Bananas, Beaches and Bases

Metadata

• Author: Cynthia Enloe
• Full Title: Bananas, Beaches and Bases
• Category: #books

Highlights

• Here is what I’ve learned from taking these women seriously: if we pay sustained attention to each and all of these unheadlined women, we will become smarter about this world, smarter than a lot of mainstream “experts.” (Location 147)
• Becoming smarter in this feminist sense will not make us more comfortable. (Location 157)
• This is a key motivation for anyone exploring the international politics of masculinities to adopt an explicitly feminist curiosity. (Location 166)
• “Plus les choses changent, plus elles deviennent les memes”—which was usually shortened by the speakers to merely “plus ça change . . .,” as if the sophisticated listener should be able to fill in the rest. “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” (Location 177)
• Making patriarchy sustainable has, I think, taken a lot of thinking and maneuvering by those who have a vested interest in privileging particular forms of masculinity to appear “modern” and even “cutting edge” while simultaneously keeping most women in their subordinate places. (Location 186)
• Pocahontas was a Powhatan Indian, the daughter of a tribal chief who acted as an intermediary between her own people and colonizing Englishmen; she later married one of these English settlers and traveled to London, as if confirming that the colonial enterprise was indeed a civilizing mission. She never returned to her New World homeland, however, for she died of civilization’s coal dust in her lungs. Carmen Miranda lived three centuries later, but her life has remarkable parallels with her Indian foresister’s. She was a Brazilian grocer’s daughter who became a Hollywood star and the symbol of an American president’s Latin American policy. She died prematurely of a heart attack, perhaps brought on by the frenzied pace of life in the fast lane of America’s pop culture. (Location 239)
• Making feminist sense of international politics requires that you exercise genuine curiosity about each of these women’s lives—and the lives of women you have yet to think about. (Location 311)
• Most of all, one has to become interested in the actual lives—and thoughts—of complicatedly diverse women. One need not necessarily admire every woman whose life one finds interesting. Feminist attentiveness to all sorts of women is not derived from hero worship. (Location 348)
• It is crucial to this feminist-informed investigation into unequal international relations that we not create a false (and lazy) dichotomy between the allegedly “mindless victim” and the allegedly “empowered actor.” (Location 383)
• If one fails to pay close attention to women—all sorts of women—one will miss who wields power and for what ends. That is one of the core lessons of feminist international investigation. (Location 404)
• in reality, all of these are shaped by the exercise of power by people who believe that their own local and international interests depend on women and girls internalizing these particular feminized expectations. (Location 431)
• If women internalize these expectations, they will not see the politics behind them. (Location 433)
• Asking how something has been made implies that it has been made by someone with a certain kind of power. (Location 448)
• The very rarity of professional international political commentators taking seriously either women’s experiences of international politics or women’s gender analyses of international politics is, therefore, itself a political phenomenon that needs to be taken seriously. (Location 520)
• Men living in a dangerous world are commonly imagined to be the natural protectors. Women living in a dangerous world allegedly are those who need protection. (Location 699)
• A masculinized rivalry is one in which diverse masculinities are unequally ranked and contested: there is a contest over which expression of manliness is deemed most “modern,” which most “rational,” which the “toughest,” which the “softest,” which the “weaker.” In such rivalries, women are marginalized unless (withstanding ridicule as “unfeminine”) they can convincingly cloak themselves in a particular masculinized style of speech and action. (Location 704)
• those who are trying to persuade women to “become informed” are not inviting women to reinterpret international politics by drawing on their own experiences as women. (Location 737)
• When home is imagined to be a feminized place—a place where womanly women and feminine girls should feel most comfortable, and where manly men and real boys should stop in now and then for refueling—then this consequence of many mainstream explanations can send the roots of masculinized international politics down even more deeply. (Location 762)
• If we can expose their dependence on feminizing women, we can show that this world is also dependent on artificial notions of masculinity. (Location 777)
• Tourism as a concept is gendered. Tourists as people are gendered. Tourism-promoting policies are gendered. Profit-seeking tourism companies and the ever-increasing numbers of people who work for them are gendered. And all five are political. All five involve the workings of power. (Location 811)
• We are asking this feminist question, “Where are the women?” at a particular moment in the ongoing gendered history of international politics. (Location 817)
• By contrast, a man is deemed less than manly until he breaks away from home and strikes out geographically on his own. (Location 846)
• the Victorian women travelers insisted upon the separateness of their own experiences. (Location 890)
• These audacious women challenged that ideological assumption, but they have left us with a bundle of contradictions. While they defied, apparently self-consciously, the ban on travel to remote areas by “proper” women, in some respects they seem conventional. Some of them rejected female suffrage. (Location 896)
• The year was 1898. The U.S. government was extending its imperial reach. American men were exerting their manliness by defeating Spanish, Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Filipino men. (Location 958)
• The world’s fairs of this energetic era preached that white men’s manliness fueled the civilizing imperial mission, and that, in turn, pursuing the imperial mission revitalized the nation’s masculinity. At the same time, world’s fairs were designed to show that civilized women’s domestication was proof of the manly mission’s worthiness. (Location 963)
• The all-male U.S. Congress responded to women’s lobbying by mandating the appointment of a Board of Lady Managers to participate in the design of the 1893 Columbian Exposition. The board commissioned a Women’s Building. It was among the fair’s largest and most impressive, designed by a woman architect, twenty-three-year-old Sophia Hayden. But the Women’s Building and its exhibits did not challenge the underlying message of the fair. (Location 978)
• The Women’s Building was filled with exhibits of the latest household technology that would lighten women’s load. Nor did these women, as unconventional as they were in other ways, challenge the racial hierarchy that was implicitly condoned by the fair. The Board of Lady Managers, chaired by a wealthy Chicago socialite, rejected the proposal that a Black woman be appointed to any influential post.18 (Location 982)
• Outside the train station in Leicester, England, one can find Thomas Cook’s statue. He is portrayed standing with a well-worn valise and rolled umbrella at his feet, his pocket watch in his left hand, waiting for his first tourists. (Location 1027)
• It is the international character of the reputation that is politically significant for the tourism strategists. (Location 1064)
• Men in nationalist movements may find it easier to be roused to anger by the vision of a machete-swinging man transformed into a tray-carrying waiter in a resort for white patrons—he is a man who has had his masculine pride stolen from him. Caribbean nationalists in the region’s diverse island societies have complained that their respective governments’ protourism policies have turned each of these societies into a “nation of busboys.” To them, “nation of chambermaids” does not have the same mobilizing ring. After all, a woman who has traded work as an unpaid agricultural worker for work as a low-paid hotel cleaner has not lost any of her femininity; she has simply confirmed it. (Location 1216)
• Three areas of the global tourism industry that appear most promising for women’s genuine empowerment are artisan crafts production, food production, and all-women local tours. (Location 1260)
• Three Sisters Adventure Trekking. (Location 1269)
• Sex tourism and sex trafficking are different, though intertwined, phenomena. They do share crucial features: both are gendered; both are patriarchal; both are political; both are commercialized; both are international. Sex tourism is the process of encouraging overwhelmingly male tourists—from North America, western Europe, the Middle East, Russia, and East and Southeast Asia—to travel from one country to another to gain access to women’s sexual services. (Location 1306)
• Because any woman’s freedom to refuse work in a sexualized massage parlor or to walk away from being prostituted in a disco or coffee shop cannot be assumed, many feminists use the common term sex worker with great care. Sex worker has been adopted by many commentators to show respect for the woman who is performing commercialized sex with paying male customers. But it is a term that implies labor autonomy. By contrast, sex slave and trafficked woman are terms developed by feminists in the 1990s to capture the realities of forced (whether paid or unpaid) sexual servicing. (Location 1326)
• What this means for anyone trying to carefully sort out the relationships between sex tourism and sex trafficking in any given time and place is that investigating those dynamic connections will require a curiosity about how women and girls (each) experience economic crisis, natural disaster, or armed conflict.66 (Location 1357)
• Yet tourism continues to be promoted by bankers, development planners, and private investors as a means of making the international system less unequal, more financially sound, and more politically stable. A lot is riding on sun, surf, ruins, service, and souvenirs. (Location 1403)
• The very structure of international tourism has needed patriarchy to survive and thrive. Men’s capacity to control women’s sense of their security and self-worth has been central to the evolution of tourism politics. (Location 1422)
• It is for this reason that actions by women—as tourists, airline flight attendants, hotel housekeepers, union organizers, women in prostitution, data collectors, wives of businessmen, and organizers of alternative tours for women—should be seen as political, internationally political. (Location 1424)
• The storytellers often craft their tales—of humiliation, mobilization, struggle, victory, and defeat—as if nationalism were experienced identically by women and men, and as if women and men played identical roles in defining and critiquing nationalist goals. (Location 1481)
• Women have had distinctly uneasy relationships with nationalism. (Location 1486)
• Seeing themselves as, and being seen by others as, members of a nation have given these women an identity larger than that defined by domesticated motherhood or marriage. (Location 1487)
• On the other hand, even when they have been energized by nationalism, many women have discovered that, in practice, as women, they often have been treated by male nationalist leaders and intellectuals chiefly as symbols—patriarchally sculpted symbols—of the nation. (Location 1488)
• Women have served as symbols of the nation violated, the nation suffering, the nation reproducing itself, the nation at its purest. Being reduced to a symbol has meant that women have not been treated as genuine participants (with their own ideas, goals, and skills) in the nationalist movements organized to end colonialism, ethnic domination, racism, and globalized capitalist exploitation. (Location 1490)
• After all, a writer, an events organizer, a curator who adds gendered complexity to the story of any nationalist movement might deprive that movement—and the very idea of “the nation”—of some of its luster. (Location 1505)
• Malek Alloula used these images to explore his own identity as a male nationalist: for a man, to be conquered is to have his women turned into fodder for imperialist postcards. Becoming a nationalist requires a man to resist the foreigner’s use and abuse of his women. (Location 1532)
• Women as symbols, women as workers, and women as nurturers have been crucial to the entire colonial undertaking. (Location 1546)
• Nationalism is a package of interwoven ideas and values, one of which is a commitment to fostering those beliefs and promoting those policies that permit the nation to stay cohesive and control its own destiny. (Location 1584)
• Colonial rule has provided especially fertile ground for nationalist ideas because it has given an otherwise disparate people such a potent shared experience of foreign domination. The experience of foreign domination can trump differences among people of diverse classes, varied skin tones, different regional affiliations, and perhaps even different religions and ethnicities. (Location 1586)
• one of the major differences between the open- and shut-umbrella versions of the nation is the official attitude toward intermarriage. (Location 1598)
• One becomes a nationalist, of either the big-umbrella or wrapped-umbrella variety, when one begins to recognize shared public pasts and futures with people one does not know personally, people beyond one’s family and town. (Location 1607)
• Living as a nationalist feminist is one of the most difficult political projects in today’s world. (Location 1611)
• Sexual liaisons between colonial men and local women usually were winked at; affairs between colonial women and local men were deemed threats to imperial order.16 (Location 1655)
• Robert Baden-Powell founded the Boy Scouts in 1908 to combat venereal disease, intermarriage of the races, and declining birthrates, all of which were believed to endanger the maintenance of Britain’s international power. (Location 1679)
• Many of these politically active women across the Middle East were consciously defining new gendered nations, national communities in which secular women and religiously observant women would see each other as mutually respectful allies, where a woman’s choice of dressing one way or another would not be used as a criterion for including her or excluding her from the nation. (Location 1710)
• Turkish girls who continued (voluntarily or under pressure from their parents) to wear headscarves could not attend state universities, nor could they be hired in the government’s civil service or be elected to parliament. (Location 1728)
• When the women protestors converged on Istanbul’s Taksim Square in 2013, they were forging political democratizing alliances between bare-headed and head-covered women, they were implicitly rejecting both the Ataturk and the Erdogan masculinist formulas for gendered nationalism.25 (Location 1732)
• For if colonial male administrators and progressive European women took prominent public stances against women wearing headscarves or the veil, and if they did so without an authentic alliance with local women, as was usually the case, they ensured that rejection of the veil would be taken as compliance with colonial rule. (Location 1738)
• European women in Egypt during the colonial period usually expressed strong opinions about the headscarf and the veil. They saw both of these as emblematic of Muslim women’s suppressive seclusion and linked it to the harem. Many of the European women who wrote about the veil did so not primarily out of genuine curiosity about the lives and thoughts of Egyptian women but because it allowed them to feel sanguine about their own condition as European women: “By thinking of themselves as all powerful and free vis-à-vis Egyptian women, Western women could,” as Mervat Hatem points out, “avoid confronting their own powerlessness and gender oppression at home.”28 (Location 1747)
• Men in many communities appear to assign ideological weight to the outward attire and sexual purity of women in the community because they see women as (1) the community’s—or the nation’s—most valuable possessions, (2) the principal vehicles for transmitting the whole nation’s values from one generation to the next, (3) bearers of the community’s future generations—or, crudely, nationalist wombs, (4) the members of the community most vulnerable to defilement and exploitation by oppressive alien rulers, and (5) those most susceptible to assimilation and co-option by insidious outsiders. (Location 1754)
• On the other hand, it can be very difficult for women to raise these sorts of “women’s issues” inside a nationalist movement that is under siege, precisely because they are actually issues about men’s power. (Location 1809)
• Najwa Jardali, a Palestinian woman long active in a movement to provide day care and health clinics for women in the occupied territories, warned Western women not to imagine that day care was simply a women’s issue. With militarization, it became a national concern: “Most Western feminists wouldn’t regard kindergarten as important[,] . . . but for us it’s very important. The military government doesn’t allow us kindergartens in schools, and day care enables women to get involved in other activities.” Proof of day care centers’ national importance was the Israeli military’s efforts to harass the women teachers and close them down. (Location 1838)
• She knows there are other women on the base—women soldiers, pilots, or sailors; wives of male officers and enlisted men; and women who come onto the base secretly to have paid sex with some of the men. But she does not think of any of these women as her natural allies. (Location 2000)
• women who may live far from a base but who are in almost daily contact with men on the base via the Internet. Paying attention to all these women makes one smarter about the international politics of military bases. (Location 2005)
• One of the reasons so many people in other countries think the United States qualifies as an “empire” is its global network of military bases. (Location 2008)
• Each of the men and women—civilian and military—deployed to each base has relationships that extend beyond that base, intensified by the Internet, which affect how that man or woman thinks about what he or she is doing there. (Location 2044)
• A military base does not need to be thoroughly militarized. Potentially, any base can be held accountable by civilian authorities for meeting other, nonmilitary goals. But that requires those civilians in office—and those in voting booths—to resist the appeals of militarized values, militarized civilian jobs, and militarized money. Many civilians do not. Insofar as civilian officials and civilian voters become militarized, they will come to see the military base’s priorities as serving their own interests.10 (Location 2056)
• To engage in a feminist analysis of any military base anyplace in the world means watching it through a gendered lens over time. (Location 2100)
• Normalcy is always interesting to a feminist investigator. (Location 2127)
• Two decades later, during the early 1940s, both the British and the American, male-led governments were ready with racial formulas when they sat down to talk about how to ensure that African American men stationed in Britain would relate to white British women in ways that would enhance the joint war effort. White British women, however, had their own ideas. When they dated Black American soldiers, they made comparisons between African American and white British manhood. British women often found the former to be more polite, better company, and perhaps more “exotic.” By 1943, some white British women were giving birth to children fathered by African American GIs. Some were choosing to marry their Black American boyfriends. Certain male members of Winston Churchill’s cabinet became alarmed at what they considered a dangerous trend. (Location 2151)
• British women who went out with African American men stationed at nearby bases were warned that they were more likely to get VD. Women who dated Black soldiers were branded as “loose” or even traitorous to Britain. Whenever some infraction of disciplinary rules involved an African American soldier, the press was likely to specify his race. (Location 2180)
• General Dwight Eisenhower, senior U.S. commander in Europe, tolerated white-Black dating because he believed that the U.S.-British alliance would be harmed if American white officers tried to impose their segregationist “Jim Crow” conventions on the British. (Location 2199)
• Whom male soldiers meet and whom they marry while stationed on overseas bases has continued to be an issue in the minds of U.S. military strategists. Their concern derives largely from a distrust of the motives of the local women. (Location 2209)
• Not taking seriously marriage politics—and the power wielded on its behalf—leaves one unable to fully comprehend international politics. (Location 2219)
• This continued to be the model of base construction through the 1990s, as American overseas bases multiplied during the Cold War: the suburb with family houses, grass to mow, men employed as soldiers and civilian women as unpaid housewives.29 Betty Friedan, the feminist who wrote the devastating critique of American white suburban women’s entrapment, would have recognized the Pentagon’s gendered community model immediately.30 (Location 2231)
• Military wives’ unpaid labor has been the glue that has made many a base a working “community.” (Location 2273)
• Trying to break the silence shrouding violence against women is always a challenge. Breaking the culture of gendered silence on a military base was harder still. Feminized silence, it became clear, was a pillar of U.S. national security. (Location 2303)
• During the post-9/11 administration of President George W. Bush, a new concept in American overseas basing was developed, “the lily pad.” (Location 2324)
• Any military base—local or overseas—is a place where certain forms of masculinity are nurtured and rewarded, other forms disparaged or punished. (Location 2341)
• This particular mode often accords primacy to toughness, skilled use of violence, presumption of an enemy, male camaraderie, submerging one’s emotions, and discipline (being disciplined and demanding it of others). (Location 2344)
• During FY 2012, that number jumped to twenty-six thousand. The majority of those American military personnel said that they had been assaulted by military men, often their superiors. Men made up 85 percent of the total active-duty personnel during this era. Women, though only 15 percent of the U.S. active-duty forces, were disproportionately assaulted. (Location 2416)
• how exactly do diverse men inside the military absorb the masculinized idea that women are property to be used by men in ways that allegedly confirm their own manhood and simultaneously preserve the masculinized atmosphere in certain institutional spaces? (Location 2434)
• Recognizing American officials’ World War II prostitution policies should not dilute the condemnation of the Japanese imperial army’s “comfort women” system. Rather, it should foster a sharp feminist-informed, cross-national, comparative investigation of the sexual politics designed to wage any war. (Location 2516)
• Prostitution has never been timeless. It is not the static “oldest profession.” Women in prostitution, women working against the prostitution industry, men profiting from prostitution, men patronizing women in prostitution, and men who make military policies to mold prostitution to suit their militaries’ needs—each of these five groups of actors lives in history. (Location 2606)
• Still today, one can meet British women for whom “Greenham” was the turning point in their political lives. (Location 2634)
• Journalist Beatrix Campbell interviewed one British woman who thought of herself as a member of the Conservative Party, the party of Margaret Thatcher, the prime minister who was a chief backer of the U.S. base and its nuclear-headed missiles. But when this woman began thinking about the Greenham women’s peace camp, she recalled that she had developed another sort of political understanding. She had cut her hair short to make it clear to her husband and sons that she identified with the Greenham women: “Before Greenham I didn’t realize that the Americans had got their missiles here. Then I realized. What cheek! It was the fuss the Greenham Common women made that made me realize. . . . The men in this house [her husband and two sons] think they’re butch, queers.” Did she? She thought for a moment. “No.” Would it have bothered her if they were butch or if they were lesbians? She thought again. “No.” Women irritated her men anyway, she said, not without affection. “They never stop talking about Land Rovers and bikes, and they’ve not finished their dinner before they’re asking for their tea.” (Location 2647)
  • Note: Really lovely example of pluralistic identities
• many institutions that are not usually labeled “military bases” can be fruitfully studied for their similarly intense interactions of place, femininity, masculinity, and militarized purpose: (Location 2663)
• Every military base depends for its operation on women occupying a range of social locations, performing quite different roles. (Location 2666)
• They are not natural allies. Many of these women may disagree with the others’ assessments; they may not trust each other. (Location 2670)
• “Smoothly” usually serves to perpetuate patriarchal international relations. (Location 2677)
• The unheadlined bases are as worthy of feminist-informed gendered analysis as the bases that become suddenly visible because of a scandal. (Location 2679)
• Humdrum is political. Humdrum is gendered. (Location 2681)

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title: Bananas, Beaches and Bases longtitle: Bananas, Beaches and Bases author: Cynthia Enloe url: , source: kindle last_highlight: 2021-03-15 type: books tags:

Bananas, Beaches and Bases

Metadata

• Author: Cynthia Enloe
• Full Title: Bananas, Beaches and Bases
• Category: #books

Highlights

• Here is what I’ve learned from taking these women seriously: if we pay sustained attention to each and all of these unheadlined women, we will become smarter about this world, smarter than a lot of mainstream “experts.” (Location 147)
• Becoming smarter in this feminist sense will not make us more comfortable. (Location 157)
• This is a key motivation for anyone exploring the international politics of masculinities to adopt an explicitly feminist curiosity. (Location 166)
• “Plus les choses changent, plus elles deviennent les memes”—which was usually shortened by the speakers to merely “plus ça change . . .,” as if the sophisticated listener should be able to fill in the rest. “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” (Location 177)
• Making patriarchy sustainable has, I think, taken a lot of thinking and maneuvering by those who have a vested interest in privileging particular forms of masculinity to appear “modern” and even “cutting edge” while simultaneously keeping most women in their subordinate places. (Location 186)
• Pocahontas was a Powhatan Indian, the daughter of a tribal chief who acted as an intermediary between her own people and colonizing Englishmen; she later married one of these English settlers and traveled to London, as if confirming that the colonial enterprise was indeed a civilizing mission. She never returned to her New World homeland, however, for she died of civilization’s coal dust in her lungs. Carmen Miranda lived three centuries later, but her life has remarkable parallels with her Indian foresister’s. She was a Brazilian grocer’s daughter who became a Hollywood star and the symbol of an American president’s Latin American policy. She died prematurely of a heart attack, perhaps brought on by the frenzied pace of life in the fast lane of America’s pop culture. (Location 239)
• Making feminist sense of international politics requires that you exercise genuine curiosity about each of these women’s lives—and the lives of women you have yet to think about. (Location 311)
• Most of all, one has to become interested in the actual lives—and thoughts—of complicatedly diverse women. One need not necessarily admire every woman whose life one finds interesting. Feminist attentiveness to all sorts of women is not derived from hero worship. (Location 348)
• It is crucial to this feminist-informed investigation into unequal international relations that we not create a false (and lazy) dichotomy between the allegedly “mindless victim” and the allegedly “empowered actor.” (Location 383)
• If one fails to pay close attention to women—all sorts of women—one will miss who wields power and for what ends. That is one of the core lessons of feminist international investigation. (Location 404)
• in reality, all of these are shaped by the exercise of power by people who believe that their own local and international interests depend on women and girls internalizing these particular feminized expectations. (Location 431)
• If women internalize these expectations, they will not see the politics behind them. (Location 433)
• Asking how something has been made implies that it has been made by someone with a certain kind of power. (Location 448)
• The very rarity of professional international political commentators taking seriously either women’s experiences of international politics or women’s gender analyses of international politics is, therefore, itself a political phenomenon that needs to be taken seriously. (Location 520)
• Men living in a dangerous world are commonly imagined to be the natural protectors. Women living in a dangerous world allegedly are those who need protection. (Location 699)
• A masculinized rivalry is one in which diverse masculinities are unequally ranked and contested: there is a contest over which expression of manliness is deemed most “modern,” which most “rational,” which the “toughest,” which the “softest,” which the “weaker.” In such rivalries, women are marginalized unless (withstanding ridicule as “unfeminine”) they can convincingly cloak themselves in a particular masculinized style of speech and action. (Location 704)
• those who are trying to persuade women to “become informed” are not inviting women to reinterpret international politics by drawing on their own experiences as women. (Location 737)
• When home is imagined to be a feminized place—a place where womanly women and feminine girls should feel most comfortable, and where manly men and real boys should stop in now and then for refueling—then this consequence of many mainstream explanations can send the roots of masculinized international politics down even more deeply. (Location 762)
• If we can expose their dependence on feminizing women, we can show that this world is also dependent on artificial notions of masculinity. (Location 777)
• Tourism as a concept is gendered. Tourists as people are gendered. Tourism-promoting policies are gendered. Profit-seeking tourism companies and the ever-increasing numbers of people who work for them are gendered. And all five are political. All five involve the workings of power. (Location 811)
• We are asking this feminist question, “Where are the women?” at a particular moment in the ongoing gendered history of international politics. (Location 817)
• By contrast, a man is deemed less than manly until he breaks away from home and strikes out geographically on his own. (Location 846)
• the Victorian women travelers insisted upon the separateness of their own experiences. (Location 890)
• These audacious women challenged that ideological assumption, but they have left us with a bundle of contradictions. While they defied, apparently self-consciously, the ban on travel to remote areas by “proper” women, in some respects they seem conventional. Some of them rejected female suffrage. (Location 896)
• The year was 1898. The U.S. government was extending its imperial reach. American men were exerting their manliness by defeating Spanish, Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Filipino men. (Location 958)
• The world’s fairs of this energetic era preached that white men’s manliness fueled the civilizing imperial mission, and that, in turn, pursuing the imperial mission revitalized the nation’s masculinity. At the same time, world’s fairs were designed to show that civilized women’s domestication was proof of the manly mission’s worthiness. (Location 963)
• The all-male U.S. Congress responded to women’s lobbying by mandating the appointment of a Board of Lady Managers to participate in the design of the 1893 Columbian Exposition. The board commissioned a Women’s Building. It was among the fair’s largest and most impressive, designed by a woman architect, twenty-three-year-old Sophia Hayden. But the Women’s Building and its exhibits did not challenge the underlying message of the fair. (Location 978)
• The Women’s Building was filled with exhibits of the latest household technology that would lighten women’s load. Nor did these women, as unconventional as they were in other ways, challenge the racial hierarchy that was implicitly condoned by the fair. The Board of Lady Managers, chaired by a wealthy Chicago socialite, rejected the proposal that a Black woman be appointed to any influential post.18 (Location 982)
• Outside the train station in Leicester, England, one can find Thomas Cook’s statue. He is portrayed standing with a well-worn valise and rolled umbrella at his feet, his pocket watch in his left hand, waiting for his first tourists. (Location 1027)
• It is the international character of the reputation that is politically significant for the tourism strategists. (Location 1064)
• Men in nationalist movements may find it easier to be roused to anger by the vision of a machete-swinging man transformed into a tray-carrying waiter in a resort for white patrons—he is a man who has had his masculine pride stolen from him. Caribbean nationalists in the region’s diverse island societies have complained that their respective governments’ protourism policies have turned each of these societies into a “nation of busboys.” To them, “nation of chambermaids” does not have the same mobilizing ring. After all, a woman who has traded work as an unpaid agricultural worker for work as a low-paid hotel cleaner has not lost any of her femininity; she has simply confirmed it. (Location 1216)
• Three areas of the global tourism industry that appear most promising for women’s genuine empowerment are artisan crafts production, food production, and all-women local tours. (Location 1260)
• Three Sisters Adventure Trekking. (Location 1269)
• Sex tourism and sex trafficking are different, though intertwined, phenomena. They do share crucial features: both are gendered; both are patriarchal; both are political; both are commercialized; both are international. Sex tourism is the process of encouraging overwhelmingly male tourists—from North America, western Europe, the Middle East, Russia, and East and Southeast Asia—to travel from one country to another to gain access to women’s sexual services. (Location 1306)
• Because any woman’s freedom to refuse work in a sexualized massage parlor or to walk away from being prostituted in a disco or coffee shop cannot be assumed, many feminists use the common term sex worker with great care. Sex worker has been adopted by many commentators to show respect for the woman who is performing commercialized sex with paying male customers. But it is a term that implies labor autonomy. By contrast, sex slave and trafficked woman are terms developed by feminists in the 1990s to capture the realities of forced (whether paid or unpaid) sexual servicing. (Location 1326)
• What this means for anyone trying to carefully sort out the relationships between sex tourism and sex trafficking in any given time and place is that investigating those dynamic connections will require a curiosity about how women and girls (each) experience economic crisis, natural disaster, or armed conflict.66 (Location 1357)
• Yet tourism continues to be promoted by bankers, development planners, and private investors as a means of making the international system less unequal, more financially sound, and more politically stable. A lot is riding on sun, surf, ruins, service, and souvenirs. (Location 1403)
• The very structure of international tourism has needed patriarchy to survive and thrive. Men’s capacity to control women’s sense of their security and self-worth has been central to the evolution of tourism politics. (Location 1422)
• It is for this reason that actions by women—as tourists, airline flight attendants, hotel housekeepers, union organizers, women in prostitution, data collectors, wives of businessmen, and organizers of alternative tours for women—should be seen as political, internationally political. (Location 1424)
• The storytellers often craft their tales—of humiliation, mobilization, struggle, victory, and defeat—as if nationalism were experienced identically by women and men, and as if women and men played identical roles in defining and critiquing nationalist goals. (Location 1481)
• Women have had distinctly uneasy relationships with nationalism. (Location 1486)
• Seeing themselves as, and being seen by others as, members of a nation have given these women an identity larger than that defined by domesticated motherhood or marriage. (Location 1487)
• On the other hand, even when they have been energized by nationalism, many women have discovered that, in practice, as women, they often have been treated by male nationalist leaders and intellectuals chiefly as symbols—patriarchally sculpted symbols—of the nation. (Location 1488)
• Women have served as symbols of the nation violated, the nation suffering, the nation reproducing itself, the nation at its purest. Being reduced to a symbol has meant that women have not been treated as genuine participants (with their own ideas, goals, and skills) in the nationalist movements organized to end colonialism, ethnic domination, racism, and globalized capitalist exploitation. (Location 1490)
• After all, a writer, an events organizer, a curator who adds gendered complexity to the story of any nationalist movement might deprive that movement—and the very idea of “the nation”—of some of its luster. (Location 1505)
• Malek Alloula used these images to explore his own identity as a male nationalist: for a man, to be conquered is to have his women turned into fodder for imperialist postcards. Becoming a nationalist requires a man to resist the foreigner’s use and abuse of his women. (Location 1532)
• Women as symbols, women as workers, and women as nurturers have been crucial to the entire colonial undertaking. (Location 1546)
• Nationalism is a package of interwoven ideas and values, one of which is a commitment to fostering those beliefs and promoting those policies that permit the nation to stay cohesive and control its own destiny. (Location 1584)
• Colonial rule has provided especially fertile ground for nationalist ideas because it has given an otherwise disparate people such a potent shared experience of foreign domination. The experience of foreign domination can trump differences among people of diverse classes, varied skin tones, different regional affiliations, and perhaps even different religions and ethnicities. (Location 1586)
• one of the major differences between the open- and shut-umbrella versions of the nation is the official attitude toward intermarriage. (Location 1598)
• One becomes a nationalist, of either the big-umbrella or wrapped-umbrella variety, when one begins to recognize shared public pasts and futures with people one does not know personally, people beyond one’s family and town. (Location 1607)
• Living as a nationalist feminist is one of the most difficult political projects in today’s world. (Location 1611)
• Sexual liaisons between colonial men and local women usually were winked at; affairs between colonial women and local men were deemed threats to imperial order.16 (Location 1655)
• Robert Baden-Powell founded the Boy Scouts in 1908 to combat venereal disease, intermarriage of the races, and declining birthrates, all of which were believed to endanger the maintenance of Britain’s international power. (Location 1679)
• Many of these politically active women across the Middle East were consciously defining new gendered nations, national communities in which secular women and religiously observant women would see each other as mutually respectful allies, where a woman’s choice of dressing one way or another would not be used as a criterion for including her or excluding her from the nation. (Location 1710)
• Turkish girls who continued (voluntarily or under pressure from their parents) to wear headscarves could not attend state universities, nor could they be hired in the government’s civil service or be elected to parliament. (Location 1728)
• When the women protestors converged on Istanbul’s Taksim Square in 2013, they were forging political democratizing alliances between bare-headed and head-covered women, they were implicitly rejecting both the Ataturk and the Erdogan masculinist formulas for gendered nationalism.25 (Location 1732)
• For if colonial male administrators and progressive European women took prominent public stances against women wearing headscarves or the veil, and if they did so without an authentic alliance with local women, as was usually the case, they ensured that rejection of the veil would be taken as compliance with colonial rule. (Location 1738)
• European women in Egypt during the colonial period usually expressed strong opinions about the headscarf and the veil. They saw both of these as emblematic of Muslim women’s suppressive seclusion and linked it to the harem. Many of the European women who wrote about the veil did so not primarily out of genuine curiosity about the lives and thoughts of Egyptian women but because it allowed them to feel sanguine about their own condition as European women: “By thinking of themselves as all powerful and free vis-à-vis Egyptian women, Western women could,” as Mervat Hatem points out, “avoid confronting their own powerlessness and gender oppression at home.”28 (Location 1747)
• Men in many communities appear to assign ideological weight to the outward attire and sexual purity of women in the community because they see women as (1) the community’s—or the nation’s—most valuable possessions, (2) the principal vehicles for transmitting the whole nation’s values from one generation to the next, (3) bearers of the community’s future generations—or, crudely, nationalist wombs, (4) the members of the community most vulnerable to defilement and exploitation by oppressive alien rulers, and (5) those most susceptible to assimilation and co-option by insidious outsiders. (Location 1754)
• On the other hand, it can be very difficult for women to raise these sorts of “women’s issues” inside a nationalist movement that is under siege, precisely because they are actually issues about men’s power. (Location 1809)
• Najwa Jardali, a Palestinian woman long active in a movement to provide day care and health clinics for women in the occupied territories, warned Western women not to imagine that day care was simply a women’s issue. With militarization, it became a national concern: “Most Western feminists wouldn’t regard kindergarten as important[,] . . . but for us it’s very important. The military government doesn’t allow us kindergartens in schools, and day care enables women to get involved in other activities.” Proof of day care centers’ national importance was the Israeli military’s efforts to harass the women teachers and close them down. (Location 1838)
• She knows there are other women on the base—women soldiers, pilots, or sailors; wives of male officers and enlisted men; and women who come onto the base secretly to have paid sex with some of the men. But she does not think of any of these women as her natural allies. (Location 2000)
• women who may live far from a base but who are in almost daily contact with men on the base via the Internet. Paying attention to all these women makes one smarter about the international politics of military bases. (Location 2005)
• One of the reasons so many people in other countries think the United States qualifies as an “empire” is its global network of military bases. (Location 2008)
• Each of the men and women—civilian and military—deployed to each base has relationships that extend beyond that base, intensified by the Internet, which affect how that man or woman thinks about what he or she is doing there. (Location 2044)
• A military base does not need to be thoroughly militarized. Potentially, any base can be held accountable by civilian authorities for meeting other, nonmilitary goals. But that requires those civilians in office—and those in voting booths—to resist the appeals of militarized values, militarized civilian jobs, and militarized money. Many civilians do not. Insofar as civilian officials and civilian voters become militarized, they will come to see the military base’s priorities as serving their own interests.10 (Location 2056)
• To engage in a feminist analysis of any military base anyplace in the world means watching it through a gendered lens over time. (Location 2100)
• Normalcy is always interesting to a feminist investigator. (Location 2127)
• Two decades later, during the early 1940s, both the British and the American, male-led governments were ready with racial formulas when they sat down to talk about how to ensure that African American men stationed in Britain would relate to white British women in ways that would enhance the joint war effort. White British women, however, had their own ideas. When they dated Black American soldiers, they made comparisons between African American and white British manhood. British women often found the former to be more polite, better company, and perhaps more “exotic.” By 1943, some white British women were giving birth to children fathered by African American GIs. Some were choosing to marry their Black American boyfriends. Certain male members of Winston Churchill’s cabinet became alarmed at what they considered a dangerous trend. (Location 2151)
• British women who went out with African American men stationed at nearby bases were warned that they were more likely to get VD. Women who dated Black soldiers were branded as “loose” or even traitorous to Britain. Whenever some infraction of disciplinary rules involved an African American soldier, the press was likely to specify his race. (Location 2180)
• General Dwight Eisenhower, senior U.S. commander in Europe, tolerated white-Black dating because he believed that the U.S.-British alliance would be harmed if American white officers tried to impose their segregationist “Jim Crow” conventions on the British. (Location 2199)
• Whom male soldiers meet and whom they marry while stationed on overseas bases has continued to be an issue in the minds of U.S. military strategists. Their concern derives largely from a distrust of the motives of the local women. (Location 2209)
• Not taking seriously marriage politics—and the power wielded on its behalf—leaves one unable to fully comprehend international politics. (Location 2219)
• This continued to be the model of base construction through the 1990s, as American overseas bases multiplied during the Cold War: the suburb with family houses, grass to mow, men employed as soldiers and civilian women as unpaid housewives.29 Betty Friedan, the feminist who wrote the devastating critique of American white suburban women’s entrapment, would have recognized the Pentagon’s gendered community model immediately.30 (Location 2231)
• Military wives’ unpaid labor has been the glue that has made many a base a working “community.” (Location 2273)
• Trying to break the silence shrouding violence against women is always a challenge. Breaking the culture of gendered silence on a military base was harder still. Feminized silence, it became clear, was a pillar of U.S. national security. (Location 2303)
• During the post-9/11 administration of President George W. Bush, a new concept in American overseas basing was developed, “the lily pad.” (Location 2324)
• Any military base—local or overseas—is a place where certain forms of masculinity are nurtured and rewarded, other forms disparaged or punished. (Location 2341)
• This particular mode often accords primacy to toughness, skilled use of violence, presumption of an enemy, male camaraderie, submerging one’s emotions, and discipline (being disciplined and demanding it of others). (Location 2344)
• During FY 2012, that number jumped to twenty-six thousand. The majority of those American military personnel said that they had been assaulted by military men, often their superiors. Men made up 85 percent of the total active-duty personnel during this era. Women, though only 15 percent of the U.S. active-duty forces, were disproportionately assaulted. (Location 2416)
• how exactly do diverse men inside the military absorb the masculinized idea that women are property to be used by men in ways that allegedly confirm their own manhood and simultaneously preserve the masculinized atmosphere in certain institutional spaces? (Location 2434)
• Recognizing American officials’ World War II prostitution policies should not dilute the condemnation of the Japanese imperial army’s “comfort women” system. Rather, it should foster a sharp feminist-informed, cross-national, comparative investigation of the sexual politics designed to wage any war. (Location 2516)
• Prostitution has never been timeless. It is not the static “oldest profession.” Women in prostitution, women working against the prostitution industry, men profiting from prostitution, men patronizing women in prostitution, and men who make military policies to mold prostitution to suit their militaries’ needs—each of these five groups of actors lives in history. (Location 2606)
• Still today, one can meet British women for whom “Greenham” was the turning point in their political lives. (Location 2634)
• Journalist Beatrix Campbell interviewed one British woman who thought of herself as a member of the Conservative Party, the party of Margaret Thatcher, the prime minister who was a chief backer of the U.S. base and its nuclear-headed missiles. But when this woman began thinking about the Greenham women’s peace camp, she recalled that she had developed another sort of political understanding. She had cut her hair short to make it clear to her husband and sons that she identified with the Greenham women: “Before Greenham I didn’t realize that the Americans had got their missiles here. Then I realized. What cheek! It was the fuss the Greenham Common women made that made me realize. . . . The men in this house [her husband and two sons] think they’re butch, queers.” Did she? She thought for a moment. “No.” Would it have bothered her if they were butch or if they were lesbians? She thought again. “No.” Women irritated her men anyway, she said, not without affection. “They never stop talking about Land Rovers and bikes, and they’ve not finished their dinner before they’re asking for their tea.” (Location 2647)
  • Note: Really lovely example of pluralistic identities
• many institutions that are not usually labeled “military bases” can be fruitfully studied for their similarly intense interactions of place, femininity, masculinity, and militarized purpose: (Location 2663)
• Every military base depends for its operation on women occupying a range of social locations, performing quite different roles. (Location 2666)
• They are not natural allies. Many of these women may disagree with the others’ assessments; they may not trust each other. (Location 2670)
• “Smoothly” usually serves to perpetuate patriarchal international relations. (Location 2677)
• The unheadlined bases are as worthy of feminist-informed gendered analysis as the bases that become suddenly visible because of a scandal. (Location 2679)
• Humdrum is political. Humdrum is gendered. (Location 2681)