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. Journal of Women, Politics & Policy - Editorial board". Taylor and Francis . Retrieved 3 June 2014. 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.

Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of

Pocahontas was a Powhatan Indian, the daughter of a tribal chief who acted as an intermediary between her own people and colonizing Englishmen; she later married one of these English settlers and traveled to London, as if confirming that the colonial enterprise was indeed a civilizing mission. She never returned to her New World homeland, however, for she died of civilization’s coal dust in her lungs. 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. ³ 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. 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 ] 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. 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 first publisher of Bananas was Pandora Press, a small, innovative feminist British publisher. I was, I confess, nervous when I learned that the American publisher most interested in copublishing it would be a major university press. I thought to myself: Oh, but then activist women and profeminist men will never see the book. I was wrong. I was missing a crucial development: feminists were rising into the ranks of influential editors inside many university presses. Naomi Schneider, now executive editor at the University of California Press, has been a believer in Bananas, making sure that it would be available to a wide and diverse range of interested readers. It was Naomi who convinced me to look anew at all the topics and questions here, to undertake this thorough updating and revision. Only Naomi could have persuaded me. Also on the skilled publishing team that has turned this newly updated manuscript into the handsome book you are holding are Kate Warne, Claudia Smelser, Christopher Lura, Elena McAnespie, and Bonita Hurd. I am indebted to each of them. 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. 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." 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 Second, if we continue to ignore the distinct ideas and actions of the British and American women abolitionists, we will underestimate the internal tensions that marked the transatlantic antislavery movement itself: to sustain their movement over decades and in the face of formidable opposition, male and female antislavery activists not only had to reconcile their differing ideas about race, property, freedom, and the meaning of humanity, but they also had to work out among themselves their contentious differences over femininity, mascul

Bananas, Beaches and Bases - De Gruyter Bananas, Beaches and Bases - De Gruyter

Published by University of California Press 2014 Bananas, Beaches and Bases Making Feminist Sense of International Politics 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. 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. 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

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Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2020-03-14 16:02:07 Boxid IA1792014 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Col_number COL-609 Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier 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. 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. 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. 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.

Bananas, beaches and bases : making feminist sense of

Cynthia Enloe". Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University . Retrieved 2023-04-19. 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.Full Book Name: Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics [Updated Edition] 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. a b Van Hook, Stephanie. "Taking Women's Lives Seriously - an Interview with Cynthia Enloe - Waging Nonviolence." Waging Nonviolence Taking Women's Lives Seriously an Interview with Cynthia Enloe Comments. N.p., September 13, 2012. Web. September 27, 2016. 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. Carol Cohn and Cynthia Enloe, "A Conversation with Cynthia Enloe: Feminists Look at Masculinity and the Men Who Wage War," Signs, Vol. 28, No. 4 (Summer 2003): 1187–1107

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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.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. The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War, Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1993 (published in Japanese, 1999); new ed. Berkeley & London, University of California Press, 2000 (published in Turkish, 2003). a b Enloe, Cynthia H. Nimo's War, Emma's War: Making Feminist Sense of the Iraq War. Berkeley: University of California, 2010. Print.