Cynthia Enloe's latest book is one in a series, edited by Terrell Carver and Manfred Steger, which aims to “present globalization as a multidimensional process constituted by complex, often contradictory interactions of global, regional, and local aspects of social life” (p. ii). The series includes other volumes that explore the connections between globalization and war, terrorism, feminist activism, labor, culture, health and the environment, U.S. popular culture, law, and international political economy. Globalization and Militarism is aimed in particular at those who have little prior knowledge of feminist approaches and who may be a priori skeptical of their value in explaining processes of world politics. The book has many features to recommend it. Enloe's straightforward prose and matter-of-fact tone are complemented by the pared-down format of the text: there are no footnotes or endnotes (and fewer Harvard citations than one might expect, possibly because she draws upon her personal interactions with feminists at least as often as she does their writings, but also because one of the aims of the series is to be accessible and “reader friendly”).
It is gratifying to see these concepts (globalization and militarism) discussed in a general introductory text from an explicitly feminist perspective without having to counter the notion that feminist scholarship merely “supplements” “broader” (read: uninterested in gender) approaches. One of the strengths of Enloe's approach is her concept of “feminist curiosity,” which circumvents the need to define feminism and creates a broad church in which all feminists and critical gender scholars should be able to find a place. The author's own curiosity is unrelenting, an attribute that functions to spark—but perhaps even more importantly, to validate—the reader's own curiosity about phenomena previously considered trivial or unimportant: “anything that is labelled ‘natural’ is something you are being encouraged not to explain” (p. 21, emphasis in original).
Individual chapters examine the connections between global manufacturing processes and the militarized actions that authoritarian governments endorse and conduct in order to keep labor “cheap”; the militarization of national security; women in militaries; global dynamics of masculinity and processes of feminization in the “War on Terror,” linking Guantánamo with Abu Ghraib; demilitarization; and the lives of militarized and demilitarized women in Japan (much of the book was originally written as a series of lectures given in Tokyo in early 2003). Enloe's now famous approach—asking “where are the women?”—is reprised here, but through her exploration of the relationships among and between men and women, masculinities and femininities, she establishes that gender is not a synonym for women, and that women are implicated in shoring up patriarchal structures insofar as they engage in practices such as “policing” their own and others' femininity.
In the chapter on women in militaries, Enloe provides a critique of military institutions for their patriarchal assumptions and exclusion/treatment of women, while at the same time maintaining and pursuing a feminist commitment to demilitarization. She candidly concedes that “militarization can appear attractive. It can be personally rewarding materially and emotionally” (p. 161). However, she also emphasizes how women's personalized coping strategies in the face of discrimination and their inability or reluctance to see patterns or systems of discrimination and assign these systems a specific name (patriarchy) make it much less likely that they will challenge structures of masculinized privilege, a particularly difficult point to demonstrate to students who are embedded in liberal individualist cultures.
Enloe's ability to construct clear definitions of terms such as masculinization, patriarchy, and feminization, and the breadth and variety of examples used to illustrate these practices, ensures that most students will easily understand and be able to apply these concepts to their own lives. She consistently “brings home” to the reader the importance of attending to gendered dynamics: in academia, when she discusses feminists' interactions with the International Studies Association; in the classroom, where she highlights the negative and dismissive comments and attitudes that curious feminist students sometimes face; and in one's personal appearance and “style,” as she urges students to dig out their family's entire sport-shoe collection in order to reveal the links between militarization, gender, and the global history of sneaker production. In part, her account is so persuasive because she draws upon experiences from her own life throughout, thereby demonstrating that the personal is cultural, political, and globalized (her account of her failures in sewing class at school is a particularly poignant image).
My main reservation about this book concerns Enloe's characterization of “theory”: “If you can discover a cause for something, you are on your way to creating a theory about it” (p. 12). Although the text acknowledges social constructivist commitments—in that “no one is born an obedient, flexible, loyal, patriotic woman” (p. 58), language is important, and “ideas matter” (pp. 86–87, 161–63)—without situating her argument in the context of any epistemological debates, the language of causality may be perceived by students as connecting that argument with approaches in which gender exists merely as a “variable” of quantitative analysis. That said, if assigned as core reading alongside authors who develop more explicit and in-depth discussions of theory (such as Marysia Zalewski), chapters from this book could be used to initiate a broader discussion about the purpose and function of theory.
Furthermore, Enloe is at pains to stress the importance of constructing subtle and nuanced analyses that take account of the complexity of the world and to take a long-term and comparative perspective when examining global, local, and regional processes, noting which are being sedimented and which are being rolled back. She also highlights the amount of contradiction and “patriarchal confusion” (p. 85) that exists, neatly dealing with a common student “complaint” about feminist scholarship, namely, that it implies some kind of male conspiracy theory. Finally, the research project that Enloe urges her students to complete (“an in-depth interview with any woman—of any age, any class, any nationality—to see if that woman had ever been dependent on, influenced by, or controlled by a military” [p. 55]) is one that I shall consider incorporating into my own international relations syllabi.
