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

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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). The Big Push: Exposing and Challenging the Persistence of Patriarchy, Oakland, University of California Press, 2018. Simultaneously, a host of more explicitly organized transnational feminist groups and networks challenge the conventional workings of international politics today. Here is an admittedly incomplete list: Kim's Story" reveals how gender and war affect each other on the other side of the world in the United States, whether or not one is actual place of war or away from it. Kim is a young American woman married to a National Guard soldier who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her story shows that their nation's state of war is dependent on wives playing certain roles. In the United States, "women who married active-duty, full-time American soldiers had been socialized to perform the demanding role of 'the military wife' ... each woman needed to be persuaded that she was most helpful and loyal to her own husband if she organized her labor and emotions in a way that enhanced the military as a whole." [22] Yet when the men comes home, there are stories that are untold. The American media are reluctant to pursue stories of domestic violence against women whose husbands are involved with the military largely because it is too great of a business risk during wartime. The blame for this neglect and decision to treat male domestic violence as a nonissue is on the entire military's masculinized culture.

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One of the lasting legacies of those years has been the ever-expanding circle of feminist thinkers, students, and researchers in the far-reaching Feminist Theory and Gender Studies section of the International Studies Association. When we see each other, we trade hunches and findings; we encourage each other in our continuing investigations into the workings of patriarchy in all its guises. And we laugh. Whoever imagines that feminists don’t have a sense of humor clearly has never hung out with feminist researchers. 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. 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? 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.

Runyan, A. (1991). "Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics". The American Political Science Review. 85 (1): 333–335. doi: 10.2307/1962955. JSTOR 1962955. S2CID 198598826. The woman tourist and the chambermaid; the schoolteacher and her students; the film star, her studio owners, the banana company executives, the American housewife, and contemporary YouTube enthusiasts; the male soldier, the brothel owner, and the woman working as a prostitute-all are dancing an intricate international minuet. Those who look closely at the gendered causes and the gendered consequences of that minuet are conducting a feminist investigation of today's international political system. Cynthia Holden Enloe (born July 16, 1938) is an American political theorist, feminist writer, and professor. [1] [2] She is best known for her work on gender and militarism [3] and for her contributions to the field of feminist international relations. [4] She has also influenced the field of feminist political geography, with feminist geopolitics in particular.

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Most of the non-feminist-informed activists who pushed for the Arms Trade Treaty focused their attention on export figures, import figures, patterns of armed conflict, and gun-exporting governments' and their weapons manufacturers' complicity in enabling those damaging armed conflicts. It was their analyses, too, that informed most mainstream news coverage. What the women of IANSA, WILPF, and Global Action did was distinct: they looked deeper into armed conflicts to chart the gendered dynamics of guns, both gun violence's causes and its consequences. IANSA's women activists in Mali, Congo, Brazil, the Philippines, and other countries that had experienced years of violence played a crucial role. They asked, "Where are the women?" And "Where are the guns?" They interviewed women about where guns were in their own daily lives. They revealed how politicized conflict became gendered conflict. They exposed the causal connections between group armed violence and violence perpetrated inside homes and families. And they demonstrated how those guns when not even fired could infuse relationships between women and men with fear and intimidation. Listening to women's diverse experiences of living with guns in their communities and their homes, they painted a Big Picture: the massive international exports of guns sustained gender-based violence as a pillar of international and national patriarchy. University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. I began this book thinking about Pocahontas and ended it mulling over the life of Carmen Miranda. Pocahontas is buried in World’s End cemetery, England. Carmen Miranda has a museum dedicated to her in Rio. Neither is the usual starting point for thoughts about contemporary international politics, but each woman made me think in new ways about just how international politics works.A political scientist is often a bit intimidated by historians and archivists. But as I pursued my hunches about the light that Pocahontas and Carmen Miranda might shed on international politics, I knew I had to tread on historians’ ground. No one made me feel more at home in this adventure than David Doughan, librarian of the Fawcett Library, that treasure house of surprising information about British and imperial women’s history. Ann Englehart and Barbara Haber both encouraged me to make full use of the splendid resources of Radcliffe College’s Schlesinger Library. Edmund Swinglehurst, of the Thomas Cook Archives in London, opened up the world of tourism history. In addition to my own digging, I was aided by the research skills of my brother, David Enloe, as well as Lauran Schultz, Shari Geistfeld, and Deb Dunn. That is, making useful sense-feminist sense-of international politics requires us to follow diverse women to places that are usually dismissed by conventional foreign affairs experts as merely "private," "domestic," "local," or "trivial." As we will discover, however, a disco can become an arena for international politics. So can someone else's kitchen or your own closet. The Susan B. Northcutt Award, Women's Caucus for International Studies, International Studies Association, to recognize "a person who actively works toward recruiting and advancing women and other minorities in the profession, and whose spirit is inclusive, generous and conscientious." (2008) As hard as this will be, it will take all of this imagining—and more—if you are going to make reliable sense of international politics. Stretching your imagination, though, will not be enough. Making feminist sense of international politics requires that you exercise genuine curiosity about each of these women’s lives—and the lives of women you have yet to think about. And that curiosity will have to fuel energetic detective work, careful digging into the complex experiences and ideas of domestic workers, hotel chambermaids, women’s rights activists, women diplomats, women married to diplomats, women who are the mistresses of male elites, women sewing-machine operators, women who have become sex workers, women soldiers, women forced to become refugees, and women working on agribusiness plantations.

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Too often gender incurious commentators attribute women's roles in international affairs to tradition, cultural preferences, and timeless norms, as if each of these existed outside the realms where power is wielded, as if they were beyond the reach of decisions and efforts to enforce those decisions. What sacrifices a woman as a mother should make, what priorities a woman as a wife should embrace, what sexualized approaches in public a woman should consider innocent or flattering, what victim identity a refugee woman should adopt, what boundaries in friendships with other women a woman should police, what dutiful-daughter model a girl should admire-in reality, all of these are shaped by the exercise of power by people who believe that their own local and international interests depend on women and girls internalizing these particular feminized expectations. If women internalize these expectations, they will not see the politics behind them. Political commentators who do not question these internalizations will accept the camouflaged operations of power as if there were no power at work at all. That is dangerous. Ethnic Conflict and Political Development, Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1973 (repr. University Press of America, 1986).As one learns to look at the world through gender-curious feminist eyes, one learns to ask whether anything that passes for natural, inevitable, inherent, traditional, or biological has been made. One asks how all sorts of things have been made-the receding glacier, the low-cost sweatshirt, the heavily weaponized police force, the masculinized peace negotiation, the romantic marriage, the all-male Joint Chiefs of Staff. Asking how something has been made implies that it has been made by someone with a certain kind of power. Suddenly there are clues to trace; there is blame, credit, and responsibility to apportion, not just at the start but at each point along the way. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep content for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services To do a gender investigation fueled by a feminist curiosity requires asking not only about the meanings of masculinity and femininity but also about how those meanings determine where women are and what they think about being there. Conducting a feminist gender analysis requires investigating power: what forms does power take? Who wields it? How are some gendered wieldings of power camouflaged so they do not even look like power? Thus, if one is interested in gaining a reliable sense of national and international politics, one should be curious about all sorts of women's resistance, whether or not that resistance succeeds. Notes also are an extended thank-you. I am indebted to every one of the researchers and writers whose perceptive works I’ve cited here.