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

"It’s a deceptively simple question: where are the women? What that question did for Enloe, and does for us, is open up entire realms and registers of life as important spaces where global politics is constructed, and is lived, in ways that are often highly gendered. And by being gendered they are, of course, by default political. The realms that are opened up by this deceptively simple question include spaces at the margins of places that we already considered political: corridors and secretaries’ offices and the diplomatic homes of people that we already recognise as global political actors. But it also opens up spaces that don’t seem to be political at first glance: places like brothels, tourist resorts, sweatshops, movie sets. One of the examples that Enloe uses is an issue that everyone recognises as central to global politics: military force. Asking where the women are on and around military bases—particularly in a network of military bases, like the US has—shows us that security relations can be affected not just by formal relationships between governments, but the everyday relations on and around these military bases. There are policies that govern and structure life on and around these bases. These policies are, Enloe argues, highly gendered. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Military marriage policies, it turns out, play a role, and have played a role historically, in international security politics. Policies relating to dating and sexual relations or violations of those policies, impact on the relations between soldiers and contractors on the bases, representatives of one state, and local men and women. And, these relations themselves impact on the relationship between the US and the state hosting the base. There’s a politics of dating, sex, and marriage on and around the base, which you won’t see if you don’t ask: ‘Where are the women?’ The book as a whole surveys a number of these kinds of spaces and practices, which may not necessarily be seen as political at first glance. It shows not only how they’re highly gendered and thus political by default, but that these spaces and practices help construct global politics itself."