Cynthia Enloe

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Cynthia Enloe is a feminist writer and professor whose many publications have contributed to current understanding of gender issues and the circumstances of women throughout the world today and historically.

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 Current occupation 2 Important Writings 3 Publications Discussed on this Page 4 Other Writings 5 See also 6 References

[edit] Biography

Born in 1938, Cynthia Enloe spent her early life on Long Island in a New York suburb. After completing her undergraduate education at Connecticut College in 1960 (which, Enloe reports in “The Curious Feminist,” had one of the highest rates amongst colleges in the American Northeast of married female students), she went on to earn an M.A. in 1963 and a Ph.D. in 1967 in political science at the University of California, Berkeley ^[1].

[edit] Current occupation

Enloe currently serves as a professor in the Department of International Development, Community, and Environment at Clark University, Worcester. She is also the Director of Clark University’s Women Studies program. She has delivered lectures on globalization, feminism, and militarization in Japan, Korea, Turkey, Canada, Britain, and at Universities across the United States. She has also been featured on National Public Radio and the BBC. In addition to serving as an editor for such scholarly journals as "Signs" and the "International Feminist Journal of Politics", Cynthia Enloe has written nine books to date, mostly published by the University of California Press. Much of Enloe’s research centers on women’s place in both national and international politics. Her books cover a wide range of issues encompassing gender-based discrimination as well as racial, ethnic and national identities.

[edit] Important Writings

In The Curious Feminist, Enloe pays particular attention to the effect of globalization on women’s labor and wage ratios. This book not only addresses women’s roles in economic markets, world conflicts, and power politics, but also shows Enloe’s particular interest in linking these themes to women’s everyday lives. In “The Curious Feminist” Enloe addresses many of the same themes that she does in her publications such as “Bananas, Beaches, and Bases,” but in this book she also discusses how she became interested in becoming a feminist. She asserts that curiosity as a feminist means that no woman’s life should be beyond the scope of her interest. She also particularly focuses on the influence of American culture on women of other nations and scrutinizes the masculine aspects of such well-established organizations as the United Nations and the American military. Within the text, a reader will find several illuminating interviews with Enloe in which she shares her thoughts about and motivations behind her published works. These interviews also clarify some of her opinions. For instance, she explains that, though she views violence as fundamentally masculine, she does not view only men as perpetrators of violence ^[2]

Bananas, Beaches, and Bases presents sexism as a prevalent issue and gives readers a look at the history of such commonplace components of the modern world as the tourism industry. Enloe displays the links between women of different cultures during the 1800s. Readers might find it interesting to read about how and why tourism was not an acceptable undertaking for nineteenth century British women. While British women maintained a stay-at-home pride, colonial women became stereotyped through such phenomenon as the World Fair, which used Social Darwinism to distinguish between the races based on levels of so-called intelligence and displays of “civilized” behavior. Enloe discusses colonialism in light of the typically-held perceptions of the masculine West and the feminine East. Discussing women from varied cultures, Enloe investigates how Muslim women, among others, felt compelled to validate their cultural practices in the face of Orientalism. This book argues that lack of understanding of foreign cultures and fascination with the differences in clothing and lifestyles of indigenous and colonial populations contributed to their continued subjugation. Readers might be particularly interested by Enloe’s analysis of US companies’ use of Carmen Miranda. By creating a popular image of the Latin American woman, US companies facilitated opening the door for the increased import of bananas from Latin America into the US. The discussions of the abuses suffered by Latin American female workers in the fruit industry add a more serious note to follow the dialogue about the origins of the “Chiquita Banana” campaign.

In Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives Enloe elaborates upon the theme of militarization and how governments utilize women’s labor in the process of preparing for and fighting wars. As she explains in her article, “Feminists from India, Zimbabwe, and Japan to Britain, the United States, Serbia, Chile, South Korea, Palestine, Israel, and Algeria all have found that when they have followed the bread crumbs of privileged masculinity, they have been led time and again not just to the doorstep of the military, but to the threshold of all those social institutions that promote militarization ^[3]

[edit] Publications Discussed on this Page

• Enloe, Cynthia. 2000. Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. Berkely: University of California Press • Enloe, Cynthia. 2004. The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in The New Age of Empire. London: University of California Press • Enloe, Cynthia. Research Profile for Cynthia Enloe Clark University Website. http://clarku.edu/academiccatalog/facultybio.cfm?id=343 (accessed March 27, 2007). • Enloe, Cynthia. 2000. Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives. London: University of California Press

[edit] Other Writings

(As Listed on Cynthia Enloe’s faculty profile Clark University Website)

• "Conversation with Cynthia Enloe," in Signs. Summer, 2003.
• "The Surprised Feminist," in Signs. Vol. 25, No. 4 (Summer 2000) 1023-1026.
• The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War , Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1993 (published in Japanese, 1999)
• New edition with New Preface, Berkeley & London, University of California Press, 2000 (published in Turkish, 2003)
• Does Khaki Become You? The Militarization of Women's Lives , London, Pandora Press; San Francisco, Harper\Collins, 1988. (editions have been published in Finnish and Swedish).
• Ethnic Conflict and Political Development , Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1973 Reprinted by University Press of America, 1986.
• Coeditor (with Wendy Chapkis) Of Common Cloth: Women in the Global Textile Industry , Amsterdam: Transnational Institute; Washington: Institute for Policy Studies, 1983.
• Contributor, Loaded Questions: Women in Militaries , Wendy Chapkis, editor, Amsterdam: Transnational Institute; Washington: Institute for Policy Studies, 1981.
• Ethnic Soldiers: State Security in Divided Societies , London: Penguin Books, 1980; Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980.
• Police, Military, Ethnicity: Foundations of State Power , New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1980.
• Co-Editor, (with Dewitt Ellinwood), Ethnicity and the Military in Asia , New Brunswick: Transition Books, 1980.
• Co-Author (with Guy Pauker and Frank Golay), Diversity and Development in Southeast Asia: The Coming Decade , New York: McGraw-Hill and Council of Foreign Relations, 1977.
• Co-Editor (with Ursula Semin-Panzer), The Military, The Police and Domestic Order: British and Third World Experiences , London: Richardson Institute for Conflict and Peace Research, 1976.
• The Comparative Politics of Pollution , New York: Longman's, 1975.
• Multi-Ethnic Politics: The Case-of Malaysia, Berkeley Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies , University of California, Berkeley, 1970.

[edit] See also

• Feminism in international relations

[edit] References