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Cynthia Enloe as The "Curious Feminist": analyzing empires, militarism, and war.

Article Excerpt
Cynthia Enloe, MANEUVERS: THE INTERNATIONAL POLITICS OF MILITARIZING WOMEN'S LIVES. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000. 418p. $22.95, ISBN 0-520-22070-6.

--. THE CURIOUS FEMINIST: SEARCHING FOR WOMEN IN A NEW AGE OF EMPIRE. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004. 367p. $21.95, ISBN 0-520-24381-1.

--. GLOBALIZATION AND MILITARISM: FEMINISTS MAKE THE LINK. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007. 187p. $19.95, ISBN 0-7425-4112-6.

If I were to point to the one book that has had the most impact on my life to date, it would be Cynthia Enloe's widely read and celebrated Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. (1) I first read it in 1994, during my junior year in college--four years after it went to print in the U.S. I was an international studies major who, before Bananas, had never taken a women's studies class. I read Bananas as part of an independent study on feminist international relations and immediately was looked. I changed my plans for graduate school from anthropology to international relations (IR) and subsequently focused my attention in my studies to questions about women, gender, and feminism. Today I work in a women's studies department as a specialist in gender and IR. Certainly there are many books that form the field of feminist IR, but for me (as well as, I imagine, for many others), it all started with Bananas.

What was it about Bananas in particular that helped lead me to become an academic in feminist IR? I think it was simply that, at Enloe's urging, I began to see the world in a monumentally different way. She demonstrated that "gender makes the world go found," (2) and she meant that quite literally. No longer did the study of international relations just include the latest weaponry system, international trade agreements, presidents and prime ministers. She argued that to make full sense of international politics, one needs to pay attention to chambermaids, flight attendants, sex workers, nannies, diplomatic wives, and people like me--a whole host of women who have been thought of as marginal at best, or not relevant at worst, to the serious study of international relations. It was through reading Bananas for the first time that I started to actually see what was invisible before--the workings of femininity and masculinity in war, peace, and the global marketplace--and the at ignited my curiosity.

Indeed, it is through the lens of a "feminist curiosity" that Enloe frames her most recent three books, which I review here. She uses this lens explicitly in The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire and Globalization and Militarism: Feminists Make the Link, and more implicitly in Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women's Lives.

As a teacher, scholar, and activist, I find Enloe's elaboration of a feminist curiosity a real boon. What she does so skillfully is ask her readers to take stock of all those assumptions, notions, and...

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