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

Product Information

Enloe, Cynthia. 2000. Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women's Lives. London: University of California Press, p. 33.

Bananas, Beaches and Bases by Cynthia Enloe - Paperback

Runyan, A. (1991). "Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics". The American Political Science Review. 85 (1): 333–335. doi: 10.2307/1962955. JSTOR 1962955. S2CID 198598826. Full Book Name: Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics [Updated Edition] Cynthia Enloe's Report from The Syrian Peace Talks, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, January 30, 2014 The book describes how gender, ethnicity and class affect the everyday lives of women worldwide, using a variety of sources including historical and government documents, biographical literature, news media and interviews. The book features chapters on tourism, colonialism, nationalism, women and military bases, diplomatic spouses, Carmen Miranda and banana plantations, female textile workers, international bankers, migrant domestic workers and the International Monetary Fund. [2] 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."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. 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. Cynthia Enloe was born in New York City and grew up in Manhasset, Long Island, a New York suburb. Her father was from Missouri and went to medical school in Germany from 1933 to 1936. Her mother went to Mills College and married Cynthia's father upon graduation. [5] 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. 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.

Bananas, beaches and bases : making feminist sense of

Adam Jones, Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women's Lives, by Cynthia Enloe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), Contemporary Politics, 7: 2 (2001), pp. 171–75. Coauthor (with Guy Pauker and Frank Golay), Diversity and Development in Southeast Asia: The Coming Decade, New York: McGraw-Hill and Council of Foreign Relations, 1977. 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."

About the Book

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. 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.

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

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. If one fails to pay close attention to women-all sorts of women-one will miss who wields power and for what ends. That is one of the core lessons of feminist international investigation. 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. Professor Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases. Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, University of California Press, 2014. 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.Consider one common journalistic trivializing device: using a photograph or a bit of video footage of women to illustrate a news story-women shown grieving seems especially alluring to editors-but then interviewing only men for the main content of the journalistic account. Most coverage of international affairs is crafted with the presumption that only men-diverse men, rival men-have anything useful to say about what we all are trying to make sense of. Feminists routinely count how many men and how many women are interviewed in any political news story. A ratio of six to one or seven to zero is common. 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." Ferguson Kathy E (2001). "Reading Militarism and Gender with Cynthia Enloe". Theory & Event. 5 (4). doi: 10.1353/tae.2001.0037. S2CID 144934267. 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.