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

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.

Aihwa Ong, University of California, Berkeley

This new edition of Bananas, Beaches and Bases demonstrates beyond all doubt the enduring brilliance of Cynthia Enloes fastidious documenting of womens lives as they shape and are shaped by the power-play of international politics. In sharpening and freshening feminist curiosity in the contemporary period, this edition reminds us of both the stubborn tenacity of gendered inequality as it is etched into everyday life and, in more optimistic terms, the potentially transformative capacity with which womens lives inhere. A gritty yet erudite text illuminating the international topography of the current-day global gender regime that is of interest to fresh eyes as well as readers looking to get a handle on patriarchys mutability.

Paul Higate, Reader in Gender and Security at the School for Sociology, Politics and International Studies, the University of Bristol and editor of Military Masculinities: Identity and the State

This book is a rare gem. International relations will never look the same again. Through Bananas, Beaches and Bases and the many lives women live, Cynthia Enloe most persuasively shows that global politics is not where it is supposed to be. This updated edition of this classic is very welcome indeed.

Jef Huysmans, Professor of Security Studies, The Open University (UK)

Cynthia Enloes unparalleled skill in making the everyday lives of women visible in and relevant to international politics is on full display as she employs her feminist curiosity to challenge the boundaries of the international. Listening carefully and not afraid to admit surprise, Enloe weaves a tapestry of stories that reveal the workings of power from the personal to the political and back. Her sustained and deeply political engagement with women from all walks of lifeall over the worldmakes us genuinely smarter about global politics. You will not be able to put this book down.

Annick T. R. Wibben, author of Feminist Security Studies: A Narrative Approach

With Bananas, Beaches and Bases , Cynthia Enloe sparked an immense paradigm shift and produced multiple wildfires of feminist scholarship, from international relations to political economy to feminist theory. Now another generation of students, activists, and scholars can be made smarter with this new edition of this essential text.

Ethel Brooks, professor of Womens and Gender Studies and Sociology, Rutgers University

Cynthia Enloe is unequaled in her ability to make feminist sense of international politics. This groundbreaking book illustrates the inadequacies of analytic frames that do not take the workings of gendered power seriously, arguing persuasively that the most complex and comprehensive understandings of international politics must be fueled by feminist curiosity. A compelling, lucid, and engaging booka must for all our bookshelves.

Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Author of Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity

Bananas, Beaches and Bases

Making Feminist Sense of International Politics

Cynthia Enloe

Second Edition
Completely Revised and Updated

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley Los Angeles London

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 .

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

2014 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Enloe, Cynthia H., 1938

Bananas, beaches and bases: making feminist sense of international politics/Cynthia Enloe.

Second edition, Completely Revised and Updated.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-27999-5 (paperback)

ISBN 978-0-520-95728-2 (ebook)

1. WomenPolitical activity. 2. International relations. 3. Feminist theory. I. Title.

HQ 1236. E 55 2014

320.082dc23

2014009218

Manufactured in the United States of America

23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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 Z 39.481992 ( R 1997) ( Permanence of Paper ).

For Joni

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

14 and 15.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

There were exposed plumbing pipes overhead. It all seemed very precarious. If any of them sprung a leak, water would wash away the history of British womens political activism. This was the Fawcett Library in London in the years before it became what it now is, the Womens Library, wonderfully housed at the London School of Economics. But it was the below-the-pipes (and below-the-pavement) atmosphere that gave me the sense that I was on the edge, uncovering a layer of international political life that had been kept out of sight. Well, not out of sight of feminist historians. They had already begun to do their own excavations, bringing Mary Wollstonecraft, Josephine Butler, Mary Seacole, and the Pankhursts up to the surface for all of us to see, to think about afresh.

But I was an unenlightened political scientist. For me, getting down on my knees to read Butlers descriptions of nineteenth-century military prostitution, filed in boxes sitting under those water pipes, was thrilling. Thanks to the archivists at the Fawcett Libraryand their energetic counterparts at the Thomas Cook travel library and the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, at Radcliffe Institute, Harvard Universityinternational politics would never look the same to me again.

In recent decades, hardworking and irreverent researchers, teachers, and writerswomen and menhave revealed that making diverse women visible exposes the actual workings of international politics. Women as Chinese businessmens mistresses, women sewing clothes for Tommy Hilfiger and washing pesticides off Chiquitas bananas, women married to CIA operatives, women working in discos around military bases, women auditioning for the Miss World contest, women scrubbing floors in Saudi Arabia, and women lobbying delegates in the corridors of the UNthey observe, they cope, they calculate, they strategize, and sometimes they organize. Here is what Ive learned from taking these women seriously: if we pay sustained attention to each and all of these unheadlined women, we will become smarter about this world, smarter than a lot of mainstream experts.

Smarter. Ive thought a lot about what it means to become smarter. I dont 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 ones explanations. And nuanced does not mean vague. It means capable of describing with clarity the multiple relationships at work and their consequences.