The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire

In her collection of essays on international politics, militarism and globalization, Enloe (author of Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics) exhibits an open-minded curiosity about how a gendered investigation reveals critical dimensions of these topics. With her logical, unadorned style, she makes the argument that the U.S. is a militarized nation where ""'commander in chief' is the essence of the U.S. presidency"" and ""manipulations of manliness often shape foreign policy decision-making."" This preoccupation with asserting masculinity, she contends, plays a role not only in U.S. foreign policy, but in economic strategies of American companies: she points to a period between the 1960s and the mid-1980s when Nike, Reebok and various other sneaker companies depended on Korean women's espousal of Confucian philosophy, which ""measured a woman's morality by her willingness to work hard for her family's well-being and to acquiesce to her father's and husband's dictates,"" to motivate them to work for unfairly low wages in U.S.-owned factories. In addition to these essays, the collection includes several transcripts of conversations with Enloe, which offer a glimpse into her opinions on how the subjects of gender and international relations are approached in academia, where she sees students increasingly becoming aware that ""leaving out the serious asking of the gender question probably will mean that their theorizing about international politics will be not just incomplete. It will be unreliable."" Her insightful and accessible explorations of the ethnic conflict in Bosnia, the emerging U.S. ""empire"" in Afghanistan and Iraq, and other global issues should appeal not only to feminists, but to anyone interested in politics and how it relates to gender. 9 b&w photos.