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

Product Information

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. 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. Book Genre: Feminism, Gender, History, International Relations, Nonfiction, Politics, Social Justice 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. Cohn Carol, Enloe Cynthia (2003). "A Conversation with Cynthia Enloe: Feminists Look at Masculinity and the Men Who Wage War". Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. 28 (4): 1187–107. doi: 10.1086/368326. S2CID 145710099.

Bananas, beaches and bases : making feminist sense of

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).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. 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. 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.

Bananas, Beaches and Bases - Google Books

Enloe’s important book is still provocatively political, shamelessly radical and genuinely feminist. But what substantially distinguishes the second edition of Bananas, Beaches and Bases from the first is the level of reflection: while in 1989 Enloe’s ambition was more limited – to include women in IR, now it has become a concrete project starting with an imagined meeting of these diverse women to talk about international politics as experienced and shaped by them – to collectively organize and transform unequal gender power relations. At the same time, we can be more curious about who does not pay attention to women's experiences-of war, marriage, trade, travel, revolution, and plantation and factory work. Who reaps rewards when women's experiences of these international affairs are treated as if they were inconsequential, mere "human interest" stories? That is, one becomes an international political investigator when one seeks to figure out who is rewarded if they treat women's experiences and women's gender analyses as if either were mere embellishments, almost entertainment, as if neither sheds meaningful light on the causes of the unfolding global events. Rewards are political. This assertion-that many commentators underestimate power-may seem odd, since so many gender- incurious commentators appear to project an aura of power themselves, as if their having insights into the alleged realities of power bestows on them a mantle of power. Yet it is these same expert commentators who gravely underestimate both the amount and the kinds of power it has taken to create and to perpetuate the international political system we all are living in today. It is not incidental that the majority of the people invited to serve as expert foreign affairs commentators are male. For instance, one study revealed that, although white men constitute only 31 percent of today's total U.S. population, they made up 62 percent of all the expert guests on the three most influential American evening cable news channels.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.

Bananas, Beaches and Bases - Google Books Bananas, Beaches and Bases - Google Books

No commentator has done more than Cynthia Enloe to explore the numerous roles that ordinary women play in the international system and global political economy -- as industrial and domestic workers; activists; diplomats and soldiers; wives of diplomats and soldiers; sex workers; and much else besides," wrote Adam Jones in his review of Maneuvers in the journal Contemporary Politics. [18] Enloe, Cynthia H., 1938- . Papers, 1977-1984: A Finding Aid". Harvard University Library - Online Archival Search Information System (OASIS). Archived from the original on April 3, 2017 . Retrieved June 3, 2014.Cynthia Enloe's Report from The Syrian Peace Talks, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, January 30, 2014 Contributor, Loaded Questions: Women in Militaries, Wendy Chapkis, ed., Amsterdam: Transnational Institute; Washington: Institute for Policy Studies, 1981.

Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Book Review: Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist

All the women and men who have tried to make us genuinely smarter about international politics have revealed that what is international is far broader than mainstream experts assume, and that what is political reaches well beyond the public square. Sometimes taking these two new understandings on board has made my head spin. But it also has energized me. The Big Push: Exposing and Challenging the Persistence of Patriarchy, Oakland, University of California Press, 2018. 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.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.