Globalizing Forces: Review of Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women's Lives.

• Date: 22 December 2000
• Author: D'Amico, Francine
• Published date: 22 December 2000
• Author: D'Amico, Francine

Cynthia Enloe, Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women's Lives. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000; 437 pp. $45.00 cloth, $17.95 paper.

OFTEN IT TAKES JUST ONE CLEAR AND INSISTENT VOICE TO REVEAL WHAT MOST OF us either cannot see or are deliberately kept from Seeing. For almost two decades, Cynthia Enloe has been that voice, exposing the intricate ways in which military planners manipulate social conceptions of gender to maintain what they deem to be desirable levels of militarization. Enloe uncovers the gender maneuvers that camouflage the calculated choices of not only politicians and military officers, but also drill sergeants, local tavern keepers, and marketing executives. Her unique contribution to the analysis of contemporary world politics consists in drawing our attention to the ways in which the globalizing forces of economic and cultural integration are militarized. She looks at the gendered lessons that NATO soldiers and U.N. peacekeepers learn from one another, and at how multinational corporations, local entrepreneurs, consumers, and tourists navigate the militarized landscape. Yet she does not stop there: she also focuses our a ttention on women's resistance within militarized societies and on strategizing around the military institution, which she characterizes as our agency "in the spaces available" (Enloe, 2000:150).

Enloe began this important work on the intersections of militarism and gender in Does Khaki Become You? (first published in 1983, revised in 1988), following on her analysis of militarism and race/ethnicity (see Enloe, 1980). In Khaki, she focused a critical feminist lens on the ways in which "the military as an institution and militarism as an ideology" depend upon social constructions of gender and people gendered feminine (Enloe, 1983:8). She expanded this effort in Bananas, Beaches, and Bases (1990) to ask, 'Where are the women?" She also examines gender "on the landscape of international politics," from the Iran/Contra hearings to global tourism (Enloe, 1990:3). In The Morning After (1993), Enloe sought "to chart more accurately the gendered processes at work in constructing the postCold War world," from U.N. peacekeeping missions to the Gulf War (Enloe, 1993: 14). In her latest work, Maneuvers (2000), she deepens and updates her global catalogue of the ways in which militarism employs gender to survive and to adapt to what she has previously characterized as the multiple endings of the Cold War (Enloe, 1993:3). In her analysis of militarized rape, prostitution, marriage, nursing, mothering, and soldiering, she addresses three new questions: "Which women are there?" "How did those women get there?" and "What do they think about being there?" (Enloe, 2000: 294).

In The Morning After, Enloe (1993:5) demonstrated that patriarchy "does not come in one-size-fits-all." In Maneuvers, Enloe demonstrates that militarization does not come in one-size-fits-all, and she cautions that what looks like demilitarization may be little more than a shell game. For example, she ponders how one woman's decision to reject militarism, such as a Russian mother's refusal to surrender her son to state conscription, relates to another woman's decision to enlist in military service. Here, the demilitarization of one woman may lead to the militarization of another (Enloe, 2000: 245, 258-60). She also explores how military tasks were civilianized during the post-Cold War military cutbacks or downsizing of the 1990s, and she warns that this displacement has removed much of the military's support structure from public scrutiny and...