BOOK REVIEW BANANAS, BEACHES AND BASES
Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. By Cynthia Enloe London: Pandora Press, 1990 200 pp., $1 1.95 Reviewed by Meera Nanda The global assembly line, (wo)manned by the new proletariat with "nimble fingers and docile demeanor," is the mainstay of the new international division of labor. New technologies allow multinational corporations to move the production of goods for sale in the industrialized countries from high-wage Western countries to the Third World. In the process, gender roles are moved as well. The monotonous, dead-end, ill-paid jobs filled mainly by women in the West have been shifted to their Third World sisters, who work for even lower wages and fewer benefits. Bananas, Beaches and Bases goes beyond most feminist commentaries on this subject by examining the sexist political arrangements that underlie the new international division of labor. Cynthia Enloe, a pioneer in providing a feminist understanding of the lives of women workers in the global economy, attempts to show in her recent book how the "conduct of international politics has depended on men's control of women." Separate chapters examine the political pillars supporting the edifice of the international economy. "Diplomatic Wives" lays bare the mechanisms through which conventional ideas about femininity and women working without pay as loyal and self- effacing companions, care-givers and hostesses are manipulated by governments to establish political and commercial links with other governments. "Bases" discusses the links between gender roles and the enforcement of the world order through military means. "Nationalism and Masculinity" examines the male biases that undercut the efforts of groups seeking to restrain the power of multinationals and create a more just society. The rest of the book explores the experiences of the Third World women toiling in banana plantations, garment industries and the burgeoning "service sector"--mostly tourism (including sex tourism) and domestic services (nannies and maids) for clients from affluent countries. The focus on the service sector is a useful corrective to the disproportionate attention Third World women workers in formal, industrial sectors like textiles and electronics have received in the past. It brings home the fact that a number of debt-ridden Third World countries, with advice and encouragement from international financial institutions, have begun to use women's bodies and emotions as a "natural resource to compete in the international market." Through interviews, historical anecdotes, newspaper reports and details from individual experiences, Enloe leads the reader to the fundamental paradox: despite the centrality of gender in international affairs, gender roles are unquestioned, unacknowledged and accepted as a part of the "natural" order. The international political and financial system relies on women's labor "as feminized workers, as respectable and loyal wives, as 'civilizing influences,' as sex objects, as obedient daughters, unpaid farmers." Yet world leaders refuse to acknowledge this dependence and deny the value of women's experiences--in war, marriage, trade, prostitution, factory work, domestic chores--in shaping political decisions. How can something so central be rendered invisible? Enloe's answer is that, just as feminists assert that the "personal is political," the "international is personal." International finance and politics rely upon private relations between men and women defined by patriarchal conventions of masculinity and femininity. Only an unquestioned equation of risk-taking and enterprise with "manliness" and docility and acceptance of authority with "feminine virtue" can make gender inequalities in international relations be taken for granted and seem "natural." From a questioning, feminist vantage point, Enloe proceeds to "make women visible" in the international political and economic order. Women in most societies, for instance, are assumed to be "naturally" good at cleaning, washing, cooking and serving without expecting any wages. This explains why even in countries with rampant male unemployment, an overwhelming majority of "chambermaids" (75 percent in the Caribbean and 80 percent in China during the late 1980s) and domestic servants are women. The international hotel industry--the "new plantation"--keeps its costs low simply by defining its lower-end jobs as "women's jobs." Immigrant women, forced to leave behind their own children and families to find jobs as nannies and servants in rich countries in the West and the Persian Gulf, have become the largest single source of foreign currency for the Philippines and Sri Lanka. Enloe connects the swelling ranks of women in hotels, brothels and affluent households to the debt crisis which makes earning hard currency the top priority of debtor countries. Enloe's most striking--and most startling--example of patriarchy in international relations describes the continuing control of women's sexuality in the colonial and post-colonial Third World. The U.S. government's insistence in the late 1980s that the Filipino government test all women providing sexual services to U.S. servicemen stationed in that country for AIDS, bears an unmistakable similarity to the "Cantonment Act," passed by the British a century ago, which demanded compulsory genital examination of Indian women around imperial military bases. Enloe provides a very readable analysis of the gender inequalities that lie at the heart of the modern-day world system. She offers hope by interspersing her narrative with descriptions of women who have united locally and globally to challenge their oppression. Her faith that "Nothing is natural ... what has been can be unmade" suffuses the entire book with a welcome optimism. Yet, the book is not without serious shortcomings, both thematic and stylistic. One major problem is that Enloe never defines what she means by international politics and how it relates to international economy. As a result, her wide-ranging analysis of different manifestations of politics is disconnected. She discusses politics conceived variously as statesmanship, as imperialism (and its nemesis, nationalism), as military might and as immigration policies. Furthermore, she looks at the role gender plays in all these forms of politics at levels ranging from sexist assumptions (e.g., women as dependents and care- givers) to lack of equal opportunity (e.g., in foreign services) to state policies that encourage overt sexual coercion (e.g., sex tourism and prostitution) and create a disposable workforce (e.g., in the garment industry and agribusiness). Taken separately, Enloe's critiques of these political processes and gender inequalities are quite valid. But a struggle against these injustices requires a more complex understanding that relates all these snippets of reality to each other. Enloe's failure to analyze the unified reality leaves the reader with no lasting and deeper understanding, but only with moving details and anecdotes about women's struggles. The book's lack of rigor is also reflected in its failure to acknowledge that other social cleavages exist be sides gender. For too long international affairs have been assumed to be gender neutral, but that does not warrant the displacement of all earlier categories of analysis, irrespective of their validity and usefulness, with gender. Enloe tends to do exactly that. At one point, she equates "risk taking" with a "masculinized conception of banking." The reader is left wondering what a femininized conception of banking would look like. So concerned is Enloe with supporting her thesis that "gender makes the world go round" that she does not even acknowledge the classical problems of feminist analysis. For instance, while men call the shots in world affairs, it is important to recognize that men are also vulnerable to manipulation for the sake of profits and political aims. Moreover, Enloe places too much faith in the "international sisterhood" for winning justice for Third World women, failing to acknowledge that class and national difference cut right through sisterhood. For example, Carla Hills, the U.S. Trade Representative, and the women at the receiving end of the trade policies she establishes do not have identical interests determined by their shared gender. Despite these limitations, anyone looking for a readable, popular overview of the state of women in world affairs will certainly find Bananas, Beaches and Bases satisfying.