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

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For example, a British woman decides to cancel her plans for a winter holiday in Egypt. She thinks Egypt is exotic, the warm weather would be welcome, and cruising down the Nile sounds exciting; but she is nervous about political upheaval in the wake of the overthrow of Egypt’s previous regime. So instead she books her winter vacation in Jamaica. In making her tourism plans, she is playing her part in creating the current international political system. She is further deepening Egypt’s financial debt while helping a Caribbean government earn badly needed foreign currency. And no matter which country she chooses for her personal pleasure, she is transforming chambermaid into a major globalized job category. 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.

Bananas, Beaches and Bases - Wikipedia

This is the work of a well-traveled feminist mulling over the inequalities of the postmodern world. In a lively overview of tourism, the food industry, army bases, nationalism, diplomacy, global factories, and domestic work, Enloe persuasively argues that gender is key to the workings of international relations. To save this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Dropbox account. It is probably a bit insane to take on the topics covered in this book. It has only been possible to make the attempt because I have had the wise and generous support of insightful friends and colleagues. First and foremost has been Joni Seager, coauthor of the groundbreaking feminist atlas, Women in the World. There was much less chance of my slipping into parochial assumptions with her as a constant sounding board, reading every chapter, passing on gems of information that a mere political scientist would never have seen. Others who have read chapters and given me valuable suggestions—and caveats—include Margaret Bluman, Laura Zimmerman, Serena Hilsinger, Ximena Bunster, and Margaret Lazarus. Superb copyediting has been done by Daphne Tagg. Margaret Bluman, my agent for this book, has also encouraged me to think that the questions posed were important ones for women committed to genuine social change. a b Enloe, Cynthia H. Nimo's War, Emma's War: Making Feminist Sense of the Iraq War. Berkeley: University of California, 2010. Print. Full Book Name: Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics [Updated Edition]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. 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. Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics is a book by Cynthia Enloe. It was first published in 1990, with a revised edition published in 2014. [1] The book focuses on feminist international relations theory, deriving its title from "the gendered history of the banana" as exemplified by promotion of sales through images of Carmen Miranda, as well as gendered issues regarding tourism and military bases. [2] Content [ edit ] The flaw at the core of these mainstream, seemingly "sophisticated" commentaries is how much they take for granted, how much they treat as inevitable, and thus how much about the workings of power they fail to question-that is, how many types of power, and how many wieldings and wielders of power, they miss. 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.

Bananas, Beaches and Bases by Cynthia Enloe | Perlego [PDF] Bananas, Beaches and Bases by Cynthia Enloe | Perlego

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.Cynthia Enloe's Report from The Syrian Peace Talks, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom January 30, 2014. 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? 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] But I was an unenlightened political scientist. For me, getting down on my knees to read Butler’s descriptions of nineteenth-century military prostitution, filed in boxes sitting under those water pipes, was thrilling. Thanks to the archivists at the Fawcett Library—and their energetic counterparts at the Thomas Cook travel library and the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, at Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University—international politics would never look the same to me again.