To do a gender investigation fueled by a feminist curiosity requires asking not only about the meanings of masculinity and femininity but also about how those meanings determine where women are and what they think about being there. Conducting a feminist gender analysis requires investigating power: what forms does power take? Who wields it? How are some gendered wieldings of power camouflaged so they do not even look like power? Most of the non-feminist-informed activists who pushed for the Arms Trade Treaty focused their attention on export figures, import figures, patterns of armed conflict, and gun-exporting governments' and their weapons manufacturers' complicity in enabling those damaging armed conflicts. It was their analyses, too, that informed most mainstream news coverage. What the women of IANSA, WILPF, and Global Action did was distinct: they looked deeper into armed conflicts to chart the gendered dynamics of guns, both gun violence's causes and its consequences. IANSA's women activists in Mali, Congo, Brazil, the Philippines, and other countries that had experienced years of violence played a crucial role. They asked, "Where are the women?" And "Where are the guns?" They interviewed women about where guns were in their own daily lives. They revealed how politicized conflict became gendered conflict. They exposed the causal connections between group armed violence and violence perpetrated inside homes and families. And they demonstrated how those guns when not even fired could infuse relationships between women and men with fear and intimidation. Listening to women's diverse experiences of living with guns in their communities and their homes, they painted a Big Picture: the massive international exports of guns sustained gender-based violence as a pillar of international and national patriarchy. To become smarter in the feminist sense of smarter, one therefore has to constantly stretch one’s gender curiosity. Asking Where are the women? won’t necessarily reap instant or superficial rewards. In fact, one might feel as though one is risking one’s status as a serious person when asking where the women are—and why they are there, who is benefiting from their being there, and what they think about being there. One’s mentor, editor, or boss may make it clear that he or she considers spending one’s time pursuing these gender questions a waste.

Bananas, Beaches and Bases by Cynthia Enloe | Perlego [PDF] Bananas, Beaches and Bases by Cynthia Enloe | Perlego

a b R.I.S., and Cynthia Enloe. "Volume Information." Review of International Studies 27.4 (2001): n. pag. JSTOR. Web. September 28, 2016. The intricately crafted final version of the Arms Trade Treaty was passed by the General Assembly on April 2, 2013 (with the delegates of Syria, Iran, and North Korea casting the three "no" votes). Its passage was the result of many actors, many efforts, many forms of analysis. But if one does not ask, "Where were the women?" one will miss who tried to dilute the ATT and why. If one ignores the thinking and the activism of the WILPF and IANSA women, one also will miss the innovative feminist thinking that causally linked international gun political economies to the political economies of sexualized wartime violence, domestic violence, and the processes of intimidation that severely limit women's economic and political participation. Moreover, one will miss the feminist-informed listening, data collection, analysis, and strategizing that transformed a groundbreaking international agreement between governments into an instrument for furthering women's rights.As hard as this will be, it will take all of this imagining-and more-if you are going to make reliable sense of international politics. Stretching your imagination, though, will not be enough. Making feminist sense of international politics requires that you exercise genuine curiosity about each of these women's lives-and the lives of women you have yet to think about. And that curiosity will have to fuel energetic detective work, careful digging into the complex experiences and ideas of domestic workers, hotel chambermaids, women's rights activists, women diplomats, women married to diplomats, women who are the mistresses of male elites, women sewing-machine operators, women who have become sex workers, women soldiers, women forced to become refugees, and women working on agribusiness plantations. Lady Travelers, Beauty Queens, Stewardesses, and Chamber Maids: The International Gendered Politics of Tourism Figure 1. Egyptian women protesting sexual harassment hold up signs in Arabic and English, Cairo, 2013. Photo: OPantiSH. The politics of marriage can become even more intensely international as a result of gendered pressures from outside: colonial rule, new international norms of human rights, transnational religious evangelizing, and membership in new interstate unions whose standards have to be met. A family's wedding album rarely shows what power was wielded nationally or internationally and by whom in that ceremony. One has to dig deeper, even when the digging makes one uneasy. Runyan, Anne Sisson (1991). "Reviewed work: The International Politics of Agricultural Trade: Canadian-American Relations in a Global Agricultural Context, Theodore H. Cohn". The American Political Science Review. 85 (1): 333–335. doi: 10.2307/1962954. JSTOR 1962954. S2CID 210663775.

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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. The Vatican was a crucial player in the UN Arms Trade Treaty negotiations. The Vatican has "observer status" at the UN (as does the Palestinian delegation). This status gives the Vatican's delegates access to crucial discussions among voting state delegations, where its opinions and interpretations often carry significant weight. In each UN treaty negotiation process, the state participants decide whether or not observers will be allowed to cast votes on the final proposed document. In the Arms Trade Treaty process, observers were not allowed to vote. But throughout the multistage negotiations, the Vatican's delegates were omnipresent and influential. Its delegates helped to create what feminists called the "unholy alliance" between the UN delegates of the Vatican, Russia, Syria, and Iran. The Vatican led the resistance to including the phrase gender-based violence in the Arms Trade Treaty. Over the years, the Vatican's delegates have treated social constructions of male and female as anathema. Thus no "gender." They pressed, instead, for the more patriarchal phrase violence against women and children. Furthermore, the Vatican pushed to have violence against women and children inserted only in the treaty's opening preamble. That is, they were comfortable with including violence against women and children in the final treaty as a motivating reason for creating this new interstate agreement, but were opposed to it being made a binding criterion that governments would be obligated to use when they assessed their own gun exports. 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. Ward, K. (1993). "Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics". Contemporary Sociology. 22 (1): 80–82. doi: 10.2307/2075007. JSTOR 2075007.Enloe, Cynthia H., 1938- . Papers, 1977-1984: A Finding Aid". Harvard University Library - Online Archival Search Information System (OASIS). Archived from the original on April 3, 2017 . Retrieved June 3, 2014. Most of all, one has to become interested in the actual lives-and thoughts-of complicatedly diverse women. One need not necessarily admire every woman whose life one finds interesting. Feminist attentiveness to all sorts of women is not derived from hero worship. Some women, of course, will turn out to be insightful, innovative, and even courageous. Upon closer examination, other women will prove to be complicit, intolerant, or self-serving. The motivation to take all women's lives seriously lies deeper than admiration. Asking "Where are the women?" is motivated by a determination to discover exactly how this world works. One's feminist-informed digging is fueled by a desire to reveal the ideas, relationships, and policies those (usually unequal) gendered workings rely upon. Cynthia Enloe's Report from The Syrian Peace Talks, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom January 30, 2014. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2020-03-14 16:02:07 Boxid IA1792014 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Col_number COL-609 Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier While you might daydream about becoming a senior foreign policy expert in your country’s diplomatic corps, you may deliberately shy away from thinking about whether you will be able to sustain a relationship with a partner while you pursue this ambition. You try not to think about whether your partner will be willing to cope with both diplomacy’s social demands and the pressures you together will endure living in a proverbial media fishbowl.

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Third, these feminist transnational groups' analyses and actions can be ignored-their reports never cited, their staff members never invited to speak as experts, their leaders or activists never turned to for interviews-on the questionable grounds that their campaigns are lost causes. Behind this justification is the notion that challenging entrenched masculinized privileges and practices in today's international affairs is hopeless, therefore naive, therefore not worthy of serious attention. Further underpinning this final argument are the stunningly ahistorical assertions that (a) any advancements that women have gained have come not as a result of women's political theorizing and organizing but because women have been given these advancements by enlightened men in power, and (b) we collectively have "always" understood such useful political concepts as "reproductive rights," "sexual harassment," "systematic wartime rape," and "the glass ceiling." This latter assertion overlooks the fact that each of these revelatory concepts was hammered out and offered to the rest of us by particular activists at particular moments in recent political history. Bates, Laura (November 6, 2017). " 'Never be the most feminist person you know' – Laura Bates meets Cynthia Enloe". Theguardian.com . Retrieved November 7, 2017.

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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.

Bananas, beaches and bases : making feminist sense Citation - Bananas, beaches and bases : making feminist sense

Smarter. I’ve thought a lot about what it means to become smarter. I don’t 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 one’s explanations. And nuanced does not mean vague. It means capable of describing with clarity the multiple relationships at work and their consequences. At the beginning of her career, Enloe mainly focused on studying ethnic and racial politics. She completed her dissertation in Malaysia on a Fulbright Scholarship from 1965-1966. There, she researched the country's ethnic politics. Ten years after receiving her PhD, Enloe had written six books on the subject of ethnical tensions and its role in politics, however she had yet to look at any of these subjects from a feminist angle; something she admits she is “embarrassed of.” [8] It wasn't until she first began teaching at Clark University, in the middle of the U.S.-Vietnam war, that Enloe really began to develop her feminist thought. Enloe spoke with a colleague at Clark, the only man on the faculty who was a veteran, about his experiences during the Vietnam war. He mentioned that Vietnamese women were hired by American soldiers to do their laundry. She began to wonder how history would be different if the entire war had been told through the eyes of these Vietnamese women. 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. Pocahontas was a Powhatan Indian, the daughter of a tribal chief who acted as an intermediary between her own people and colonizing Englishmen; she later married one of these English settlers and traveled to London, as if confirming that the colonial enterprise was indeed a civilizing mission. She never returned to her New World homeland, however, for she died of civilization’s coal dust in her lungs. Gill, V. (1985). "Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics". Journal of Peace Research. 22 (1): 87–90. doi: 10.1177/002234338502200107. JSTOR 423590.Filipino women entertainers near the U.S. Navy’s Subic Bay base line up for compulsory examinations, 1988 That is, a feminist, gender-curious approach to international politics offers a lot more topics to investigate because it makes visible the full workings of myriad forms of power. In recent decades, hardworking and irreverent researchers, teachers, and writers—women and men—have revealed that making diverse women visible exposes the actual workings of international politics. Women as Chinese businessmen’s mistresses, women sewing clothes for Tommy Hilfiger and washing pesticides off Chiquita’s 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 UN—they observe, they cope, they calculate, they strategize, and sometimes they organize. Here is what I’ve 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.