the struggle that feminist movements face in international politics through the domestic service industry. Enloe states that “domestic work is international business with political implications.” During the Industrial Revolution, female domestic workers were in high demand because middle class women believed they needed to protect their own femininity from manual labor. From the time of the Industrial Revolution to modern day, female domestic workers have faced the challenges of being treated as subordinate to the middle class. Female domestic workers continue to have the responsibility of providing for family abroad while facing increasingly strict immigration laws and restrictions from the International Monetary Fund. [17]

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If you keep up with the world news, you may be able to put yourself in the shoes of a women’s rights activist in Cairo, but how would you decide whether to paint your protest sign only in Arabic or to add an English translation of your political message just so that CNN and Reuters viewers around the world can see that your revolutionary agenda includes not only toppling the current oppressive regime but also pursuing specifically feminist goals? That is, a feminist, gender-curious approach to international politics offers a lot more topics to investigate because it makes visible the full workings of myriad forms of power.In the revised edition, Enloe adds content on new manifestations of militarism, gives new accounts of women in and affected by the military, and comments on the various ways women "have sought to resist the devastating effects of violence and war", noting the work of Syrian and Iraqi feminists and Afghan women. [1] Reception [ edit ] The very rarity of professional international political commentators taking seriously either women's experiences of international politics or women's gender analyses of international politics is, therefore, itself a political phenomenon that needs to be taken seriously. What so many non-feminist-informed international commentators ignore has been explored by the burgeoning academic field of gender and international relations. That is, paying close attention to-and explaining the causes and consequences of-what is so frequently ignored can be fruitful indeed. a b R.I.S., and Cynthia Enloe. "Volume Information." Review of International Studies 27.4 (2001): n. pag. JSTOR. Web. September 28, 2016.