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

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Smarter. I’ve thought a lot about what it means to become smarter. I don’t think it means simply to become more clever, more facile, more hip. It sometimes means to become more cautious. It certainly means to become more nuanced in one’s explanations. And nuanced does not mean vague. It means capable of describing with clarity the multiple relationships at work and their consequences. 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. 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. Most of all, one has to become interested in the actual lives—and thoughts—of complicatedly diverse women. One need not necessarily admire every woman whose life one finds interesting. Feminist attentiveness to all sorts of women is not derived from hero worship. Some women, of course, will turn out to be insightful, innovative, and even courageous. Upon closer examination, other women will prove to be complicit, intolerant, or self-serving. The motivation to take all women’s lives seriously lies deeper than admiration. Asking Where are the women? is motivated by a determination to discover exactly how this world works. One’s feminist-informed digging is fueled by a desire to reveal the ideas, relationships, and policies those (usually unequal) gendered workings rely upon. Full Book Name: Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics [Updated Edition]

Cynthia Enloe - Wikipedia Cynthia Enloe - Wikipedia

Thus it is important to investigate, despite their differences, these influential media companies' common dismissal of unorganized and organized women as insignificant and to weigh carefully the risks that such dismissals carry. Each dismissal hobbles us when we try to explain why international politics takes the path it does. The Big Push: Exposing and Challenging the Persistence of Patriarchy, Oakland, University of California Press, 2018. 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. The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom was founded a century ago by transnational feminist peace activists in the midst of World War I. Many groups on this partial list, by contrast, have been created in the years since the 1990s. New transnational networks and coalitions are on the brink of being launched today. Each network has its own gendered international political history.Lacey, Anita, and Thomas Gregory. "Twenty-five Years of Bananas, Beaches and Bases: A Conversation with Cynthia Enloe." N.p., August 2016. Web. September 27, 2016. a b c Enloe, Cynthia. 2000. Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press. Parikh, M. (1991). "Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics". Journal of the History of Sexuality. 2 (1): 125–128. JSTOR 3704111.

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

Published by University of California Press 2014 Chapter one. Gender Makes the World Go Round Where Are the Women? From the book 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. To save this article to your Google Drive 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 Google Drive account. 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.Please list any fees and grants from, employment by, consultancy for, shared ownership in or any close relationship with, at any time over the preceding 36 months, any organisation whose interests may be affected by the publication of the response. Please also list any non-financial associations or interests (personal, professional, political, institutional, religious or other) that a reasonable reader would want to know about in relation to the submitted work. This pertains to all the authors of the piece, their spouses or partners. 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? Gender makes the world go round -- On the beach: Sexism and tourism -- Nationalism and masculinity -- Base women -- Diplomatic wives -- Carmen Miranda on my mind: International politics of the banana -- Blue jeans and bankers -- 'Just like one of the family': Domestic servants in world politics

Bananas, Beaches and Bases by Cynthia Enloe - Paperback

Enloe, Cynthia H. "Nationalism and Masculinity & "Just Like One of The Family": Domestic Servants In World Politics." Bananas, Beaches & Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. Berkeley: U of California, 1990. 42+. Print. In Maneuvers; the International Politics of Militarizing Women's Lives, Enloe expands on her themes from Does Khaki Become You. She emphasizes the different experiences of women located in varied ethnic, national, class, and occupational contexts and how they are tailored to the needs of militarism, therefore embedding themselves in policy. In The American Political Science Review Mary Fainsod Katzenstein writes, "Those already among Enloe's wide readership will know some of this text's central arguments, but Maneuvers offers a trove of new insights. A thesis even more powerfully developed here than in Enloe's earlier writings is the title of the book—how policymakers maneuver to make strategic choices." Katzenstein later states, " Maneuvers has more than a functionalist lesson; by emphasizing policy choices and variability across time and national context, Enloe shows that militaries are not governed by primeval identities." [29] Honors and recognition [ edit ] Or consider an American elementary school teacher who designs a lesson plan to feature the Native American "princess" Pocahontas. Many of the children will have watched the Disney animated movie. Now, the teacher hopes, she can show children how this seventeenth-century Native American woman saved the Englishman John Smith from execution at Jamestown, Virginia, later converted to Christianity, married an English planter, and helped clear the way for the English colonization of America. (The teacher might also include in her lesson plan the fact that Pocahontas's 1614 marriage to John Rolfe was the first recorded interracial marriage in what was to become the United Sates.) Her young students might come away from their teacher's well-intentioned lesson having absorbed the myth that local women are easily charmed by their own people's foreign occupiers. Ward, K. (1993). "Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics". Contemporary Sociology. 22 (1): 80–82. doi: 10.2307/2075007. JSTOR 2075007.

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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 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]