5/13/24, 5:38 PM "Where are the women?

": An interview with Cynthia Enloe - Writing by Renee

"Where are the women?": An interview with Cynthia Enloe

Leave a Comment / Feminism and women's rights, Militarism / By reneejg

I began to read feminist literature — real, radical feminist literature — around 2014, and found it
transformative. Cynthia Enloe is one of my favourite feminist authors, because reading her book
Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics broadened my horizons
all over again. Cynthia’s work looks at the sexual politics of everything from agriculture to militarism
to high finance and sweatshop labour, and in the process offers readers new insight and clarity with
which to look at the world.

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5/13/24, 5:38 PM "Where are the women?": An interview with Cynthia Enloe - Writing by Renee

In February, I sent Cynthia a few questions by e-mail, which she managed to answer whilst travelling
between the United States and Iceland, where she teaches for one week per year. I hope the
interview sparks interest in Cynthia’s work.

What are some of the key questions you encourage students to ask more often, and what sort of
connections do you encourage them to make and explore, in order to develop a broader analysis?

The challenging in classrooms is always in at least two directions, my trying to challenge students,
but also them challenging me!

I’m always trying to excite students to employ their feminist curiosity — about everything.

For instance, as students are developing their new skills for doing gender analysis, one of the
projects I ask them to set for themselves is to try doing a thorough gender analysis of their own
extended families — over at least two, maybe three generations: who does what chores? Who is
admired for doing what? Who has the greatest say in what sorts of family decisions? Who earns
what money? Who travels what distances? Whose friendships matter most to each parent or to each
older adult? Whose standards of success carry the most weight for each person in the family? Who
votes which way? Who leads any conversations about politics? What are the big areas of silence in
the family? What in any of these things has changed from generation to generation? What ideas or
behaviors cause the most tension in the family? Why?

Then add to these: in what ways does it matter to any of these questions what country you and your
family members have been living in? And what has been the ethnic/racial/class status your family has
occupied in that country? And does your current generation’s particular historical moment in that
country matter? How so?

The revelations that students come up with are wonderful.

When learning skills of gender analysis one should not start with the World Bank. One should try
investigating them out close to home.

The first book of yours that I read was Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of
International Politics, published in 1990. This book was as eye-opening for me as the subtitle
promises. Could you explain the work you were doing before you wrote Bananas, and how it
changed by the time you published this book?

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5/13/24, 5:38 PM "Where are the women?": An interview with Cynthia Enloe - Writing by Renee

I began thinking about the question “Where are women in the international politics of food, tourism,
nationalist movements, military bases, domestic work and diplomacy?” in the mid-1980s. That
question sparked my doing the research that finally became the first edition of Bananas, Beaches and
Bases.

What I think ignited my curiosity about these four areas then was what I had learned — all so new to
me! — when I had asked where women — all sorts of women, from different countries, classes,
ethnic groups — were in the waging of wars. That was the puzzle that led me to research and write
Does Khaki Become You? in the early 1980s (I returned again to these questions when I wrote
Maneuvers, published in 2000).

So, for several years I’d already begun asking myself (and anyone who would help me figure it out!)
this core question – “Where are the women?” – before I launched the Bananas book project. What
was new for me in the late 1980s, I think, was asking this same question of all sorts of areas of work,
starting with who was doing what sorts of work on banana plantations.

When I returned more recently to all these questions as I researched and wrote the new edition of
Bananas, Beaches and Bases (2014), I had lots of new information and new ideas to tackle. That was
great.

In Does Khaki Become You, you look at just how carefully the military needs to cultivate and manage
its image and relationship with women and women’s labour, so that it can be seen as quintessentially
male and masculine, but still civil and heterosexual.

In Bananas, you talk about how masculinity even influences the division of labour by sex in
agriculture – banana plantations are worked on by men whose work as a “banana man” can become
a source of pride; tea is mainly harvested by women.

I also admired how in Seriously! you looked at how masculinity operates in the finance sector and
contributed to the global financial crisis of 2008. You explore masculinity and how it influences
institutional behaviours in a way that is grounded and clarifying.

What are you are investigating in your work at the moment?

I’m so glad you’ve enjoyed reading the chapters in Seriously! about masculinities in banking, finance
and austerity politics. I especially liked researching and writing those chapters because it was so new
to me.

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5/13/24, 5:38 PM "Where are the women?": An interview with Cynthia Enloe - Writing by Renee

And I liked thinking about banking masculinities — and their political consequences — across several
institutions and across several countries.

I always try to pose my feminist questions in a way that never assumes that any one country’s
gendered dynamics or gendered experiences are the norm.

Right now I am in the midst of writing an article about wartime women nurses as political thinkers. I
first began investigating women as nurses in wars back in the 1980s, but not as people who
developed their own analyses of war, of patriotism, of manliness, of women’s capacities.

It’s always fun to return to a question you posed earlier, but with a new approach, recognizing the
questions you back then forgot to ask! In this instance, I’m trying to push the envelope as to what
“counts” as political thinking.

You dedicated your last book, The Big Push: Exposing and Challenging the Persistence of Patriarchy,
to three women, including Teresia Teaiwa, who was a New Zealand academic who examined
militarism in the Pacific. What are some of the things that you learned from, or discussed with,
Teresia?

Teresia Teaiwa taught me so much about the varied levels and diverse genderings of militarized
politics in the Pacific. She taught me to pay close attention, for instance, to Fijian feminists as they
responded to and challenged the Fijian military’s anti-constitutional coups. She made sure I paid
attention to Guam too, and to Guam’s women anti-bases activists.

Although Teresia was a sharp critic of the present militarization of Pacific peoples, she never
demonized women who decided to join a military. Instead, she listened carefully to each of them, to
understand their own assessments of career, of family, of marriage.

Teresia taught me to avoid any simplistic generalizations about gender politics in the South Pacific –
for example, Samoan women and Tongan woman have had different histories, experience different
current pressures.

I am interested in asking you about militarism and repression in New Zealand. Part of the reason is
that feminists here – there are very few – are having to put up a ginormous fight in order to have a
voice at all. On issues like prostitution and sex self-identification, there is a total media lockdown,
and politicians actively intimidate women out of the conversation on sex self-identification laws.

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I have had many conversations to try to understand why the New Zealand context is so repressive.
Since New Zealand has a population of less than five million, “small town mentality” is the standard
interpretation.

But I have also interviewed Gudrun Jonsdottir in Iceland – she attributes the radicalism and strength
of the Icelandic women’s movement partly to Iceland’s small population.

The fact that New Zealand was one of the first nations to adopt neoliberal economic policies, which
we did in 1984, is also a common explanation – one commentator has called this country “Chile
without the gun.” I’ve also found the book by Jock Phillips, A Man’s Country, helpful.

How would you go about interpreting the level of complacency and repression here in New Zealand?
What questions would you ask, in our to determine the reasons for it?

Comparing women’s movements and their impacts on national policies in two seemingly similar
countries — for instance, New Zealand and Iceland (where I spend a week each year teaching) — can
be clarifying. I don’t think smallness by itself is the key explanation for what now seem major
differences in either feminists’ influence or levels of militarization: think of all the differences among,
say, Fiji, Honduras, Costa Rica, Finland. It is worth noticing that New Zealand women were the first in
the world to win the vote on the same terms as men. Icelandic women took another 20 years to win
the vote — in 1915.

Icelanders’ decision not to have a military seems to at least partly to have come out of their never
being a conquering settler community. When the first Norwegians arrived there were no indigenous
people in Iceland (due to its extremely harsh climate). This may have altered their national narrative
about themselves today. It’s only outsiders who portray Nordic Vikings as warriors. Icelanders see
their ancestors as hardy farmers and fishing people.

Significant numbers (not all?) of New Zealand government officials’ and MPs’ eagerness to stay close
to an American militarized alliance may have to do with the current interlocking narratives of brave
masculinities and portrayals of external threats. Those interlocking are always worth tracking.

I think that it is also important not to let fade from popular and official sight New Zealanders’
instances of anti-militaristic choices. The most prominent was under the country’s first woman prime
minister, Helen Clark, the refusal to allow US navy ships to come into NZ ports if they would not
spell out whether they were carrying nuclear weapons. This was a major decision. New Zealand was
the only US ally to insist on this.

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5/13/24, 5:38 PM "Where are the women?": An interview with Cynthia Enloe - Writing by Renee

It is crucial for the present day gendering of New Zealand politics that these anti-militaristic and
patriarchy-challenging national decisions are not forgotten. When they are forgotten, it is easier to
persuade people now that the present militaristic policies are simply “inevitable.”

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