Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Cynthia Enloe on Militarization, Feminism, and the International Politics of Banana Boats

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Let's go back to this Dole California ship in the background. That’s a gendered ship! Let’s look at some of the gendered aspects involved in this banana boat. Who produces Dole bananas? It’s women that are working on the banana plantations in Central America. And what about the ship’s crew? It's a small crew because it's a container ship—but they aren't simply ‘men’. I would guess they are Filipino men navigating bananas from Central America to California. And they have relationships at home; they're sending money home. Dole, moreover, has a whole executive hierarchy that, in my guess, are male and probably they don't look anything like the crew on that ship, let alone like the plantation workers. And it is here in San Diego feeding the American public—through shopping done by women. So, that ship is definitely making the world go round. It's definitely key not only to what we eat for breakfast, but also to globalized capitalism. You can't explain that ship in its entirety without asking which men, why those men, and what their relationship is to which women.

That's one of the things that I learned—I read a lot of history and, going back to what I was affected by, when I was first becoming a feminist in my academic work, the people I was reading were overwhelmingly historians and that has been so good for me. Amongst the first historians that I read were historians of the globalized textile industry. One of the things that I learned from a historian named Judy Lown, who is British, was that the early textile entrepreneurs requested—informed—their engineers to create textile looms—the technology with levers if you will—so that they could be worked by children and women. This then gets naturalized to ‘Oh, the textile industry is perfect for women, because look at the machinery!’ But in fact, it was the entrepreneur who said, ‘no, make these machines usable for women’, because at that point, if you could get farm girls off British farms, you could pay them less than the skilled male weavers.

So structures matter, but it doesn't mean that gender doesn't matter. There's an assumption, maybe by people who don't do gender research, that actually gender is all in the area of culture. Gender is structured and is made structured, because structures are human-made. Conducting gender research means to always ask ‘What role is masculinity playing, and what role is femininity playing?’ Where are the women, where are the men, why are they each there, who gains from them being in those places?—and you're off and running. Pick the topic and you're ready.

It is true that the legitimation of many structures is the process by which we are persuaded that these structures are natural. That is the idea that the labour market is the invisible hand. But that's why I look for decisions in history because if I can find the decisions, meaning the decisions made one way rather than another way, then there's evidence that that structure actually not only was created in the first place, but has to be maintained every day.

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But the protector is the one who gets to know the outside world. If you're protected, you are domesticated. And you're in the private sphere, and you're definitely in the local, domestic sphere—and you're grateful. If you are the protector, you're presumed to have to know about the greater world, because how else could you be the protector? So even if you are not worldly, there's pressure on you to act as though you are able to assess the threats. That just sets up the whole political hierarchy. If the protected is feminized and the protector is masculinized and the protector is supposed to be worldly and rational and strategic and the protected is supposed to be nurturing and grateful, you have patriarchy. Patriarchy can take so many different forms. It can fit a lot of different personalities and a lot of different structures, so you can have patriarchies that are quite comfortable. I oftentimes think that patriarchy, as a particular way of ordering human life, wouldn't work if a lot of women weren't persuaded that it was good for them.

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Cynthia Enloe’s career has included Fulbrights in Malaysia and Guyana, and guest professorships in Japan, Britain and Canada, as well as lecturing in Sweden, Norway, Germany, Korea, Turkey and at universities around the U.S. Her books and articles have been translated into Spanish, Turkish, Japanese, Korean, Swedish, and German. She has written for Ms. Magazine and has appeared on National Public Radio and the BBC. Enloe’s twelve books include Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (2000), Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives (2004), and Globalization and Militarism: Feminists Make the Link (2007). Her newest book is Nimo’s War, Emma’s War: Making Feminist Sense of the Iraq War (forthcoming from University of California Press, spring, 2010). In years past, Enloe’s feminist teaching and research has focused on the interplay of women’s politics in the national and international arenas, with special attention to how women’s labor is made cheap in globalized factories (especially sneaker factories) and how women’s emotional and physical labor has been used to support governments’ war-waging policies—and how many women have tried to resist both of those efforts.


http://www.theory-talks.org/2012/05/theory-talk-48.html