A rural poor woman wants to withdraw from the microcredit scheme, but her husband slaps her when she even suggests not renewing her loan.
A long-distance trader carries from her source to her market all sorts of products: bolts of cloth, farming utensils, boxes of ammunition.
A state-of-the-art jet fighter plane just purchased from a U.S. male-led aerospace company by Malaysia's male-led Defense Ministry has been wired by American women factory workers.
A young man joins an insurgent militia in part out of his belief in the cause, in part because he is alienated, feeling disrespected as a man, and in part because he has been promised a monthly salary.
For readers of Politics & Gender, it has always been exhilarating to break through disciplinary barriers. For four decades they/we have been expanding the definitions of “politics.” As Heidi Hudson and Katherine Allison remind us here, gender-curious political analysts have pulled back the curtain on the operations of politics in “messy” everyday life—everyday work life, domestic life, social movement life, military life, and bureaucratic life. Together, we all have turned bright spotlights on the workings of power where our still-narrowly focused colleagues have seen merely the “normal,” the “routine,” the “conventional.” Simultaneously, gender-savvy researchers have disaggregated all sorts of data, where too many of their fellow gender-dismissive researchers have been incuriously content with such grossly unhelpful categories as “voters,” “non-voters,” “home-owners,” “refugees,” “clerics,” “migrant workers,” “contractors,” “bankers,” “journalists,” “soldiers,” “civil societies activists,” “workers,” “rioters,” “farmers,” “officials,” “legislators,” “judges,” and “insurgents.” These sorts of lazily un-gender-disaggregated categories make a feminist investigator's teeth grind.
In dismantling these customary and institutionalized intellectual barriers, feminist-informed gender analysts have made two major contributions to our collective understandings of politics: First, they have exposed the artificiality of the presumed division between the public and the private spheres. Second, they have demonstrated that there is a lot more power (and confusion) at work in politics than most nonfeminist analysts have been willing to admit.
Both of these feminist contributions have had significant impacts on all fields of political analysis. Nowhere is this truer than in the study of international politics. In fact, as the six multinational authors of these provocative essays make clear, the evolution of feminist analysis of international politics has moved so far along in the last decade that there are now signs—worrisome signs—that feminist analysts of international politics might be forgetting what they have shared. They might be making bricks to construct new intellectual barriers. That is not progress.
Building, brick by metaphorical brick, new intellectual barriers would deprive all of us, trying to make sense of politics in all its myriad guises, of crucial feminist insights. For instance, as Juanita Elias and Shirin Rai warn us here, we might forget to always—always!—ask, “Where is gender-infused violence or threatened violence in any economic transformation?” On the other side of this worrisome analytical coin, is Jacqui True's valuable caveat: we will never reliably understand any violent armed conflict (and thus end this one and prevent the next one) if we forget to investigate what gendered economic activities—much of it desperate—are threaded through that conflict. The gendered politics of mining, farming, marketing, banking, and smuggling do not stop because weapons-wielding state armies and armed insurgents have taken center stage.
I was recently struck by the value of both of these wise warnings when I was rewriting and updating Bananas, Beaches and Bases. To make sense of the new U.S. military basing strategies, for instance, I had to track the transformations of the sexualized politics around American bases in Qatar and Bahrain. I also had to figure out the political consequences of Filipino women and women migrants from Ukraine having replaced Korean women in the discos around the U.S. bases in South Korea. Likewise, I had to monitor the new twists in the international gendered politics of the global garment industry—that is, to craft a useful feminist analysis of Nike, H&M, North Face, Mango, Tommy Hilfinger, and Walmart. I needed to pay close attention to all the new players in Bangladesh's intense, garment export politics. But in doing that, I couldn't pretend that the Bangladeshi women sewing in unsafe factories weren't also part of a society just now coming to grips with the long postwar silences surrounding wartime rapes (Enloe Reference Enloe2014).
Yes, both investigations made me stretch. Yes, it would have been easier if I could have put U.S. bases in one box and sexualized entertainment businesses in another box. It would, similarly, have been easier if I could have put the garment industry in one box and wartime sexual violence in a separate box. But whoever said that plunging into a feminist investigation was easy?
In her essay here, Laura Sjoberg usefully reminds us that any disciplinary institutionalization has its own history. For example, “feminist security studies” was named by a particular scholar at a particular historical moment in the ongoing evolutions of four academic fields: political science, international relations, development studies, and women's/gender/feminist studies.
That reminder serves to make us more acutely aware of a conundrum that simultaneously enlivens and plagues current academic life—one might even say academic “everyday life.” That is, unless we are wide awake and attentive, new questionings, new investigatory and teaching energies, new collaborations, new excitements—each of which has helped to dismantle existing wasteful barriers—can now provide the mortar and the bricks for constructing new wasteful academic walls.
The free-flowing river of thought and findings can begin to diverge into separate channels. Out of our fresh questionings, collaborations, and discoveries we begin to offer new advanced undergraduate and graduate seminars that are more specialized. We propose new academic lists to book publishers. Because there is now so much new work getting into print, we craft assigned readings that are more specialized. We launch new Internet lists to stay in touch with those researchers asking questions closest to our own. We scheme to publish new journals. We do the hard work of organizing new focused workshops and conferences. We urge academic association officers to provide space for more of our specialized panels.
It's all so exciting. The adrenalin flows. We certainly don't feel as though we are building walls. In the process, the woman in the microcredit scheme is not asked about where violence or intimidation is in her life. We chart fighter planes as if it only matters who pilots them, not also who designed and assembled them. We critique UNSC Resolution 1325's feeble implementation in constitution drafting processes, but not in the decision-making processes for building new postwar roads and electricity grids. We delve into militiamen's misogynist attitudes and actions without much attention to whether those gun-wielding men are being paid and, if so, what they are doing with their money. The rushing river of feminist curiosity divides; its currents grow weaker.
What these five valuable essays amount to is a cautionary tale. It is a cautionary tale not just for scholars/teachers working in the exiting field of gender and international politics. It is a cautionary tale for all of us, no matter what our special interests are in the wide-open area of gendered political analysis. We should delight in our feminist-fueled intellectual excitements. We should cultivate new interests and nonparochial networks. Let a hundred new panels bloom. But, all the while, we need to be wary of creating and then slipping into comfortable new isolating silos. Instead, I think, we need to keep asking ourselves, How do we make sense of women's and men's gendered political lives without shying away from their wonderful “messiness”?
