Ask a Political Scientist: A Conversation with Cynthia Enloe about Gender and Global Politics

Abstract

Previous article FreeAsk a Political Scientist: A Conversation with Cynthia Enloe about Gender and Global PoliticsInterviewer: Alyson ColeInterviewer: Alyson Cole Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreAC:Your pioneering book, Bananas, Beaches and Bases, confronted International Relations (IR) scholars with one simple question—“Where are the women?” Of course, by asking this question you compelled the field not only to grapple with questions of gender, but also to turn its attention from elites to non-elites, from government policy to the material economies of workers. Your vital critique was published in the U.S. in 1990, with a second edition in 2014. What has changed in the field and what has remained stubbornly persistent over the last three decades? Do we need still to ask, “Where are the women?” Are there new unasked questions? If you were writing a third edition, what changes might you introduce?CE:Honestly, Alyson, back in the late 1980s the reason I asked, “Where are the women?” was because, until the early 1980s (when I published Does Khaki Become You?),1 I never had asked that question! Just before writing Khaki, I had spent seven years researching a book2 tracking the racisms and ethnocentrisms that shaped at least a dozen state militaries, and yet I had not even noticed that I was researching men. I failed to see men-as-men; I saw them only as Scottish UK soldiers or Navajo US soldiers or as Kikuyu Kenyan soldiers or as white Afrikaans-speaking South African soldiers.That failure of curiosity meant that I missed the politics of masculinities—and the deliberate racializations of masculinity. I thereby missed all the calculations, anxieties, and erroneous assumptions that shaped male officials’ efforts to recruit, control, and deploy male soldiers. That also meant I failed entirely to take notice of—analytically interrogate—all the power senior national security officials expended to control women for the sake of pursuing their military objectives: women as wives, as mothers, as munitions factory workers, as nurses and, of course, as coercively prostituted women or as sex workers. Back then I also missed some women’s resistance to those efforts to militarize their emotions, loyalties, sexuality and labor.What I’m now embarrassed to confess is that, for all those years (and in six gender-uncurious early books), I woefully under-estimated political power—its forms, its intents, its wielders, its consequences. Of course, as a political scientist, a Berkeley-in-the-60s-trained political scientist, no less, I was sure I was studying power in all its subtleties. But now, as a feminist, looking back, I cringe to realize how much about power I missed.The reason I tell this embarrassing story today is to remind myself how powerful patriarchy is. Patriarchy shrinks our intellectual curiosities. Patriarchal assumptions and patriarchal structures of academic careerist rewards confer the sought-after accolade of “serious” on research that pays zero heed to women’s relationships to power, to states, to other women, and to men. Those patriarchal assumptions and structures, I’m increasingly convinced, weaken the analytical value of political science as a discipline. So these days I think a lot about what is taken seriously by whom—and thus what is not taken seriously and by whom.3Your hunch is right. I was motivated to research a thoroughly updated new edition of Bananas4 because I imagined a lot had changed in gendered international politics between 1990 and 2014. The positive changes (toward equity, justice, and sustainable peace) that I did discover were especially in the realm of diverse women’s organizing—by women working on banana plantations, by women migrating internationally to work as domestic workers, by women in the transnational garment industry, and by women organizing for peace against the odds in war zones. Their organizing has made impacts on international diplomacy and political economies. But what really struck me when I was researching this new edition was what hadn’t radically changed. I found that people who benefit from the workings of all sorts of patriarchal systems have not stood still. They have learned how to talk the new talk, without having to walk the new walk.That was fascinating to uncover. And that’s why, as soon as I sent off the updated Bananas manuscript, I began mulling over a new book, one that would continue tracking the workings of “sustainable patriarchy.” It became The Big Push: Exposing and Challenging Persistent Patriarchy.5And if I were thinking about another new edition of Bananas, I would plunge into the national and international gendered politics of public health. Well, actually, being greedy, I hope there are researchers out there conducting feminist political analyses of the World Health Organization, Pfizer, and Doctors Without Borders. And I hope that political scientists working in Brazil, New Zealand, India, Thailand, and the UK (and, of course, the US) right now are conducting intersectionally gendered investigations into each of those country’s pandemic politics. The good feminists at the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (I’m part of WILPF’s transnational Academic Network) persuaded me to write several short pieces in 2020 on militarization of the pandemic for their COVID-19 online series, but I know they just scratch the surface.AC:Can you share how you came to feminist IR, and what you view as the role of feminist IR in relation to the many shades of neorealism, as well as to other genres of critical IR? Have political scientists learned to embrace what you have called “feminist curiosity’?CE:Well, actually I became a feminist before I became a feminist IR specialist. In fact, I became a feminist Comparative Politics specialist before I became a feminist IR researcher. Initially, it was thanks to friends in London that I started thinking about the drivers and consequences of sexism. British feminist friends in the 1970s brought me along with them to sit on the floors of crowded, smoky rooms where everyone was sorting out the theories of Engels, Wollstonecraft, and de Beauvoir. The stakes were high.You know how exciting it can be to see the world afresh, to have new puzzles to tackle. It was in the 1970s that I first subscribed to the British journal Feminist Review and to the US journal Signs. I joined the American Political Science Association’s (APSA) Women’s Caucus and took part in the launch of my own university’s nascent Women’s Studies Program. The first gender and politics course I crafted was “The Comparative Politics of Women.” I loved introducing political science students to the writings and activist lives of Olympe de Gouges, Alexandra Kollantai, and Huda Sha’rawi! About that time I also joined the National Women’s Studies Association. Its annual meetings were wonderfully buzzy.And it was during those years that I got caught up in one of the first nationally publicized academic sexual harassment cases. My Clark University colleague, Ximena Bunster, a Chilean anthropologist in exile to escape the Pinochet regime (Ximena had been an advisor to President Salvador Allende), brought sexual harassment charges against the male chair of sociology, a man who baldly asserted that he could not possibly abuse power because he was a prominent activist in anti-war movements. It divided the campus—and split the American Sociological Association (ASA) and the American Anthropological Association (AAS). Trying to offer effective support to Ximena taught me lasting lessons about the gendering of power. It’s one of the reasons that today I keep close track of the politics of dozens of national and institutional #MeToo movements—in very specific countries: China, UK, Iceland, Australia, US, Japan, South Korea, France, and the UN. The politics of sexual harassment in each country have international dynamics (via the Olympics, transnational corporations, international treaties, transnational legal strategies, and transnational women’s organizing) and, though each of these national politics is distinctive, some of the political gender dynamics are surprisingly similar.You and I both know that today it still is pretty easy for a lot of people in most subfields of political science to imagine themselves to be doing “serious” research and to be teaching “serious” courses—on national security, international organizations, international finance, state building, environmental politics—without their needing to explicitly investigate where women are, where the men are, and why. One still can get published in prominent political science journals, get panels accepted at APSA, Britain’s PSA, as well as ISA, BISA, EISA and IPSA, and get political science academic jobs and promotions, each without demonstrating any interest in the operations of, or the political manipulations of gender, or without any familiarity with the scores of research publications on diverse women’s complex relationships to diverse men, to political movements, to patriarchal institutions and power.Now, that doesn’t mean that there haven’t been any significant changes in the organization, culture, and practices of political science. Most political science departments now have at least one faculty member whose gender analytical skills shape their research and teaching. Still, when I do guest lectures at colleges and universities, it’s not unusual for a woman political science professor to come up and whisper that she’s the sole gender specialist in her department and is expected to take on all the extra work that that can entail. She also often goes on to say, sotto voce, that the existence of a Women’s and Gender Studies Program on her campus as an alternative intellectual home is a godsend.APSA meetings are now enlivened by dozens of panels on gender politics. So are meetings of the British Political Studies Association. At International Studies Association (ISA) meetings, the sessions of the Feminist Theory and Gender Studies (FTGS) section have earned the reputation of being among the conference’s most lively—and collegial. The same is true at the British International Studies Association, thanks to the Gender in International Relations Working Group (GIRWG). And new gender-conscious political science networks and caucuses are forming all the time: for instance, the Brazilian International Studies Association now has a lively Women’s Caucus; and the newly up and running “Fanel,” is a network of women national security specialists in southern and southeastern Europe. Academic refereed political science journals have not stood still. There is Politics and Gender, International Feminist Journal of Politics, and Women, Politics and Policy to insure that valuable analyses of gendered politics are widely read. Nowadays at many general political science journals, gender-explicit manuscripts are invited and get thoughtful reviews. And here is Polity, of course, co-edited by you, a scholar doing serious gender-curious political research!Also on the positive side of the ledger are all the international agencies, ministries, and NGOs that have been compelled to conduct rigorous gender audits of their own institutional policies, cultures and programs. I’m an avid reader of these carefully researched reports. For instance, I’ve found fascinating the findings in the just-released World Wildlife Fund’s first-ever report on the gender dynamics shaping the international illegal trade in wildlife, as well as the US Department of Defense’s revealing investigation of the gendered mismanagement of one of its largest army bases, Fort Hood, and the Canadian government’s devastating report on the sexual harassment and impunity rampant in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.6Many of the specialists conducting these revealing audits have gained their gender-smart political analytical skills by double-majoring in political science and Women’s and Gender Studies, or by earning their master’s or doctoral degrees at universities such as LSE, SOAS, Kings College, Monash, Sydney, Georgetown, Rutgers, Ehwa, Bristol, Tufts, or York, schools that have developed impressive gender-explicit graduate programs.AC:Have your ideas about women’s subordinate role in international relations changed over the years as more women assume positions such as Secretary of State and serve as pivotal actors on the international diplomacy scene?CE:I remember once being in Australia—this would have been in the 1990s—doing a series of radio interviews. The on-air male hosts had been told by their producers (often women) that they would be talking to a feminist political scientist. The hosts seemed to assume I would be advocating more women in senior posts as the foolproof antidote to world militarism. So they were ready. Unfailingly, they would pose their “gotcha” question: “What about Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi, and Golda Meier?”I think they were a bit surprised that I was happy they asked that question. Nothing like being invited to explain (in 30 seconds or less) the distinctions between feminism and essentialism, right?We’ve learned over the decades that it matters most when those women who rise into consequential political posts bring with them gender analytical skills, gender equity commitments and, best of all, links to an activist women’s constituency. Nonetheless, we’ve also learned that having more women per se in significant political posts can matter in so far as it lessens the masculinization of those posts. It’s tricky, though. In any patriarchy if any post loses its masculinist cache it can risk becoming a “feminized” post. If that happens, it is likely to lose much of its past political authority and clout. That’s the catch, isn’t it? Again, the beneficiaries of patriarchy learn, and they have learned since the 1970s, how to increase the sheer numbers of women in senior posts without surrendering much of their own patriarchal political clout.Still, feminists do count. We always count. I think it does matter, for instance, what the level of masculinization is of one of the most politically powerful committees shaping today’s global politics: the Standing Committee of the Chinese Communist Party’s Politboro. The Standing Committee currently has nine members, all of whom are men (and, not insignificantly, all of whom are ethnic Han Chinese men).The first woman to fill a post is never, on its own, proof of patriarchy’s decline (think who succeeded the first women to serve as President of Iceland, President of Chile, Prime Ministers of Canada, India, Turkey…). Still, the processes that have insured a never-a-woman post are worth investigating. The UN never has elected a woman as Secretary General, although women inside and outside the UN have managed to campaign successfully for a less secretive backroom selection process. NATO claims to be pursuing gender equity, but it is a boys’ club at the top. Likewise, The World Bank never has been headed by a woman.In 2019, however, a quite remarkable succession did occur: the Board of the International Monetary Fund appointed as successor to Christine Legarde, the first woman they had ever appointed to be IMF Managing Director (in the wake of a sexual scandal that compelled Dominique Strauss-Kahn to resign), a second woman, Bulgarian economist Kristalina Georgian. Two women in a row to head one of the world’s most powerful institutions: that’s not “peanuts.” Furthermore, Legarde had shown a keen awareness of sexism and thus perhaps had an impact of the IMF’s patriarchal internal culture. On the other hand, it is requiring serious analysis now to determine whether Legarde’s and Georgian’s back-to-back tenures have generated new attention among IMF economists to what feminist analysts long have shown to be the disproportionate economic hardships falling on women in IMF loan-receiving countries as a consequence of the IMF’s standard austerity package of loan conditions. (The Strauss-Kahn scandal energized me to delve into the gendered politics of international banking in Seriously!)Does it matter that today President Joe Biden’s National Security Council is 36% women, 64% men? It certainly does widen the crack in the wall of patriarchal presumption that national security expertise somehow inherently adheres to manliness. (I’ve tried to explore how the very concept of “national security” has become masculinized and militarized in Globalization and Militarism).7For a sense of gender comparative perspective on Biden’s NSC, one notes that Donald Trump’s NSC membership was 15% women, 85% men; Barak Obama’s NSC was 25% women, 75% men; George W. Bush’s NSC was 12% women, 88% men; Bill Clinton’s NSC was 14% women, 86% men. During most of the years of the administrations of George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, and Jimmy Carter the US National Security Council was wall-to-wall men. The reason we even have these gender figures at hand is because a group of US women committed to gender equity is doing the counting.8 Counting is political. Refusing to count is political too.Let’s return, though, to the double-puzzle at the core of your own enticing question: when and why do increasing proportions of women, reducing the super-majorities of men in any powerful organization, matter? To answer those crucial questions, we need to dig further, asking explicitly feminist questions: for example, have US administrations’ NSC increasing numbers of women made any dent in that institution’s militarized world view; have the increasing proportions of women appointed to the Council broadened the NSC’s collective gender curiosity about what constitutes both “national” and “security”?I’m not a specialist in international law. But, especially since the late 1990s, I’ve been nudged by activist colleagues to pay closer attention to efforts at institutionalizing women’s political participation in international negotiations and women’s rights in international agreements. I’m still a greenhorn. Yet, even to start analyzing any of these efforts, I’ve learned to ask first: “Where were the common assumptions about—and (very different) what was the verifiable knowledge about—diverse women in the pursuit of each of these international agreements?” I’ve also been tutored by transnational activists to ask: “Where were feminist activist women in negotiating any notable achievement?”Where are the women? It turns out that some of them were lobbying at 2:00 AM in Rome hotel corridors! Feminist human rights lawyer, the late Rhonda Copelon, and other feminists—building on careful research detailing the experiences of diverse women in recent wars, particularly those in Rwanda and Yugoslavia—were staying awake past midnight to persuade state delegates to pay explicit attention to violence against women in war as they hammered out the fine print in what became the Rome Statute of 1998, the foundational document setting the perimeters of the International Crimes Court’s (ICC) authority. If one does not ask “Where are the women?,” I’ve learned, one will not be able to explain why the current ICC can prosecute individuals for enabling or perpetrating systematic wartime rape, forced abortion and forced births, or female sexual slavery for the sake of pursuing their wartime objectives.9With the help of colleagues in Norway, the UK, the US, and Australia, I’ve been trying to follow the political maneuvers by states to skirt the obligations imposed on them in the 2000 UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace, and Security (referred to by feminist peace activists as simply “1325”) to meaningfully include civil society women in ceasefire and peace negotiations, as well as in crucial decision-making about post-war rebuilding—road construction, police reform, mining contracts. I’ve also been fruitfully pushed by WILPF advocates at the UN to become interested in the Arms Trade Treaty of 2013’s surprising inclusion (in Article 7) of an obligation imposed on ratifying governments to account for gender-based violence when they decide whether or not to permit exports of rifles and pistols.10Today, Turkish feminist colleagues make sure I pay attention to the ongoing politics—of both enforcement and opting out—of the 2014 Council of Europe’s Istanbul Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence (usually referred to just as “the Istanbul Convention”). In other words, the politics of intimate forms of violence, male violence against their domestic partners, have become international politics. And, most recently, there is the Treaty Prohibiting Nuclear Weapons, which entered into force in January 2021. It turns out that the prolonged diplomatic and civil society processes that produced this remarkable treaty are threaded with the politics of feminization and masculinization—and with resistance to both. Fascinating. (A remarkably detailed, candid insider’s account of the roles gender dynamics played in the step-by-excruciating-step campaigning and diplomacy behind the historic TPNW is provided in Ray Acheson’s Banning the Bomb, Smashing the Patriarchy.)11AC:Less than a week ago, the US finally left Afghanistan. I wonder if you might comment on whether you think we are closer to the end of “forever wars.” Do you think the arguments you made in Nimo’s War, Emma’s War: Making Feminist Sense of the Iraq War would be applicable to the gender politics in Afghanistan?12CE:Ah, interesting. The gender political histories of Iraq and Afghanistan, of course, are significantly different. Both countries have had women’s rights movements since the early decades of the twentieth century. But the Iraqi women’s movement managed to make more substantial and lasting political gains. In part, as I learned from the work of Nadje Al-Ali and other feminist historians, this was due to their effective pressuring of Iraq’s Communist and Baathist political parties as those male-led parties pursued their anti-colonialist and modernist goals. The nationalist authoritarian regime of Saddam Hussein and his secularist Baathist Party calculated that fostering women’s education and women’s engagement in paid work would strengthen both Iraq and their own hold on state power.The 1996–2000 Taliban regime of Afghanistan—and, incidentally, also their chief militarized Afghan rivals, the warlord-led Northern Alliance backed by the US government—saw women’s education and engagement in the paid labor force quite differently: as weakening what those men saw as the pillars of Afghan social order.This meant that when the US government led a military invasion of Iraq in 2003, it faced a very different local gender political, social, and economic landscape than when it had led a military invasion into Afghanistan two years earlier. But no one in the George W. Bush administration had either the skills or the inclination to conduct an historicized political gender analysis of the countries they were invading, or of the political systems they sought to topple. If they had had those skills and had used them, they might not have been surprised that many Iraqi educated women did not see them as “liberators.”So one of the chief lessons I learned researching Nimo’s War, Emma’s War (which remains one of my favorite books because I learned so much in writing it!) was that every war happens at a particular moment in each combatant’s gendered history. That’s true not just of the US war in Iraq and the US war in Afghanistan; it’s true, we’ve learned from scores of thoughtful feminist historians, of the US Spanish-American War, of Britain’s Boer War, the Ottomans’ genocidal war against ethnic Armenians; it’s true of World War I and World War II, the US war in Korea, the French colonial wars in Algeria and Vietnam, the US war in Vietnam, the civil war in Northern Ireland, the 1988 Iran-Iraq war, the genocidal war in 1994 Rwanda, the 1992–1995 war in the former Yugoslavia, the decades-long civil war in Colombia, the current wars in Kashmir and in Israel and Palestine. This certainly is true of the newest brutal wars in Myanmar and in Ethiopia. It will be true of the next war.No war stands outside gendered history. How that distinctive gendered historical moment shapes each armed conflict is what we have to investigate.That is, I’ve gradually learned that every war happens at particular—knowable, analyzable—moments in the ongoing histories of diverse women’s relationships to marriage, to property, to money, to violence, to literacy, to ethnic identity, to the state, to organizing, to international institutions. For instance, as the US government was invading Iraq in 2003, US women were entering the paid labor force in rising numbers and entering the state’s post-gay ban military in increasing numbers (women comprised 14% of active duty personnel in 2003, with African American women especially prominent in the ranks of the active duty army; Latinx women’s numbers in the military were on the rise); US women were holding a fifth of the seats in the US Congress though still ranking an embarrassing 72nd in the world’s national legislatures. At that same time, women in the US were increasingly politically organized, though torn by the tricky American politics of militarized security and patriotism.Iraqi women—ethnically and religiously diverse—were all too aware of this moment in their own historic efforts to gain literacy, legal autonomy, and economic security, their efforts dating back to the 1920s. US policymakers were apparently oblivious of this, perhaps imagining Iraqi women simply to be oppressed and thus ready to welcome the invaders. Iraqi women, we soon learned (well, some Americans never learned), could be critically conscious of Saddam Hussein’s masculinized rule and authoritarian oppression, while simultaneously they could deeply resent a foreign military that destroyed their conditions for safe schooling, chances for careers, and reliable electrical power grids. These Iraqi women were being not inconsistent; they were being sophisticated.While Iraqi women on the eve of the US-led invasion in 2003 had higher than regional average rates of literacy and maternal health, Afghan women in 2001 were enduring some of the world’s lowest rates of literacy and highest rates of maternal mortality. Some Afghan women remembered the previous era of the 1970s with its more modernist rule. Again, they were not naïve. They were aware of the Soviet-backed distortion of Afghanistan’s civic life. But they also had learned what a more secular, even if masculinized, regime could offer if it saw women’s education and women’s paid work as key to achieving its own regime goals. That is, 2001 Afghanistan was not an un-gendered tabula rasa. While most Americans—and most people in the countries whose forces joined the Americans in the invasion—made no effort to learn anything about the rich political gendered history of Afghanistan, it was not a society whose gendered canvas was historically blank.One of the reasons I learned so much from writing Nimo’s War, Emma’s War, I now realize, was because I structured this book as a series of deep dives into the wartime lives and ideas of eight particular women, four Iraqis and four Americans. Nimo really inspired the entire book. She ran a tiny women’s hair salon a few blocks (but a universe away) from Baghdad’s famous “Green Zone.” Thanks to Nimo, I spent months trying to understand the economic history of Iraqi women, the Baathist Party’s incentive for encouraging women to join the paid labor force (especially to take jobs in the large state economic sector—hospitals, museums, banks, textile plants, public utilities) in the 1970s, the devastating impacts on so many Iraqi women’s work lives of the post-1991 US-backed international economic sanctions, and the economic coping strategies crafted by women to keep earning incomes after the US invasion. Nimo taught me to never stop asking questions about gendered economics just because there’s a war on!It is Nimo who reminded me to watch what goes on inside women-managed beauty salons in Kabul and Kandahar during the Afghan war. The genderings of Afghanistan’s political economy have not come to a grinding halt when the last US military cargo plane lifted off the Kabul airport’s tarmac.The experiences of another Iraqi woman, Maha, reminded me of several lessons that I’d absorbed in my early years of becoming a feminist political analyst of war and militarization, but which are easy to forget. First, always ask about prostitution as a political economic system and about sex work as engaged in by particular women. Always. For instance, ask: which women make economic calculations that bring them into sex work; which women are coercively prostituted; who are the male clients; who greases the wheels of the resulting wartime prostitution system; what do fellow citizens think about those women whom they suspect of having been sex workers? Secondly, never take your political eyes off of marriage.Marriage is always political. All sorts of states have stakes in particular systems of marriage. So do rival male-led movements. Women’s oppression happens more often than not inside marriage, even if women’s access to economic security and to housing frequently comes only with marriage. This reality may take twists and turns as wars mobilize, deploy, displace, and kill people. But the politics of marriage remain salient, thus worth investigating during wartime.So in Afghanistan today, having learned to pay attention to Maha to understand the US war in Iraq reminded me to watch what is happening during the 2001–2021 war to those women who sought shelter in Afghan-women-run shelters in order to escape abusive marriages. Thinking about Maha’s experiences during