Through an analysis that focuses on gender, sexuality and imperialism, Molly Geidel attempts to understand the post-Second World War world, characterised by the author as a new order of social control which resulted from the ways that modernisation theory facilitated the global hegemony of the United States. Geidel achieves this by using the Peace Corps as a window through which to describe in detail the implementation of modernisation theory's masculine vision.
The book provides an analysis of what the author considers to have been the most ‘irresistible’ of development fantasies: the promise of homosocial intimacy through participation in capitalist relations. In other words, Geidel argues that development functioned as a hegemonic discourse, laden with masculinity, that shaped the Peace Corps and many other modernising efforts in the United States. This led to the configuration of a gendered global modernisation project, where the masculine anxieties of powerful policy-makers influenced the reordering of the world. For Geidel, this reordering was not constrained to the realms of diplomacy and international development efforts. It even reached oppositional culture and politics, including the New Left and the African American liberation struggles in the United States.
Geidel's book offers a refreshing historiographic perpective on the Peace Corps. It does not focus on institutional history, the organisation's internal disputes and conflicts, the spirit that motivated volunteers, or the objectives, failures and achievements of the Peace Corps. Instead, Geidel offers a different perspective which places the masculinity inherent in the discourses that shaped the Peace Corps in an ample context at a national as well as global level.
The book is divided into six chapters. The first concentrates on the formation, conception and organisation of the Peace Corps, a process marked by the emergence of a series of gendered anxieties. Later, the author goes back a decade to capture the racist-romantic vision of masculinity that prevailed in the 1950s in order to explain how the paradigms of modernisation gave a new stamp to those visions. The third chapter studies the feminine world of the 1960s, to explain how women found their place in the world within the modernising logics of brotherhood and frontier heroism that shaped the Peace Corps. Chapter 4 explains how the struggle for civil rights and the Black Power movement were influenced by liberal modernisation theory, while chapter 5 addresses the relation of the Peace Corps with the Vietnam War and the New Left by focusing on the returned volunteers and their radicalised criticism voiced throughout the Committee of Returned Volunteers. Finally, chapter 6 centres on the expulsion of the organisation from Bolivia in 1971, a process in which the Peace Corps' experience reflected the modernising efforts of several different organisations in that country.
In general terms this is a well structured book. The chapters address different topics without repeating the same arguments. They are supported by a good variety of sources, in particular official documents from the Peace Corps as well as from other government offices of the United States, diaries, memoirs and newspapers, as well as literary works, iconography and interviews. The analysis and the author's use of the sources is very solid, though sometimes the meaning of certain sources is over-interpreted, as in the case of the photograph of President Kennedy and Paz Estenssoro (p. 3).
I have a few comments about the book's main argument. Geidel maintains that the Peace Corps represented and disseminated a heroic iteration of modernisation theory, embodied in the promise of masculinity and brotherhood, whose function was to enable the United States to maintain its world hegemony in a context of decolonisation processes and struggles. The book's subtitle goes further still and suggests that ‘development shaped the global sixties’. But what type of development is the author referring to? The United States and its global projection or the world's development? The book presents an argument regarding the global post-war world but it only addresses the modernising forces of the United States. There were many more organisations and ways of understanding development in Europe, Australia and other countries in the American continent like Canada. Some embraced similar projects to those from the United States while others embraced radically different projects. Moreover, several ‘Third World’ countries, where the volunteers worked, developed their own development and community volunteer organisations before the arrival of Kennedy to power. Those institutions also profoundly marked the way in which development was understood and policies were implemented. It is necessary to query the true reach or impact of the ‘Peace Corps Fantasies’ and whether, in reality, what was profoundly altered after 1945 was the manner in which the United States gave meaning to the world in light of the challenges of modernisation rather the world itself, as the author argues by alluding to a supposed reordering of the world. This is not to refute the author's argument, but to question the true reach of the policies and modernisation discourses of the United States, which in reality interacted with many others that came from different parts of the world during the 1960s and in the following decades.
These criticisms aside, it remains that Molly Geidel's book is very well written, the fruit of an ambitious research agenda that will surely serve as a model for many researchers. Specialists dedicated to the Peace Corps, the 1960s, community development, modernising forces and the postcolonial world, as well as those who study gender and masculinity certainly will welcome this important and refreshing academic contribution by Molly Geidel.
