The Curious Feminist.Pdf

Praise for Cynthia Enloe’s The Curious Feminist “The book is a sensitive gendered analysis of interlocking developments from globalized economic markets to war and postconflict dynamics. While Enloe’s book brings out the complexities of women’s positions in a very immediate way as they play out in large-scale platforms of power, survival, politics, and profit, she also convincingly shows the links between and importance of women’s everyday lives.” Carolyn Nordstrom, author of Shadows of War: Violence, War, and International Profiteering in the Twenty-first Century “At the heart of this book is a challenge to patriarchal systems that privilege masculinity and marginalize critical feminist voices. Enloe encourages all of us to consider not just what we study but how we study the world in this new age of empire and to pay attention not just to the powerful, but to ‘the bottom rungs.’” Steven Lamy, Director, School of International Relations, University of Southern California THE CURIOUS FEMINIST Cynthia Enloe THE CURIOUS FEMINIST Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley Los Angeles London University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2004 by the Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Enloe, Cynthia H., 1938– The curious feminist : searching for women in a new age of empire / Cynthia Enloe. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-520-24235-1 (cloth : alk. paper)— ISBN 0-520-24381-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Feminism. 2. Sex role. 3. Women and the military. 4. Women and war. I. Title. HQ1155.E55 2004 305.42—dc22 2004010904 Manufactured in the United States of America 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 10987654 321 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper). For Gilda Bruckman and Judy Wachs Contents Introduction: Being Curious about Our Lack of Feminist Curiosity / 1 Part One SNEAKERS, SILENCES, AND SURPRISES 1. The Surprised Feminist / 13 2. Margins, Silences, and Bottom Rungs: How to Overcome the Underestimation of Power in the Study of International Relations / 19 3. The Globetrotting Sneaker / 43 4. Daughters and Generals in the Politics of the Globalized Sneaker / 57 5. Whom Do You Take Seriously? / 69 6. Feminist Theorizing from Bananas to Maneuvers: A Conversation between Cynthia Enloe and Marysia Zalewski / 83 Part Two WARS ARE NEVER “OVER THERE” 7. All the Men Are in the Militias, All the Women Are Victims: The Politics of Masculinity and Femininity in Nationalist Wars / 99 8. Spoils of War / 119 9. Masculinity as a Foreign Policy Issue / 122 10. “What If They Gave a War . .”: A Conversation between Cynthia Enloe, Vivian Stromberg, and the Editors of Ms. Magazine / 131 11. Sneak Attack: The Militarization of U.S. Culture / 145 12. War Planners Rely on Women: Thoughts from Tokyo / 148 13. Feminists Keep Their Eyes on Militarized Masculinity: Wondering How Americans See Their Male Presidents / 152 14. Becoming a Feminist: Cynthia Enloe in Conversation with Three British International Relations Scholars / 155 Part Three FEMINISTS AFTER WARS— IT’S NOT OVER ’TIL IT’S OVER 15. Women after Wars: Puzzles and Warnings from Vietnam / 193 16. Demilitarization—or More of the Same? Feminist Questions to Ask in the Postwar Moment / 217 17. A Feminist Map of the Blocks on the Road to Institutional Accountability / 233 18. When Feminists Look at Masculinity and the Men Who Wage War: A Conversation between Cynthia Enloe and Carol Cohn / 237 19. Updating the Gendered Empire: Where Are the Women in Occupied Afghanistan and Iraq? / 268 Part Four SIX PIECES FOR A WORK-IN-PROGRESS: PLAYING CHECKERS WITH THE TROOPS A War without White Hats / 309 Playing Guns / 311 Hitler Is a Jerk / 312 Leaden Soldiers / 313 Gurkhas Wear Wool / 314 The Cigarette / 316 Notes / 319 Index / 343 Introduction Being Curious about Our Lack of Feminist Curiosity Being curious takes energy. It may thus be a distorted form of “energy conservation” that makes certain ideas so alluring. Take, for instance, the loaded adjective “natural.” If one takes for granted that something is “natural”—generals being male, gar- ment workers being female—it saves mental energy. After all, what is deemed natural hasn’t been self-consciously created. No decisions have to be made. The result: we can imagine that there is nothing we need to investigate. We can just feel sympathy with women working in sweatshops, for instance, without bothering to figure out how they got there or what they think about being women sewing there. “Tradition” serves much the same misguided energy-saving purpose. If something is accepted as being “traditional”—inheri- tance passing through the male line, incoming officials swearing 1 2 / Introduction on a Bible—then it too can be swathed in a protective blanket, making it almost immune to bothersome questioning. A close cousin of “traditional” is “always.” Warning lights now start flashing in my head whenever I hear someone wielding “always.” Too often it is used to cut short an awkward discussion. “Americans have always loved guns.” “Women have always seen other women as rivals.” A variant on “always” is “oldest”—as in the glib declaration “Prostitution is the oldest profession.” As if prostitution were timeless, without a history. As if the organizing of certain women’s sexuality so that it can serve simultaneously commercial and masculinized functions had “always” existed, everywhere. Thank goodness, the fans of “always” imply, now we don’t have to invest our scarce energy in exploring that topic. Phew. During the eight years that it has taken me to think through the essays included here—the last was written during the continuing U.S. occupation of Iraq—I have become more and more curious about curiosity and its absence. As an example, for so long I was satisfied to use (to think with) the phrase “cheap labor.” In fact, I even thought using the phrase made me sound (to myself and to others) as if I were a critically thinking person, someone equipped with intellectual energy. It was only when I began, thanks to the nudging of feminist colleagues, to turn the phrase around, to say instead “labor made cheap,” that I realized how lazy I actually had been. Now whenever I write “labor made cheap” on a blackboard, people in the room call out, “By whom?” “How?” They are expanding our investigatory agenda. They are calling on me, on all of us, to exert more intellectual energy. The moment when one becomes newly curious about something is also a good time to think about what created one’s previ- Introduction / 3 ous lack of curiosity. So many power structures—inside house- holds, within institutions, in societies, in international affairs— are dependent on our continuing lack of curiosity. “Natural,” “tradition,” “always”: each has served as a cultural pillar to prop up familial, community, national, and international power structures, imbuing them with legitimacy, with timelessness, with in- evitability. Any power arrangement that is imagined to be legiti- mate, timeless, and inevitable is pretty well fortified. Thus we need to stop and scrutinize our lack of curiosity. We also need to be genuinely curious about others’ lack of curiosity—not for the sake of feeling self-satisfied, but for the sake of meaning- fully engaging with those who take any power structure as unproblematic. Why is a state of uncuriosity about what it takes to produce a pair of fashionable sneakers so comfortable? What is there about being uncurious about how any military base affects the civilians living in base towns that seems so reasonable? I’ve come to think that making and keeping us uncurious must serve somebody’s political purpose. I also have become convinced that I am deeply complicit in my own lack of curiosity. Uncuriosity is dangerously comfortable if it can be dressed up in the sophisticated attire of reasonableness and intellectual efficiency: “We can’t be investi- gating everything!” What is distinctive about developing a feminist curiosity? One of the starting points of feminism is taking women’s lives seriously. “Seriously” implies listening carefully, digging deep, developing a long attention span, being ready to be surprised. Taking women—all sorts of women, in disparate times and places—seriously is not the same thing as valorizing women. Many women, of course, deserve praise, even awe; but many 4 / Introduction women we need to take seriously may appear too complicit in violence or in the oppression of others, or too cozily wrapped up in their relative privilege to inspire praise or compassion. Yet a feminist curiosity finds all women worth thinking about, paying close attention to, because in this way we will be able to throw into sharp relief the blatant and subtle political workings of both femininity and masculinity. “Military spouses,” “child soldiers,” “factory managers,” “sweatshop workers,” “humanitarian aid workers,” “rape sur- vivors,” “peace activists,” “warlords,” “occupation authorities.” Each of these conventional ungendered terms serves to hide the political workings of masculinity and femininity. Each dampens our curiosity about where women are and where men are, about who put women there and men here, about who benefits from women being there and not someplace else, about what women themselves think about being there and what they do with those thoughts when they try to relate to men and to other women. Any time we don’t pursue these questions, we are likely to miss patriarchy. It will glide right by us like an oil tanker on a foggy night.

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