Will I love Bananas, Beaches and Bases?

“Where are the women?” So goes this 1989 classic’s opening gambit.

We think politics is the domain of men, Enloe points out, but women have long been out there doing vital and often invisible work, whether as diplomats’ wives, sex workers recruited around US army bases, farmers, or labor leaders.

Bringing this gendered labor to the forefront of international relations is Enloe’s strength. She discusses how images of women “work,” as in the Chiquita Banana ads that introduced American housewives to this unusual fruit and helped expand United Fruit’s bloody empire, but also studies women’s transnational labor organizing.

Reading this… show more.

As a graduate student, I picked up this book on gender and international relations, and there was no turning back; I now knew my domain!

I realized where I stood in the male-dominated discipline of international relations, where concerns of "Man, State, and the War" dominate. The often-overlooked frivolousness of domesticity is also a matter of international relations. This book asks: "Where are women?" as it explores the gendered aspects of everyday life, as often we women tend to ask, navigating through the alleys of personal and professional spaces.

Making feminist sense of international politics requires genuine curiosity about multi-layered… show more.

Enloe’s book, to my mind, started Feminist International Relations. Published in 1989, written during the waning years of the Cold War, Enloe exploded our minds by asking questions we had never heard in our IR classes before, like how do women feel about nuclear-tipped cruise missiles being emplaced in their country?  How do they feel about NATO bases and American soldiers in their city? In other words, Enloe pressed us to ask whether “security” from a male perspective is the same as “security” from a female perspective. And if those conceptions differ, as Enloe argues, then is it possible that… show more.