Bananas, Beaches And Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics

Through the bar fine system in the Philippines (when large US military bases operated there), male customers paid bar owners “to take a woman outside the club to have sex” (166). Enloe explains that such policies facilitated sex work and were intentional. The US military and local authorities sustained the system.

The double day refers to the burden on women to perform full-time paid work and then do unpaid work at home. While working-class women are accustomed to this burden, middle-class women in wealthier countries have turned to domestic workers to help with the work at home, increasing the demand for such workers.

Heavy industries, such as steel and aluminum, are masculinized, while light industries, such as garment and food processing industries, are feminized. The categories are fluid: Corporate executives femininize an industry if they want to pay lower wages. Heavy industries enhance a nation’s prestige and are deemed essential to national security, which further entrenches “the marginalization of women’s paid work and the masculinization of international politics” (286).

A lily pad is a low-impact military base with a small footprint in the host country and, importantly, does not include housing for soldiers’ families. Enloe explains that the US military has shifted to this model for some of its bases to avoid meeting the demands of soldiers’ wives, who had begun to organize against domestic violence and to demand better treatment. Lily pads force husbands to spend more time away from their families.

Military sexual trauma is a medical concept that the Veteran’s Administration developed to provide care for women veterans whose fellow male soldiers had raped them. The need for special clinics to care for these women testifies to the prevalence of the problem in the US military. As late as 2007, a woman sergeant who reported her rape to an army chaplain was told that it was God’s will (155). Enloe highlights how international politics cause trauma in women’s daily lives.

A nation is “a collection of people who have come to believe that they have been shaped by a common past and are destined to share a common future” (94). Nationalist visions can be narrow, embracing cultural homogeneity, or open, championing multiethnic states and diversity. Marriage policies and norms, which direct women on whom to marry, dictate the type of nationalism. Nationalist campaigns tend to place women’s rights on the back burner, and Enloe notes the difficulty of reconciling feminism with nationalism.

In a patriarchal society, “relationships and inequalities are shaped by the privileging of particular masculinities and by women’s subordination to and dependence on men” (31). Enloe emphasizes that sustaining such societies requires conscious effort, and she highlights throughout her work how this is done. In such societies, men in power keep certain groups of men down by labeling them feminine.

A plantation economy is one in which “foreign agribusiness giants have so dominated entire societies that those societies are reduced to the status of dependency and their cultures suffused with paternalism” (235). The banana industry has created such societies. Typically, sex work is integral to these economies. The impact on women in them is especially negative.

A “sex slave” is a person forced into sexual service, either paid or unpaid. Enloe notes that the travel industry promotes sex and that the male customers do not typically inquire about whether those servicing them do so of their own free will.

Sex tourism is the “process of encouraging overwhelmingly male tourists […] to travel from one country to another to gain access to women’s sexual services” (74). Countries entice men via advertisements and, in doing so, commodify women. This practice in international politics is intentional, and countries rely on the tourism revenue it generates.

Sex tourism and sex trafficking are intertwined. Trafficking involves moving people across borders against their will, a process that requires complex alliances. Enloe highlights the lack of curiosity about the opportunities that women have to leave sex work and the conditions in which they enter this role and exist within it.

A term adopted “to show respect for the woman who is performing commercialized sex with paying male customers” (76), a sex worker, as Enloe explains the term, implies autonomy, but this is not necessarily the case. As a result, other terms have arisen to describe women coerced into sex work.