Cynthia Enloe puts women at the heart of politics and international affairs

In the midst of war or at the end of one as a shattered society begins to pick up the pieces, women’s rights may not be the first and obvious priority to come to mind. But that’s only because we have fallen for a deliberate ploy, says Cynthia Enloe. “We have too often swallowed the notion that gender issues are trivial, that they are something we can address later, once the ‘urgent’ problems are solved,” she says. Watch out for the ‘urgent’ word, warns Enloe, because “organizations wield the notion of urgency to avoid looking at how masculinity operates.” And how masculinity ‘operates’, in her view, is to deny that women are at the center of today’s most important issues–whether it be relocating manufacturing abroad or government policies to develop tourism or ensure national defense.

As Research Professor at Clark University’s Department of International Development, Community and Environment, Cynthia Enloe has devoted her career to making us look harder at how gender shapes thinking, from the way we as individuals live to how international institutions operate and set priorities. Framing an issue in a gender perspective, she says, allows us to “see that we are missing something, that we are not asking the right questions”. Our understanding of the war in Iraq, for example, is more complete, because, for the first time, gender analysis has had an impact on how journalists cover a war and how political scientists and historians assess it. “We know a lot more about the interactions in this war, for instance, between men and women as refugees and in relief agencies than we did about those crucial relationships in other wars.”

In Nimo’s War, Emma’s War: Making Feminist Sense of the Iraq War, Enloe looks at war through its effects on eight women, Iraqi and American. She focuses on each woman’s experience and, then, widens her scope to take in the gender dimensions of the war as a whole. She also looks at their individual experiences as a continuum, paying attention to subtle changes in gendered phases: which forms of masculinity or femininity are privileged over time; what kinds of women are honored or criticized; what issues are prioritized or downgraded. “Paying attention to these eight particular women over time throughout this one war has taught me to cultivate a long attention span, to eschew analytical laziness, to avoid referring simplistically to ‘the war’,” says Enloe.

Gender analysis must now be more fully integrated into national and international politics, she says, calling on the United Nations “to take gender seriously and to take women seriously by fully implementing UN Security Council Resolution 1325”. That Resolution, adopted in 2000 but still scattily applied, calls for a gender perspective on the special needs of women and girls during repatriation and resettlement, rehabilitation, reintegration and post-conflict reconstruction. Enloe also calls for vigilance in how gender issues may be used. “Recent history in Afghanistan shows how women’s issues can be used to justify a very different agenda.”

One area Cynthia Enloe has thought a lot about is THE most masculine of institutions, the military, and how it is equated with seriousness and wisdom in many cultures. “The soldier is equated with sacrifice for the higher good which legitimizes military ethics and performance,” she says. “This gives violence a sense of inevitability, that war is part of being a man. When we are taught that violence is hard-wired into men, it becomes an excuse. Personally, I don’t think many things are hardwired into us.”

Women play a surprisingly major supporting role in warfare, as fighters, suppliers and tacit supporters. In her groundbreaking book Bananas, Beaches and Bases and subsequent works, Does Khaki Become You? and Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives, Enloe examines how governments utilize women’s labor and support to prepare for and fight wars. She also shows how women are complicit in more subtle ways in maintaining the military as a patriarchal institution. In a sense, her work answers that wry anti-war slogan of the Sixties: Imagine they gave a war and nobody came. Only, in this case, she asks us to imagine what would happen if women didn’t show up, by revealing the huge contribution they already make to warfare.

“There are always fresh questions to ask about what it takes to wage wars —about all the efforts to manipulate disparate ideas about femininity, about the attempts to mobilize particular groups of women, about the pressures on certain women to remain loyal and silent,” she says. “There are more efforts to control women and to squeeze standards for femininity and manliness into narrow molds than most war wagers will admit. There are far more efforts than most analysts care to acknowledge.”

by Sarah Meyer de Stadelhofen

So, who’s afraid?
In October, Cynthia Enloe will be at the Graduate Institute of Geneva for a series of talks organized by Elizabeth Prügl, Professor of International Relations and Political Science. “In my talk ‘Who’s afraid of gender analysis?’ I use ‘feminist curiosity’ to make sense of national and international affairs. Why do officials and NGOs show so much resistance to UN Security Council Resolution 1325? Why is it so hard for them to get it?”