Search results

Cynthia Enloe's riveting new book looks at the end of the Cold War and places women at the center of international politics. Focusing on the relationship between the politics of sexuality and the politics of militarism, Enloe charts the changing definitions of gender roles, sexuality, and militarism at the end of the twentieth century.In the gray dawn of this new era, Enloe finds that the politics of sexuality have already shifted irrevocably. Women glimpse the possibilities of democratization and demilitarization within what is still a largely patriarchal world. New opportunities for greater freedom are seen in emerging social movements-gays fighting for their place in the American military, Filipina servants rallying for their rights in Saudi Arabia, Danish women organizing against the European Community's Maastricht treaty. Enloe also documents the ongoing assaults against women as newly emerging nationalist movements serve to reestablish the privileges of masculinity.The voices of real women are heard in this book. They reach across cultures, showing the interconnections between military networks, jobs, domestic life, and international politics. The Morning After will spark new ways of thinking about the complexities of the post-Cold War period, and it will bring contemporary sexual politics into the clear light of day as no other book has done

The state has utilized women militarily within the context of gener al security formulas, rarely as a consequence of pressures exerted by women themselves. The process by which the state determines its specific military man power needs is to a large extent an ideological process. The state officials not only conceptualize women's "proper" role in security systems; they also conceptualize the roles of racial, ethnic and class subgroups. As far as possible, state officials try to utilize women militarily with minimal alteration of the existing gender ide ology. Thus women are typically demobilized as soon after a crisis as possible. In addition, military conditions such as "combat" and "front lines" are redefined so as to avoid mobilization of women clashing with current gender norms. These ideological processes and the contradictions they often generate are revealed in three spheres of women's military utilization: as soldiers, as defense industry lab orers, as mothers of future soldiers. The military histories of Britain, the United States, Soviet Union, Germany, Israel and China expose these processes.

Taking wartime nurses – and post-war nursing – seriously makes one think more politically about the wounds endured in wartime and what counts as a wartime 'wound'. Thinking about wounds and the wounded, in turn, reveals how war-waging officials, and militarizers more generally, have tried in the past, and today still try, to shrink citizens' awareness of militarism's negative consequences. Nursing, nurses, wounds, and the wounded each continues to be gendered, influencing the workings of both masculinities and femininities in past and current wartimes and post-war politics. Feminist analysts have expanded the 'political' and multiplied 'political thinkers'. Failing to absorb these feminist theoretical insights fosters the trivialization of nurses and other caretakers of the wartime wounded and their diverse political thinking. It is a failing with serious implications. Overlooking nurses and others who provide wartime care, combined with a lack of curiosity about wounds, perpetuates militarization and war.

REPRINTGlobalization and Militarism: Feminists Make the Link,2nd ed., p. 77-98. Copyright © 2016Used by permission of Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group.All rights reserved.

Afterword to the chapter Globalization and Militarism: Feminists Make the Link, 2nd ed., p. 77-98. The afterword is written exclusively for this issue of Women, Gender & Research.

REPRINTGlobalization and Militarism: Feminists Make the Link,2nd ed., p. 77-98. Copyright © 2016Used by permission of Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group.All rights reserved.

Afterword to the chapterGlobalization and Militarism: Feminists Make the Link, 2nd ed., p. 77-98. The afterword is written exclusively for this issue of Women, Gender & Research.

A rural poor woman wants to withdraw from the microcredit scheme, but her husband slaps her when she even suggests not renewing her loan.