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

The relations between governments depend on controlling women as symbols, consumers, workers, and emotional comforters. Enloe compares Pocahontas and Carmen Miranda, though they were three centuries apart. A Powhatan, Pocahontas married an English colonist and went to London, “as if confirming that the colonial enterprise was indeed a civilizing mission” (xxi). A Brazilian grocer’s daughter, Miranda became “a Hollywood star and the symbol of an American president’s Latin American policy” (xxi). Both women, whom men invoked as symbols and stereotypes, died prematurely. Enloe investigates what kinds of power have built the international political system.

To make sense of international politics, one must exercise curiosity about women’s lives and follow diverse women to places typically dismissed as private. Women at the margins of society assess and strategize and are a portal into the workings of the world. To ask where they are is to make power visible.

Enloe investigates power, which is often camouflaged, and to do so explores the meanings of femininity and masculinity and “how those meanings determine where women are and what they think about being there” (8). Power operates across international boundaries. For example, marriage is political and bestows citizenship on spouses in some instances. However, male commentators do not inquire about women’s roles and instead attribute them to tradition or culture. When women accept these expectations, they fail to see their political choices. Women’s collective resistance can change local and international power dynamics. Enloe cites the hysterical reaction that every women’s suffrage movement ignited as proof.

In the 21st century, transnational feminist groups and networks challenge the conventional workings of international politics. While these activists do not agree on everything, they have much in common. For example, Enloe notes, the groups are headed by women, foster autonomy among their grassroots membership, and urge women to participate in local and international politics. These political campaigns focus not just on government but on the media, international agencies, and corporations. Despite representing half of the world’s population, women are often dismissed as a special interest, especially when they assert their right to equal opportunity and fair treatment. Three rationales support this dismissal: that the areas exposed are private or domestic; that security, stability, crisis, and development are falsely considered separate from women’s labor, rights, education, and reproductive health; and that the activists are championing a lost cause. Enloe notes the ahistorical nature of the last rationale given the previous successes of those championing women’s causes.

Since 2000, activists have successfully used social media to break through the biases of mainstream media. However, this strategy cannot “match the cultural and political influence” wielded by mainstream media (20). Enloe cites two case studies to highlight what is missed when the media ignores women. In failing to highlight the lesser-known British and American women in the antislavery movement, commentators missed how much racialized, gendered power it took to sustain the system of slavery. Additionally, they underestimated internal tensions in the movement and failed to recognize the connection between this movement and suffrage campaigns. The second case study focuses on the 2013 International Arms Trade Treaty. Enloe highlights the important role of a transnational feminist alliance in the inclusion of the phrase “gender-based violence” in the treaty despite opposition from the Vatican and others, which preferred the phrase “women and children.” Activists exposed the connection between the international gun trade and gender-based violence.

When photos of government leaders included a woman, such as Margaret Thatcher, it became more difficult to ignore the fact that all the others were men. The war on terror, following the 9/11 attacks, promoted a form of masculinity that subordinated women and justified men in leadership roles. A patriarchal society, in which “relationships and inequalities are shaped by the privileging of particular masculinities and by women’s subordination to and dependence on men” (31), disparages all things feminine. Men demonstrate their masculinity, and the contest among them, in turn, shapes the international politics of domestic servants, sex workers, wives, and female workers. Women’s work is not for men, and men are rarely analyzed as men since they make their efforts to be masculine invisible.

Women are infrequently viewed as explainers, shapers, actors, and thinkers of the world. Enloe seeks to remap the boundaries of international politics. Family dynamics, consumer behaviors, travel choices, and relationships with others shape the world. Ideas about masculinity and femininity and efforts to control women are key to world making, as is resistance to those efforts. Because the world depends on artificial ideals of masculinity, it is fragile and open to radical change.