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

“Too often gender incurious commentators attribute women’s roles in international affairs to tradition, cultural preferences, and timeless norms, as if each of these existed outside the realms where power is wielded, as if they were beyond the reach of decisions and efforts to enforce those decisions.”

Enloe argues that intentional policies and actions of stakeholders in the patriarchal system result in the placement of women in subordinate positions. Sustaining the hierarchy of power requires effort. Repeatedly, Enloe highlights The Role of Human Agency in National and International Politics.

“That is, the common assumption is that one-half of the world’s population is equivalent to, say, logging companies or soccer clubs.”

Criticizing mainstream media for failing to cover and publicize the work of transnational feminist organizations, Enloe exposes the absurdity of the excuse for this failure. The media deems feminists a special interest group, akin to other narrow groups pursuing self-interests. However, by challenging the elite power structure, which men dominate, feminists are working on behalf of all women and, for that matter, most men.

“Rarely are women seen as the explainers or reshapers of the world. Rarely are they made visible as thinkers and actors.”

Whether accepting their assigned roles or challenging those roles, women have agency and influence international politics. However, they are typically depicted as symbols or objects. Throughout her study, Enloe describes the decisions made by women in poorly paid or unpaid positions and their effects.

“It was when sexual harassment and sexual assaults appeared to jeopardize foreign women tourists’ safety that the media and officials started to pay attention.”

Writing about India, Enloe explains that media attention about a gang rape threatened to reduce tourism. Concern for the tourist industry, not for local women, motivated the government to crack down on such violence. Enloe highlights the importance of women’s choices in travel destinations. She fears that in the absence of media attention regarding the issue of sexual assault, the government will revert to its lackadaisical approach.

“When the men who founded the first airline companies initially considered pilots, they thought only of men, despite women being among the first generation of airline pilots.”

High-paying jobs in the tourist industry are masculinized, while low-paying jobs are feminized. In this case, a decision was made to hire only men as pilots and relegate women to the role of “stewardess.” Enloe again emphasizes the role of human agency in speculating how the industry could have approached hiring differently. Later, this industry used sexual images of women as stewardesses to lure customers (most of whom were men).

“Many of these male customers do not ask whether the women and girls (and occasionally boys) offered to them for a fee are performing these sexualized services of their own free will.”

Sex tourism is big business, catering to male tourists, men on business trips, male diplomats, men in the military, and others. Policies such as poor economic opportunities for women and lax regulation of business enable this trade. These are deliberate choices. The customers choose to be incurious about the rights of these women. From the policy makers to the customers, all these men are exercising agency.

“For many feminists today, approaching nationalism with extreme caution is necessary because, they have concluded, building alliances between women’s advocates in all of their country’s ethnic and racial communities is crucial for a vibrant, sustainable women’s movement.”

While women sometimes participate in nationalist campaigns and enter politics, nationalist movements tend to suppress discussion of gender dynamics and power because nationalism attracts people (largely men) who hold conservative views of inclusion, among other things. Given the international nature of gendered power, women are most successful when they build inclusive and transnational alliances. Such alliances are often questioned when nationalism is rampant.

“But every time that women succumb to the pressure to hold their tongues about problems they are having with men in a nationalist organization, nationalism becomes that much more masculinized.”

When the nation is under threat, women are often told that it is not the time to raise questions about gender dynamics. However, if they do not, men will define the nationalist cause and assume leadership roles in the new nation, indefinitely suspending consideration of gendered power and prioritizing other agenda items.

“Many white Americans were afraid that if sexual relations between Black men and white women were allowed in wartime Britain, sexual segregation would be harder to maintain in post-war America.”

Enloe emphasizes the role of the state in shaping marriage. During World War II, Great Britain tried to discourage British women from dating Black US soldiers by labeling the women as “loose” and warning of sexual diseases. The US government did not question Great Britain’s stance given the potential backlash about US views in the South. In addition, US authorities made the conscious decision not to accept British women whose prospective husbands were Black into the US.

“Breaking the culture of gendered silence on a military base was harder still. Feminized silence, it became clear, was a pillar of U.S. national security.”

When soldiers’ wives on military bases began to speak about the issue of domestic violence, they met resistance from commanders who expected soldiers’ wives to cope with this problem, which they blamed on the stress of deployment. In addition, they feared the publicity and potential questions about the military’s culture of violence. Despite the difficulty, these women persisted and challenged this enabling approach.

“But they all have interesting stories to tell. Moreover, the separations between them are among the things that sustains the base.”

Referring to the various women who sustained military bases in greatly varying roles (sex worker, laundress, wife, enlisted soldier, and local critics of the base), Enloe explains how policies and norms developed intentionally to keep these women apart. Their collaboration would be a threat to the gendered power system.

“The more that male diplomats rely on informal relationships to accomplish their political tasks, the more formal are the expectations that their wives will come to the government’s aid.”

Exposing the crucial roles of diplomats’ wives in international politics, Enloe describes how their services are unpaid and unrecognized yet expected. Until the 1970s, the evaluation of a diplomat included a review of his wife’s performance. Wives hosted other diplomats, enabling their husbands to more easily develop bonds with them, and thereby played a crucial role in conducting policy.

“[W]hy should marriage advance a man’s capacity to gain money, skills, and influence, but hinder a woman’s chance to acquire the same?”

Before the 1970s, a diplomat who was a woman had to resign from the US State Department if she married. In contrast, the organization expected male diplomats to have wives who helped with official duties, including hosting social events and attending public ceremonies. These women, of course, were not paid for their services. Enloe again demonstrates how policies, made by men, sustain international politics.

“But by the time Franklin Roosevelt entered office in 1933, sending the marines was beginning to lose its political value; it was alienating too many potential regional allies. New, less direct means had to be found to guarantee the United States’ control of Latin America.”

Governmental policies enabled American corporations to dominate the banana industry in Latin America. When a softer approach to power was needed, Hollywood came to the rescue through the use of women, such as Carmen Miranda, and other Latin American actors. The face of the banana industry hid its workings, including the exploitation of the men and women working on the plantations. In Latin America, the fame of a few helped quiet resistance.

“What has remained constant, however, is the presumption of international corporations that their position in the world market depends on manipulations of masculinity and femininity.”

Corporations do not hesitate to feminize positions that were once for men if they need to cut the cost of labor or if men demand too much money. They control the definitions to classify work as women’s work or men’s work. These are not natural categories but definitions that those in power sustain. Additionally, corporations use race and ethnicity to divide workers.

“Slipping on a banana peel may not be merely a vaudeville comic act. It may be slipping into the naïve political assumption that the banana is natural.”

Men in corporate executive positions work with the local and national governments to shape the production of bananas. Men chop the bananas, while women wash the pesticides off them. Women historically have been kept in line via sexual harassment and below-subsistence wages. More recently, women have organized and exercised human agency to challenge national and international politics in this area.

“To many, it seemed as if the clock had spun backward. Women garment workers, locked in their flaming factories, jumping out of upper-story windows, meeting their deaths as a result of owners’ abuses: was this March 21,1911 again?”

Many made comparisons between the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911 in Manhattan and the fire at Tazreen Fashions in Bangladesh in 2012. In both cases, women were locked in at sewing jobs and told to keep working when they smelled smoke. Neither politicians in Bangladesh (men) nor the brand-name corporations that had their clothing manufactured there enforced fire and safety codes. In fact, those corporations flocked to Bangladesh to increase their profit margins because the cost of labor was cheap (unsurprisingly, given that the factory intentionally feminized labor and made no investment in safety to minimize costs).

“No one’s labor is automatically cheap. It has to be made cheap. It is the deliberate manipulation of ideas about girls and women, and of notions of femininity, that empowers those who try to cheapen women’s labor.”

Labor management decisions, such as in the design of machinery and the organization of jobs, have cheapened women’s labor and made it invisible. The tasks women perform are deemed natural and not requiring skill even though that is not true. Management does not acknowledge hazards since they would imply a need for higher pay. Thus, women work with pesticides and other dangerous chemicals without adequate protection or pay that reflects such hazards.

“If the seamstress rebels, radically reimagining what it means to be a female citizen who sews for a living, her country may turn up on the bankers’ list of ‘poor investments.’”

Enloe draws attention to the crucial role of bankers (most of whom are men) in the exploitation of garment workers (who are virtually all women). These workers are poorly paid and work in unsafe conditions, while the bankers demand high profitability ratios when they award loans to corporations and governments and therefore sustain the gendered hierarchy. For example, when Chinese women demanded safer conditions and better pay, some corporations left that country for Bangladesh, which had no such women’s movement at the time.

“In 2013, […] domestic workers still were among the world’s workers most likely to be exploited. Their labor could be exploited, their rights ignored, their bodies trafficked. […] That continuity is a product of the politics of sustainability—the politics of sustaining sexist labor systems.”

Arguing that the exploitation of domestic servants (who are predominantly women) is the result of intentional actions, Enloe emphasizes The Role of Human Agency in National and International Politics. The level of exploitation in the domestic service industry, which often completely ignores human rights, exemplifies the negative impact of international politics on women’s daily lives.

“Women domestic workers who, against all odds, have become grassroots and transnational activists are today making each of these pillars wobble.”

Enloe chronicles the obstacles that female domestic workers faced and overcame through organizing and achieving results. They exemplified the role of human agency in challenging national and international politics. Only them exercising this agency weakened the formula keeping domestic labor cheap.

“That is, perhaps if the map of what is counted as political were re-drawn by feminist-informed cartographers, the gap between women’s and men’s political knowledge would shrink dramatically.”

When the definition of politics is limited to what leaders (primarily men) discuss, women are deemed less informed. Enloe challenges the definition of international politics and maintains that expanding it to include areas such as affordable childcare and the appropriate treatment of women who bring rape charges would reveal that women are as informed as men. The current definition of politics is artificially detached from its impact on women’s lives.

“When enough women have refused to behave in those prescribed ways, relations between governments and [between] governments and corporations have had to change.”

The concerted actions of women who exercise their agency have the potential to bring about changes in national and international politics. For this reason, Enloe highlights the changes that women have achieved when they united to pursue political action to challenge the gendered hierarchy.