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

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1990

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface 1-Chapter 1

Chapters 2-3

Chapters 4-5

Chapters 6-7

Chapter 8-Conclusion

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Themes

The Role of Human Agency in National and International Politics

The patriarchal structure of international politics and economics was created and has been sustained via human efforts. Men have used policies, tokenism, new language, and cooptation to retain their grip on power. However, women are actors and shapers of this system as well. When they adhere to their prescribed roles, they help sustain the system. If they choose to challenge the patriarchal structure, they almost always face obstacles, humiliation, or worse. However, women who united and organized have effected change and thereby challenged the patriarchal structure. Enloe demonstrates this dynamic in several areas.

The global tourist industry entices men through sex tourism. To do so, policies must enable sex work (as, for example, Thailand did). Women are used as symbols to lure men via advertising campaigns. Iceland used its victory in a beauty pageant as the basis for a campaign to lure men for one-night stands. Women also make choices about when and where to travel. Those choices impact the gendered politics of the tourist industry. When India received widespread criticism for an infamous gang rape, the country chose to crack down on sexual assault. It did so not for the sake of Indian women’s safety but to assure foreign women travelers of safety. Any disruption to tourism threatens revenue.

When nationalist movements have arisen to break free from colonial rule, women have an opportunity to participate, but not on equal terms. Men actively suppress questioning of gender relations, labeling women who raise such issues as traitors. This suppression ensures that nationalism produces another patriarchal society. The military works to suppress challenges to patriarchy as well. It works with local officials to ensure that male soldiers have access to sex workers and seeks to keep soldiers’ wives compliant and satisfied through other means, such as shopping discounts. When military wives challenged leaders about inattention to domestic violence, the military reacted by decreasing the number of bases that housed families and shifted to “lily pads,” small bases where soldiers live without their families. Likewise, men’s dominance of diplomacy has been established via rules and practices. For example, before the 1970s, female diplomats had to resign from the US State Department if they married, while the organization expected male diplomats’ wives to perform several unpaid duties. To the extent that wives performed those duties, they helped sustain patriarchal practices. When the diplomats’ wives and other women at the State Department asserted their agency and began to challenge its policies, however, they successfully brought about changes.

Corporations in the banana and garment industries invoke policies and practices that disempower women. In the banana industry, women are hired to clean pesticides off the fruit and pack them. Paid below-subsistence wages, some turn to sex work. The corporations count on that to keep both the women and men under their control. In the garment industry, corporations, banks, and local officials (predominantly men) conspire to keep the wages of factory workers (predominantly women) low and allow them to work in unsafe conditions. When women organized in both these industries, they achieved some gains. Banana workers won a promise that sexual harassment claims would be taken seriously. Chinese garment workers won higher wages and improved conditions. Domestic workers, predominantly women, are exploited because of governmental policies that exempt these workers from labor laws. Countries who export these workers depend on the wages they send home and therefore do not complain about their mistreatment. When these workers organized despite myriad obstacles, they won legal protections in New York and an international treaty protecting their rights.

In all these areas, governments and corporations take actions to sustain patriarchy. They attempt to divide women and keep them from identifying common causes. When women overcome those divisions and create transnational alliances, they can challenge patriarchy. The system is not static but the result of human actions.

The Impact of International Politics on Women’s Daily Lives

International politics impacts women’s daily lives in devastating ways, and urgent action is needed considering the large-scale exploitation of women that occurs. Women often work for little or no money in dangerous conditions, and laws do not properly protect them from violence. As a result, women suffer trauma, poor health, injuries, and death. Enloe exposes these consequences through several examples.

In the global travel industry, women hold approximately 90% of the low-wage jobs, cleaning, cooking, and serving. The commercial airline industry in its infancy chose not to recruit or hire women as pilots even though many early pilots were women. Instead, flight attendants (who were mostly women then) had to organize to protect themselves from sexual harassment and demeaning “stewardess” uniforms, and the travel industry continues to use women as sex symbols to entice male travelers.

In the military, female soldiers often experience sexual assault. This issue was not acknowledged until the 21st century, and even then, it has been a battle to effect changes in the reporting structure so that women do not have to report rapes to the perpetrators. Male soldiers’ wives have received no support or help when they experienced domestic violence. The military expects women who accompany their husbands overseas to sacrifice their careers, and in the case of divorce, they are left without healthcare or a home. Sex workers who service US soldiers live in poor conditions. For example, in the Philippines, researchers found that of the

approximately 30,000 children born of Filipino mothers and American fathers each year during the 1970s and 1980s […] some 10,000 were thought to have become street children, many of them working as prostitutes servicing American male pedophiles (166).

Male diplomats’ wives, who served their country for no money, could find themselves destitute in old age if their husbands divorced them. They were not entitled to pensions. Before the 1970s, female diplomats lost their jobs if they married.

In many industries, women work in low-wage and dangerous jobs. In banana production, they are hired to clean pesticides off the fruit and often incur painful rashes as a result. They experience sexual harassment and receive below-subsistence wages, which causes some to turn to sex work. Their living conditions are unsanitary and crowded. Garment workers put in 11-hour days, six days a week, for low wages and in unsafe and unsanitary factory conditions. When factories in Bangladesh burned or collapsed in 2012 and 2013, more than 1,000 women died. Domestic servants, exported from poor to wealthy countries, are vulnerable to exploitation. In many cases, they are grossly overworked, not fed properly, and denied the opportunity to quit and return home. In all these areas, the impact on women is devastating.

Women’s Invisibility in Mainstream Accounts of International Politics

Analysts and academics often speak of international politics as though women are not relevant, deeming the positions of women in the societal hierarchy outside the sphere of politics and therefore a private matter. Thus, women are rendered invisible. Enloe seeks to make women visible and, in doing so, expose the shortcomings of any analysis of international politics that omits women. She provides several examples of the faulty coverage of women.

When women have organized to challenge the workings of international politics, mainstream analysts have demeaned their efforts by referring to them as a special interest. However, men are rarely analyzed as men when pursuing interests woven into the power structure. Women’s efforts are dismissed as lost causes, private matters, and/or distinct from important issues, such as security and stability. Much is missed because of this blindness toward the role of women. Enloe cites the case studies of women’s roles in the antislavery movement and women’s input in the Global Arms Treaty to demonstrate how ignoring women prevents a clear understanding of the workings of international politics.

In nationalist campaigns, the media tends to overlook the role of women, which is substantial in most cases. The focus is on male leaders, who are the face of the campaign and become its heroes. The lack of attention on women’s participation enables gendered power structures to remain in place in the aftermath of nationalist campaigns. Likewise, the media and governments overlook the contributions of male diplomats’ wives. Enloe compares the obituaries of diplomats with those of their wives. The latter’s obituaries make no mention of their significant and lengthy contributions to foreign relations; they are unrecognized and therefore invisible. Likewise, male soldiers’ wives, living on bases abroad, assume a sort of invisibility. For example, the military did not want to hear about the prevalent issue of domestic violence. The struggles of these women did not feature in mainstream analysis of international politics.

The media pays more attention to heavy industries, which men dominate, than to light industries, which women dominate. Heavy industry equates with national security, and its jobs are highly valued, so the press covers any threat to those industries. In contrast, when garment manufacturers, such as Levi Strauss, began closing factories in the US South and shifting to overseas manufacturing, the economic devastation that garment workers (mainly women) experienced was largely ignored. When tragedy strikes, as it did in Bangladesh, the media spotlight on the victims briefly results in reports about unsafe conditions in the garment industry. However, their connections to international banking and corporate executives of popular clothing companies receive no coverage, and attention to the issue quickly vanishes. This lack of curiosity and inattention results in garment workers remaining invisible and unsafe. Domestic workers are completely hidden from public view; analysts deem their work to be in the private sphere. However, these workers are imported from other countries, largely unprotected by labor laws, and subjected to harassment or worse from immigration authorities.

Enloe encourages other scholars to rectify women’s invisibility in mainstream accounts of international politics. Only by making women visible can the true workings of international politics and power be understood.