To Make the Connections, You Must See the Pieces

Abstract

The Curious Feminist. By Cynthia Enloe. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 367 pp., $50.00 cloth (ISBN: 0-520-24235-1), $19.95 paper (ISBN: 0-520-24381-1). Readers familiar with Cynthia Enloe's work know to expect both clarity and new insights from it. Enloe, Research Professor at Clark University, helped create the field of feminist studies in international politics while also contributing to feminist theory and to comparative politics more generally. The Curious Feminist , a collection of essays on “searching for women in a new age of empire,” will not disappoint either new readers or long-term followers of Enloe. A number of these essays have been published previously. Fans of Enloe's work will recognize, for example, such classics as “The Globetrotting Sneaker” and “Sneak Attack: The Militarization of US Culture.” But placed in the context of this volume, which argues for the importance of developing a “feminist curiosity,” even these familiar essays offer new perspectives. Moreover, many of the essays included in The Curious Feminist have either not been published before in the United States or have appeared in journals or collections that may be hard to locate. Altogether, then, this volume is a most welcome addition to the Enloe oeuvre (see especially Enloe 1989, 1993, 2000). Enloe has been arguing for some time that those who wish to understand politics need to develop habits of “curiosity” (see especially Enloe 1993)—that is, a willingness to ask questions about things that might seem to be either natural or obvious. In The Curious Feminist , she takes up this call, exploring the multiple dimensions of what it might mean to develop a “feminist curiosity” as we think about politics in general and international relations in particular. As she demonstrates through the essays in this volume, to develop such a curiosity means (1) taking …