Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (2014) by Cynthia Enloe - A Book Review by Varsha Gopal

- Varsha Gopal

Cynthia Enloe is one of the pioneering theorists in feminist international relations. Feminist IR theory emerged as a change from the traditional approaches to IR and has contributed to the ontological revisionism of mainstream IR.[i] The traditional approaches explore international polity with a presumption of homogeneity among experiences of the different genders. Enloe's gender-conscious approach places women as active participants and as the exploited where and when she deems necessary. Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, written by Enloe and first published in 1989, is one of the most influential works of feminist IR theory. It questions the gender-blindness of international policy making and interactions and aims to construct a gender-neutral platform for international politics. 

Enloe takes her deconstruction of the role of gender in international relations forward with the question: "Where are the women?", which runs throughout Bananas as a lens to make evident the "gender-numbness" of the field of study and this work forms the focus of this paper.[ii] Enloe begins with the argument, "gender makes the world go round" [iii]. She argues that gender is an organizing principle of the world and stresses the importance of considering gender as an analytical device and a lens through which to view the practices which make up the international economy and polity. In the seven chapters (each of which talks about an institution) following the introduction, Enloe elucidates the power structures of each institution and shows how it places women in disadvantaged positions and how it depends on this hierarchy to function. By illuminating structures and responses to inequities, Enloe advances towards her final argument, "the international is personal", which implies a dependence of international politics on personal relationships.[iv] 

Though the text is guided by "feminist-informed explorations" of the tourism industry, nationalist movements, military bases, lives of diplomats and diplomatic wives, plantation workers, factory workers and domestic servants, in this essay, the author focuses on bananas, the plantation industry, beaches, the tourism industry, and, bases, military bases. Tourism, an industry whose total contribution to the global gross domestic product is above 10%, is gendered in the composition of tourists as well as of those who make tourism possible, argues Enloe. [v] From the prevalent notion of women tourists being uncivilized when not accompanied by a male escort, to the situations in which the military looked appealing to a woman just because it brought with it the scope to travel, there exists a necessity to ask where the women are within the industry. The tourism industry hires women to be stewardesses, chambermaids and sexual service providers to bolster the gendered division of labour. 

Militarism runs through the works of Enloe as a common thread and forms an important section of Bananas too. Enloe puts forward the argument that: the primary aim of militarized base camps is the efficient functioning of the military, and for achieving this, there is a dependence on the subject-specific subjugation of women playing social roles of military wives, woman officers and base prostitutes. The "Good Military Wife" was supposed to ensure the mental well-being of the officer, to relinquish any self-advancement prospects and to keep quiet about the harassment faced in the household.[vi] Women in uniforms have been of a steady low percentage in the army. They have been assaulted in various forms ranging from being called an "intruder" to experiencing what has been euphemistically called "military sexual trauma", i.e., to being raped by a male officer.[vii] Base prostitutes and sexual slaves (e.g., Japanese comfort women) have been used as instruments for keeping male sexual needs in check; undertakings like Contagious Diseases Prevention Act have also protected the male sexuality according to which women in and around base camps, who are likely to be prostitutes (as per police officers) are compulsorily subjected to vaginal examination to ensure that they would not disease the male officers.

Enloe argues that both the banana and the banana industry are gendered. She points to Carmen Miranda and Chiquita Banana (Figures 1 and 2) as examples of how gender is involved in the politics of bananas. Miranda was a Brazilian singer-dancer who rose to fame in the US, who was known for her fruit hat consisting of bananas. She was a major part of one of the instruments of the American foreign policy- influencing Latin Americans through popular culture. She was what the Americans, during the 1940s, thought of as the Latin American culture, and it was during these years that the US had found it vital to keep Latin America allied to it. Chiquita Banana was a half-banana, half-woman advertising figure for the United Fruits Company and was aimed at the American housewife. Not only was the publication of bananas gendered, but also its production, where women would only wash and pack the bananas. 

 

                          Figure 1: Chiquita Banana                  

  Figure 2: Carmen Miranda 

Feminist IR theory has been criticized for adopting a stance which equates gender with femininity, i.e., for example, by equating gender issues with women's issues. Critics claim that feminist theorists are bound by normative commitments to necessarily take women as the epistemological starting points.[viii] Liberal feminism (subscribed to by Enloe) in IR has faced the criticism of being a contradiction within itself: it criticizes the patriarchal roots of the liberal state while also depending on it for reform and redress.[ix] A lack of empirical exploration and of theoretical rigor has been attributed to Enloe quite often.[x] It has been seen that a high dependence on details and anecdotes have managed to place men in the stereotype of power-brokers and women, to be the only sufferers under harsh working conditions.[xi] It has also been said that the international politics, to which all these interpersonal relations are said to be related, has not been defined clearly and that she moves across various dimensions without relating it, in a defined manner, to the international economy.[xii] a significant criticism warranted by post-modern feminist scholars is that Enloe refuses to acknowledge the issues faced by men because of gender narratives and that she attributes a majority of women's issues to patriarchy.[xiii] 

Some of her arguments are loose and tinted with excessive dependence on a certain man versus woman equation. Though very few and scattered, such occurrences tend to take away from the illuminating nature of her other arguments. Though not theoretically dense, Enloe's expositions hold relevance as well as relatability, to a certain extent. Enloe provides a comprehensive framework with which a complete reading of international relations can take place. How she links the lives of first-world women and third world women under the commonality of economic and gendered oppression provides for an inclusive feminist theory. Her overarching arguments of gender making the world go round and the international being personal runs throughout her text as an undercurrent. Enloe signs off, after having infused a sense of gender curiosity into the minds of the reader who thinks, "does gender indeed make the world go round?"

Notes:

[i] Gillian Youngs, "Feminist International Relations: A Contradiction in Terms? Or: Why Women and Gender Are Essential to Understanding the World' we' Live in ", International Affairs  80, no. 1 (2004): 78.

[ii] Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, 2^nd ed. (California: University of California Press, 2014), 28.

[iii] Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases, 1.

[iv] Ibid., 343.

[v] World Travel & Tourism Council, Travel & Tourism Economic Impact 2018, (London : World Travel & Tourism Council, 2018), 7.

[vi] Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, 2^nd ed. (California: University of California Press, 2014), 142.

[vii] Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases, 154.

[viii] Adam Jones, "Does 'Gender' Make the World Go Round? Feminist Critiques of International Relations", Review of International Studies  22, No. 4 (1996): 420.

[ix] Anne Sisson Runyan and V. Spike Peterson, "The Radical Future of Realism: Feminist Subversions of IR Theory", Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 16, no. 1 (Winter 1991): 67.

[x] Robin Morgan, "Light Bulbs, Radishes and Politics of the 21st Century," In Radically Speaking: Feminism Reclaimed, ed. Diane Bell and  Renate Klein (Chicago: Spinifex Press, 1996), 5-6.

[xi] Jones, "Does 'Gender' Make the World Go Round?", 421-422.

[xii] Meera Nanda, "Gender Makes the World Go Round", Economic and Political Weekly 26, No. 20 (1991), 1276 ;

[xiii] Christine Sylvester, Feminist International Relations: An Unfinished Journey, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 35.

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Varsha Gopal is pursuing her Master's in Development Studies at IIT Madras. Her research interests are at the intersection of gender and sexuality.