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Article 1:
Write a 400-word reflection on the film. You have lived through these movements, viewed them via social media, perhaps even attended or witnessed marches or protests in your hometowns. There is a lot here to discuss and explore.
The following questions can get you started, but your response and discussion should extend beyond them:
What’s different about this period of the women’s movement from what you watched in the original 3-part documentary on the history of the women’s movement? What surprised you? What was new information? What wasn’t? What goals and challenges are engaged?
The initial poster must answer the question of the final poster, completing a chain of Q&A, and dialogue.
Article 2:
1. One of the starting points for “feminist curiosity” is taking women’s lives seriously, which implies listening carefully, digging deep, developing a long attention span, being ready to be surprised.
What about “feminist curiosity” works for you, what doesn’t?
C
APTER 2
“FEMINIST CURIOSITY” AND
GLOBALIZED MILITARISM
Developing a “curiosity” involves exploring, questioning-refusing to
take something for granted. One is not curious about the things one
takes for granted. For instance, most of us most of the time (unless we
have a rotten cold or have started going to yoga classes) aren’t very
curious about breathing. Too many of us most of the time don’t spend
much time wondering about the extended droughts and melting arctic
ice caps.
A major theme we will chart here is “feminist curiosity”: How to
develop it? What’s distinctive about it? We will discover what it is that
a feminist curiosity can reveal about the workings of globalization and
militarization-and the links between them-that we would otherwise
miss. In other words, this is a very practical, down-to-earth enterprise.
Developing a new kind of curiosity is not just academic. It takes
energy. It is political. It is cultural. It is personal. To insist upon posing
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questions about things that other people take for granted can be a political act.
A feminist curiosity is a crucial tool to use today in making sense of
the links between two of the world’s most potent trends: globalization
and militarization.
Like any “ization” (e.g., industrialization, urbanization), both globalization and militarization are actually many-layered processes of
transformation. For instance, it turns out to be possible to track, step
by step, strategic decision by strategic decision, precisely how the Nazi
regime of 1930s Germany transformed the conscience of so many
ordinary Germans. Advertising techniques and popular moviemaking
played central roles (Koonz 2003). Thus you will need to watch trends
in globalization and militarization over time and you will need to keep
your eye on several layers at once: observing individuals change at the
same time as you are paying attention to changes occurring in local
communities, public institutions, companies, and whole societies. It’s a
tall order. Using a feminist curiosity should help all of us do it more
realistically and with more reliable results.
Globalization is the step-by-step process by which anything-a
movie industry, vegetable production, law enforcement, banking, the
nursing profession, higher education, an individual’s own sense of
identity, human rights, environmental activism, or a women’s movement-becomes more interdependent and coordinated across national
borders. Nurses-usually women-migrate from the Philippines to
hospitals in New York; Hollywood producers make films with few
words and a lot of masculinized action so they can draw movie-going
crowds in China; Chilean farmers produce blueberries that are consumed in the depths of winter in Toronto; Canadian mining executives,
mostly men, anticipate a peace agreement in Colombia so they can
expand their mining operations in this war-tom country:
Or think about the globalization of rubber. The first time I wondered
where the rubber for my car’s tires came from was when I was a graduate student living for a year in Malaysia trying to understand the ethnic
tensions inside this former British colony’s complex education system.
My little apartment, though, was in a new development just outside the
capital on land carved out of a rubber plantation. So in addition to
education politics, I began to ponder rubber. There were rubber trees
just outside my back door. In the early morning I watched rubber tap-
“FEMINIST CURIOSITY” AND GLOBALIZED MILITARISM
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pers working, skillfully slicing crescent-shaped cuts into the dappled
bark of the slender rubber trees, then placing underneath the new cuts
small cups into which the rubber tree’s treasure, white liquid latex,
would drip. Standing there in the early morning tropical light, I thought
about the tires on my VW Beetle. But I don’t think I realized that I was
watching globalization at work.
For it was British scientists a century ago who surreptitiously took
rubber trees from Brazil to their famous Kew botanical gardens in
England, developed a commercial strain of rubber trees, transplanted
them in their then British-ruled colony of Malaya in Southeast Asia, and
hired thousands of Indian migrant workers to tap the white fluid latex
flowing from the slim rubber trees on their vast plantations. The result:
Dunlop, a British company operating rubber plantations in Malaya,
became an international powerhouse when the development of the auto
industry made rubber tires essential to modern transportation worldwide. The American company Firestone similarly used Liberia and
France’s Michelin used Vietnam to develop their global tire and rubber
businesses. And other iconic American companies such as Singer,
maker of the famous Singer sewing machines, were consciously developing global marketing strategies by the early twentieth century
(Domosh 2006). So globalizing trends-in science, political control,
labor migration, product marketing-are not new. What is new is the
scale and breadth of globalizing trends since the late twentieth century,
accelerating into the current century:
Often globalization is used as a shorthand label only for the worldwide
sprawl of capitalist business organizations and flows of technology, labor,
and capital designed to enhance the profits of those businesses. Likewise,
then, antig1oba1ization is used to refer to the many-stranded social movement inspired by critiques of that capitalist globalizing trend. But it is
more useful to understand that globalization can happen to anything, not
just to profit-seeking companies and their products and employees. In
fact, the antiglobalization movement, with its loose but often effective
networks of environmental activists, antisweatshop activists, prodemocracx advocates, and local culture defenders, is itself a major result of
globalizing trends: activists in Nigeria are now trading information and
strategic lessons with people in Canada, Britain, and India.
On the other hand, it is true that not everyone enters into globalization with equal resources: not everyone can afford jet travel; not everyone
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has easy access to the Internet; not everyone has scientific laboratories or
banking credit at their fingertips; not everyone has equal access to English, the increasingly dominant “lingua franca” of globalized communication; not everyone gets to discuss their international issues privately over
cocktails with a senator.
Militarization may be a less familiar concept. But it too is a transforming process that happens over time-sometimes rapidly, though
often at a slow, hard-to-spot creep. And like the process of globalization, militarizing trends can simultaneously change the influence one
person has on another, can alter how stories are interpreted, can turn
meanings upside down. To become militarized is to adopt militaristic
values (e.g., a belief in hierarchy, obedience, and the use of force) and
priorities as one’s own, to see military solutions as particularly effective,
to see the world as a dangerous place best approached with militaristic
attitudes. These changes may take generations to occur, or they may
happen suddenly as the response to a particular trauma. Most of the
people in the world who are militarized are not themselves in uniform.
Most militarized people are civilians.
A husband’s and wife’s marriage can become militarized if the husband decides to enlist in his country’s military and that military operates on the assumption that a soldier’s spouse will put the needs of the
soldier in the family ahead of any other marital need. If a wife finishes
her engineering degree and decides to accept a job offer to work for a
large corporation that relies on defense contracts from governments
and expects its engineers to accept a culture of secrecy, that can create
deep pockets of silence within the couple’s now-militarized home life.
Similarly, a town’s elected officials can become militarized if they begin
to think that getting and keeping a military base sited nearby enhances
the town’s economic health, or if they believe a local weapons-producing
corporation offers the best chance for sustaining decently paid jobs for
their residents. Hundreds of towns around the world today are militarized (Vine 2015).
A government’s international intelligence service can be militarized if
intelligence gathering is done chiefly by the country’s department of
defense. Even if an independent intelligence agency exists on the government’s organizational chart, intelligence gathering and, especially important, the interpreting of that intelligence, can become militarized if in
daily reality it is the defense bureaucracy that possesses the greater
“FEMINIST CURIOSITY” AND GLOBALIZED MILITARISM
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budget and resources to conduct its own intelligence operations-and
the country’s elected representatives accept this as normal or even
effective.
A country’s international borders likewise can become militarized if
a majority of voters and their representatives begin to think that danger
lurks on the other side of those borders, dangers that must be addressed
not through cultural understanding, diplomatic negotiations, immigration regulations, and ordinary policing, but instead through fortification, militarized policing, and even the deployment of soldiers. Such
border transformations can spark intense public discussions and debates
over whether militarization is the most useful process by which to
address the movement of peoples from state to state in today’s increasingly globalized world.
Border police and intelligence agencies are two of the most likely
engines of militarization in today’s world. The less that border police and
intelligence agencies are held effectively accountable by democratically
elected civilian authorities, the more prone that country will be to further militarization. In countries as different as Italy, France, and the
United States, police forces have been equipped with military-scale
armored vehicles and weaponry. This sort of equipment sends out a
double message: to police officers, the message is: “Your fellow citizens
are the enemy” To the civilian residents of towns policed by officers
militarily equipped, the message is: “Your local police see you as threats,
not as fellow citizens.” Such a double message is doubly militarizing.
A civilian court judge can become militarized if that judge begins to
believe that she or he must defer to a government lawyer’s claims that,
when a government agency is sued by a civilian plaintiff, the government’s need to protect “national security” trumps all other claims
before the court. Judicial deference in the face of executive branch
claims of national security necessity is one of the most common modes
of judges’ militarization. That is, militarization can look less like conventional aggressiveness and more like deferential passivity
Ordinary citizens can become militarized whenever they start to
think that the world is so dangerous that the necessarily slow processes
of legislative hearings, compromise, and open voting don’t match the
sense of speed and urgency-and maybe secrecy-they have come to
think are needed to address those alleged dangers. This is the point at
which officials in the executive wing of government-presidents, prime
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ministers, politically appointed officials, career civil servants-may
think they have been given the green light to act behind the legislature’s
back, without public oversight, in the name of protecting the public
from the perceived danger. If some members of the elected legislature
also share this sense of danger and urgency and the resultant impatience
with compromise and transparency, then that green light will shine all
the more brightly. An elected legislator becomes militarized when she
or he starts to demote civil liberties to second place among public priorities behind purported military necessity. Any civilian voter assessing
the legislators becomes militarized when she or he begins to see military solutions to international problems as more effective than the often
painfully slow and complex diplomatic solutions.
A globalizing corporation becomes militarized insofar as its executives come to believe that its overseas factories will be more secure if
the foreign government is willing to use military troops or militarized
police to put down labor protests.
This book explores how these two potent contemporary trendsglobalization and militarization-often feed each other. For example,
globalized militarization occurs when a foreign-owned corporation
chooses to locate its contractors’ factories in a country whose government is quick to wield military force against employees who call for
better working conditions. Globalization can become militarized. Globalization depends on militarization whenever militarized ideas about
national security come to be seen as central to creating or sustaining·
certain international relationships.
Similarly; militarization can be globalized. Think of all the national
and international sales of rifles, land mines, armored vehicles, submarines, fighter aircraft, uniforms, body armor, radar systems, guided
missiles, drones, and unmanned surveillance aircraft. There are so
many players involved in the design, manufacture, sale and purchase of
these militarized products-scientists, engineers, assembly line workers, executives, lobbyists, secretaries, accountants, marketers, middlemen, buyers, and users-that peace advocates, just to track the complex
flows of large and small arms, together worth billions of dollars, have
formed several independent, globally’ conscious groups: for instance,
the Small Arms Survey, based in Geneva, Switzerland (www.smallarms
survey.org); the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute
(SIPRI) (www.sipri.org).
“FEMINIST CURIOSITY” AND GLOBALIZED MILITARISM
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Just looking at the contracts won by the largest military defense
corporations from the U.S. Department of Defense in fiscal year 2014,
one finds Lockheed Martin at the top of the list, winning 8.84 percent
of all Defense Department contracts, worth a total of $25 billion. Next
in line is Boeing, followed by General Dynamics, Raytheon, and
Northrop Grumman. Each of these corporations shapes the lives of
thousands of employees-and those family members and local communities that depend on their wages. Number seven on the list caught
some observers’ eyes: It was not American. The British company BAE
Systems was the only non-U.S. company in the “top ten” for 2014
(Aeroweb 2014). It had benefited from the “special relationship” between
the U.S. and British governments in foreign policy, which persuaded
Pentagon officials that, while not American, BAE could be trusted with
contracts for sensitive weaponry. BAE’s executives said it was not really
an anomaly but an indicator of more to come-namely; defense manufacturers headquartered in diverse countries seeking profitable weapons
contracts from any government eager to buy (Wayne 2006).
While it is usually the large companies producing the large weapons
systems that make the news, small weapons kill more people day in and
day out around the world. Where do the guns and ammunition that are
causing death and dislocation among thousands of civilians in the
Darfur region of Sudan come from? How do they get from their manufacturers to Sudan? Who is profiting?
Consider the recent emergence of globally active private security
contractors, such as Blackwater USA (in the wake of a scandal, its owners renamed it Xe Service). Unlike the more familiar defense manufacturers, private security contractors actually provide, for substantial fees,
the services formerly provided by governments’ own militaries and
police forces-guarding embassies and mines, providing food for soldiers, running supply convoys. Most of the recruits working for American, British, Fijian, and South African private security contractors are
men (Eichler 2015). By 2006, in Iraq alone, in the midst of that U.S.-led
war, nearly 50,000 private military and security personnel had been
contracted by the U.S. government, private businesses (including
newspapers and television companies), and the fledgling Iraqi government to provide various services (Holmquist 2005; Koppel 2006).
In addition, there are scores of companies-some little known to the
public, others as well known as Halliburton, AT&T, Pizza Hut, Pepsi,
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McDonald’s, and Burger King-that may not deliver armed men overseas, but do make profits by providing goods and services to soldiers in
war zones and on military bases. Many civilian military spouses have
found low-paid jobs at these fast food restaurants, though in 2014
several of these companies decided to close some of their military base
outlets rather than meet the Department of Labor’s new minimum wage
rules (jowers, 2014).
Or imagine a map of the world showing all the military baseslarge and small-that just the U.S. government operates. Today, there
are an estimated 800 overseas American military bases. U.S. military
bases currently stretch from Cuba, South Korea, Australia, and Britain
to San Diego and Pearl Harbor, from Qatar and Bahrain to North Carolina, Washington State, and Arizona, from Colombia, Djibouti, and
Egypt to Kenya and Uganda, from Japan, Poland, and Hungary to
Aruba, Kwajalein Atoll, and Guam. In Germany alone today there are
134 American bases, in Japan 113, in South Korea 83, and in Italy 50
(Vine 2015, pp. 4-7).
These bases and their immediate neighborhoods take the mundane
forms of barbed wire, tarmac, playgrounds, bowling alleys, bars, discos,
grocery stores, medical clinics, tattoo parlors, tailors, mechanics shops,
target ranges, fuel tanks, file cabinets, memos, emails, Facebook friends,
love letters, sexually transmitted diseases, local civilian employees,
spouses, children, private contractors, takeoffs, landings, parades; and
pornographic DVDs. Together, however, these everyday base fixtures,
personnel, and operations, as well as the typically secret official negotiations that create and sustain this worldwide network of bases, have produced a globalized process of militarization.
On every domestic and overseas military base, the daily relationships
inside the wire are gendered. The relationships between the people working inside and those living in the local communities surrounding each
base are also gendered. The dynamics of masculinization and feminization do not respect the physical boundaries (Enloe 2014; Gillem 2007;
Hirshberg 2012; Lutz 2002; Vine 2015).
Again, some of these globalizing militarization engines were fired up
more than a century ago.’ The imperial governments of Britain, France,
the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, the United States, and Belgium deliberately exported their own models of militaries to the countries they
colonized around the world. Britain sought to replicate the British army
“FEMINIST CURIOSITY” AND GLOBALIZED MILITARISM
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in India, Nigeria, Malaysia, Fiji, Australia, and Egypt, complete with its
own homegrown presumptions about ethnic hierarchies and notions of
“martial races”-that is, ethnic groups whose men were imagined by
the colonizers to be “traditional warriors” (Barkawi 2006). Britain’s
imperial rivals did the same in Indonesia, Vietnam, Mozambique, the
Philippines, Senegal, Algeria, Peru, and Mexico (Enloe 1980). Recently,
the British military is seeking recruits into its own military from young
men in its former colonies, especially Fiji and Nepal (for its famed
Gurkha regiments) (Gillan 2005; Ware 2012). When you next hear
about Gurkhas serving in private security companies or in the British
or Indian or Brunei armed forces on peacekeeping or disaster relief
missions around the world, think of the long-lasting gendered militarized legacies of imperialism, as well as the hopes of young men and
their parents in impoverished former colonies (Chisholm 2014).
So the globalization of militarizing processes is not new. What is
new is (a) the global reach of these business, cultural, and military
ideas and processes; (b) the capacity of promoters of globalizing militarism to wield lethal power; (c) the fact that so many private civilian
companies are now involved in this globalization of militarization; and
(d) the intricacy of the international alliances among the players.
Asking feminist questions is a valuable means of understanding how
and why both the globalization of militarization and the militarization
of globalization happen. Posing feminist questions, furthermore, can
help reveal the potential consequences of these processes for both
women and men. Each of us probably has had the experience-with
friends, with family, perhaps even with teachers-of insisting upon
asking about things that others would much rather take for granted.
They think you are a nuisance to be posing these questions:
“Dad, how come on farms producing food for export it’s usually the
women who do the weeding?”
“Well, because they always have. That’s just the way it is! Anyway,
what’s the big deal about weeding?”
Of course, we might be the lazy ones. Other people might have to
nudge us toward becoming curious. Perhaps we are the’ ones who don’t
want to be bothered asking new questions. It can be quite comfortable
taking a lot of things for granted. That is why it takes so much effort by
so many people to turn something most people take for granted-the
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fact that it is mainly women who weed, the fact that miners breathe in
coal dust, the fact that many high school students join a military cadet
corps, the fact that people become poorer as they grow older-into an
issue.
Something becomes an “issue” only when a lot of people do two
things: first, they start questioning it and stop taking it for granted,
and second, they begin to believe it deserves public attention and
public resolution. Persuading people to do both of these things is not
easy. Since so many cultures and so many governments treat women’s
experiences as not worth exploring and create the impression that the
condition of women is merely a private matter, converting any aspect
of women’s lives into an issue has taken-and still takes-enormous
effort.
For instance, if a lot of people begin to be curious about why it is
mainly women who weed, but they still stop short of calling for public
responsibility for this situation, then the fact that it is mainly women
who weed won’t become an issue. However, even the emergence of just
a popular curiosity about why women are designated as the weeders
may, further down the road, provoke people to call for more public
responsibility for the causes and consequences of that agricultural division of labor. They may start looking into the international politics of
cotton, of strawberries, of coffee.
Creating a new curiosity is an important first step-and it’s not so
easy to take. But nothing can become an issue if the exercise of curiosity remains a private activity or if what you uncover is deemed unworthy of public response.
So it is tough to turn something into an issue. Issue making is a
political activity. It requires developing a new curiosity plus spreading
that curiosity among a lot of people in their roles as public citizens.
Think of all the things that today are being treated nationally or internationally as issues, things that fifteen years ago were not considered
“issues.” When, for example, did male soldiers’ use of women as prostitutes become an issue at least in a few countries? How about “stalking”?
When did militaries’ use of land mines become an issue? Becoming an ,
issue is never automatic. Each issue’s development has its own history.
Each issue needs to be explained. Every issue has become an issue only
because some people stopped taking it for granted, developed a new
curiosity about it, and managed to persuade a lot of us who used to be
complacent about it to become newly curious, too-and to start finding
“FEMINIST CURIOSITY” AND GLOBALIZED MILITARISM
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answers that made them think afresh about citizens’ and governments’
responsibilities for those dynamics that they had discovered.
Developing a feminist curiosity can be energizing. It motivates one to
treat as puzzling the relationships of women to any aspect of social life
and nature that other people take for granted. So many people in most
societies usually say (and many of us said before we began to cultivate
our own feminist curiosity) that we do not need to ask about the condition of women or assumptions about women because they are “natural”
or because they are “trivial.”
“Mom, why do all these carmakers drape women models over their
new automobiles?”
“Oh, dear, don’t worry. Nobody takes that seriously.”
Beware the adjective “natural.” Beware “trivial.” Both are boulders
rolled up against a door you may want to open. Rolling away those
boulders can take a lot of intellectual and social stamina. Using a feminist curiosity, one discovers that who weeds is not “natural”; it flows
from who is assigned to weed, which child is pulled out of school
because a life of weeding won’t require the ability to read and write.
Who is assigned to weed may determine who in the village is not
trained to operate a tractor. Who weeds may turn out to have a lot to
do with who is not legally permitted to inherit land. Following the
bread crumbs of these questions reveals that “Who weeds and who
doesn’t?” is not a trivial question to pursue. It is a question whose
exploration can shed a bright light on globalized agriculture, on who
benefits from it, and on who stays mired in poverty because of it.
Developing and using a feminist curiosity does take a lot of energy.
Many of you might have sat in a class and felt hesitant to raise your
hand to ask a question, sensing people around you letting out an
audible sigh, “Oh, there she goes again.” It takes energy to go ahead and
ask that question, to not let a misleading assumption about women or
about men, about boys or about girls just slide by. Continuing to pose
feminist questions even takes a kind of co;urage.
;
“Thinking about your lecture about international terrorism, Professor, shouldn’t we ask ‘Where are the women?'”
Or: “Excuse me, but in your discussion about nuclear proliferation
policy; do you think that it matters to ask about international contests over masculinity?”
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Exercising a feminist curiosity, therefore, is not a passive endeavor. It
is not a quiet intellectual pastime. It is intellectual, but it takes stamina.
Exercising a feminist curiosity calls on us to develop a kind of politics
that has to be nurtured and cultivated; it does not just grow by itself.
There will be those listeners who will raise their eyebrows skeptically or
theatrically roll their eyes when a friend or colleague poses a feminist
question. Each raise of an eyebrow, each rolling of eyes should be recognized as a political act. Each of those gestures is meant to discredit,
maybe even to silence, the feminist questioner. Each of those gestures is
meant to keep the boulders firmly up against the patriarchal door. Thus
each gesture is worth investigating.
This book also calls on us to move beyond an interest in the impacts
of global affairs on women-though those impacts are important and
do need careful monitoring. This book is a call to action, a call to use a
feminist curiosity to develop explanations-that is, to discover causes.
“Move beyond impacts to causes.” It sounds deceptively bland. Yet
wielding a feminist curiosity, one finds that one is not just spelling out
the impacts (consequences) of anything on women, but delving into
whether pressuring women to act and believe in certain ways actually
explains why something has occurred: the outbreaks and perpetuation
of wars; the spread of certain industries from rich countries to poor
countries; the continued abuse of the environment (yes, it could be that
it will take a feminist curiosity to fully explain why those arctic ice caps
are melting).
Explanation-the discovery of what causes what-is the “brass
ring” of any analytical endeavor. If you can discover a cause for something, you are on your way to creating a theory about it. A theory is an
explanation that is backed by specific publicly shared evidence. Moreover, an explanation does not rise to the status of a theory until it has
been reliably tested.
Still, let’s look for a moment at impact analysis. It requires curiosity,
too. And getting a feminist curiosity onto the agenda when people at the
table are choosing what questions will be asked about impacts-out! comes, consequences-can be a challenge. Ask anyone with a feminist
curiosity who has worked for a corporation, a local government, an
international agency; a humanitarian aid organization. “What will the
U.S. government policy of requiring the teaching of sexual abstinence in
order to qualify for reproductive health aid mean for girls’ relationships
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to men in Uganda?” “What did sending thousands of male UN peacekeeping forces into East Timar mean for those Southeast Asian women?”
Getting their colleagues to take seriously the weighing of the impacts on
women of any action the group is about to take can be a frustrating
endeavor.
Often, even if official pronouncements are made calling for the condition of women and the ideas of women to be taken seriously, the actual
institutional response is merely a token response-that is, officials go
through the superficial motions, but don’t alter their masculinist practices and policy presumptions (e.g., they appoint a “gender advisor” to
their department but starve that person of resources and leave that person out of the loop of crucial information flows needed to do the job
effectively). This has happened in national militaries, corporate businesses, and international agencies. Thus, developing the finely honed
skills to distinguish tokenism from genuine change is useful when dissecting both globalization and militarization.
A “gender impact analysis” is a new tool in local and global policymaking. Gender impact analysis should be-but is rarely-completed
before any final decision is made; decisions such as allowing a new
foreign company to come into one’s region or country to open a new
copper mine, signing an alliance with another government that entails
building a new air force base, permitting a foreign film distribution
company to buy up most of the country’s movie theaters, and legalizing
a new anti-AIDS drug call for asking:
•
•
•
How will this decision (in contrast to the other options on the
table) affect men? Which men especially?
How will this affect women? Will it affect certain women more
than other women?
How will this policy choice affect the relationships between women
and men? Will it shrink the inequalities? Widen the disparities?
Globally or locally or both?
Gender impact analyses ar_e difficult to do. It takes skills and training.
Some professional schools are still refusing to incorporate this training
into their curriculum, depriving their students of the skills they will
need. Today, however, those gender-analysis skills are being taught in
new graduate programs and special training programs all over the world.
Networks of feminist scholars, women engaged in local women’s groups,
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and feminist-informed agency staff members are meeting, for instance,
in Canada, Colombia, Thailand, and Kenya to write new gender-analysis
training manuals and to create new courses to increase the number of
people who have the skills to perform gender investigations and assessments of policy proposals. These gatherings don’t make headlines, CNN
and Reuters crews don’t arrive there with their cameras. Nevertheless,
the women and men who travel across time zones to take part in these
meetings are helping to globalize a feminist curiosity. Among today’s
most effective globalized feminist networks are:
•
•
•
•
Women Living Under Muslim Laws (WLUML), whose activists,
themselves women from Muslim backgrounds, monitor and challenge nationalist discourses, religious intolerance, sexist laws,
and sexist practices rationalized in the name of Islam and nationalism. Its activists publish a newsletter from Pakistan and organize
international solidarity campaigns to support local women subjected to patriarchal Islamist regimes (www.wluml.org).
Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF),
celebrated its 100th anniversary with a large meeting in The Hague
in April 2015. It was founded in The Hague in 1915, during World
War I, by 1,300 women activists from Europe and North America
who opposed that devastating war (one million men were killed or
maimed in the stalemated muddy trench warfare in France in the
five-month Battle of the Somme alone) and now has its headquarters in Geneva, with active branches in Colombia, Sweden, Norway,
Burundi, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Canada, Russia,Japan, Australia, the
United States, and twenty other countries (www.wilpf.org; www
. peacewomen.org).
Women’s Initiatives for Gender Justice, based in The Hague, is a
newer network of feminists who organized to monitor and pressure the new International Criminal Court (established in 1999 as
the first international war crimes court). Its members take actions
to ensure that systematic rape and sexual slavery in wartime are
explicitly recognized and prosecuted as war crimes (www.4gender
justice.org).
·
Women Waging Peace, first launched by a former U.S. ambassador
who had seen firsthand the impact of war on women in Bosnia
during the early 1990s, as well as local women’s own courage and
“FEMINIST CURIOSITY” AND GLOBALIZED MILITARISM
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organizing skills, has become a network designed to support and
build bridges between often isolated local women’s peace groups,
among them groups in the Congo, Bosnia, Georgia, and Sierra
Leone (www.womenwagingpeace.net).
Women Peacemakers Program, based in the Netherlands, works
with affiliates in Burundi, Sudan, and other countries whose women
and men are coping with the violence and legacies of war. It also
works with the Dutch government to ensure that UN Security
Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security is fully
implemented ( www.womenpeacemakersprogram.org).
Women in Black, a network of women in countries around the
world-in Israel, Serbia, Spain, Italy, Japan, the United States,
Britain-who oppose militarism and its roots in patriarchy and
nationalism and who hold silent vigils open to all women, standing prominently every week in their own city’s busy intersections
(Cockburn 2012; Women in Black 2005).
Two WILPF leaders have been awarded Nobel Peace Prizes (lane
Addams in 1931 and Emily Greene Balch in 1946). Women in Black’s
Belgrade and Jerusalem groups were nominated for the Nobel Peace
Prize in the late 1990s.
All six of these globalizing feminist networks have made the exposing of, and the rolling back of, local and international militarist policies,
ideas, and practices central to their work. Members of all six global
networks also have become convinced that, given the ways in which
hydra-headed militarization works, the most effective actions are those
that not only are sensitive to local cultures, politics, and priorities but
also embrace international alliances in which to share ideas and information and to coordinate actions. Members of all six of these groups,
furthermore, have become convinced that women have special roles to
play in exposing and challenging militarization, not because women are
somehow innately, biologically wired for peacefulness, but because
women are so often outside the inner circles where militarizing decisions are being made yet are likely to be called upon to support, and
even work on behalf of, militarizing agendas.
That is, members of all six groups, while they differ in their ways of
organizing, their modes of resistance, and their country focuses, share
a conviction that we must take women seriously and that it is crucial to
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challenge those particular ideas about masculinity, about femininity,
and about patriarchal social orders that they have come to see as the
local and global engines of militarization (Bauer and Helie 2006; Cockburn 2012; Cohn 2013; Confortini 2012; Giles, de Alwis, Klein, and
Silva 2003; Hawkesworth 2006; Kaufman and Williams 2010; Sjoberg
and Via 2010; Spees 2003; Stiehm 2006; Women in Black 2005; Women
Waging Peace and International Alert 2005).
Yet many international and national decision makers prefer to
switch off their curiosities and to leave these new feminist analytical
tools to rust in the basement. If the policy elites did use the gender
analysis tools, they might have to change their agendas. For example,
if they commissioned gender impact analyses and then acted on their
findings, officials in natural disaster relief agencies might have to significantly reallocate their resources. When planning for future tsunami,
earthquake, or hurricane relief, many people (though not all, and not
necessarily those with authority) have learned the hard way that it is
always important to ask ahead of time about the likely impacts both on
women and on men-of every economic class, of every ethnic group.
Why? Because, of all the thousands of people who died in the giant
waves set off by the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, a majority
turned out to be women and their dependent children. Likewise, in the
chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the Gulf
Coast of the southern United States in September 2005, it was African
American women and their dependent children who were especially
endangered by the lack of government preparedness and the resultant
overcrowding of unsanitary emergency shelters.
Look at another recent example of how a serious engagement with
gender impact analysis would push officials to alter their political decisions. In 2005, the Iraqi and American male political elites who together
hammered out Iraq’s first post-Saddam constitution deliberately inserted
(or passively allowed) provisions for putting much of family lawthose laws determining marriage, divorce, child custody, and inheritance-under the influence of conservative male clerical officials. Some
Iraqi women went into the streets in the summer of 2005 to protest. But
these women’s advocates weren’t inside Baghdad’s fortified, exclusive
Green Zone where the U.S. administrators had their offices and where
the constitutional deals and compromises were being made. These Iraqi
women were certainly talking about gender impacts; they were convinced
that inserting these conservative provisions into the new constitution
“FEMINIST CURIOSITY” AND GLOBALIZED MILITARISM
Ii:,
31
would push most Iraqi women further out to the margins of the country’s public life. But neither the American nor the Iraqi officials wielding
the most influence in the constitutional process ordered a formal gender impact statement to be written or to be discussed in public or to be
taken into serious account by senior negotiators. Iraqi women activists-and they grew in number as the war dragged on, despite the risks
involved in being publicly visible as women as the violence escalated
during 2005 and 2006–were shut out of high-level American and Iraqi
elite policymaking. Iraqi women activists didn’t lead any of the Iraqi
political parties; they didn’t control any U.S. or new Iraqi army or police
regiments or the multiplying sectarian Iraqi militias; they didn’t occupy
the positions of clerics or of media editors. Those were the people being
taken seriously, and they were virtually all male. The result: passage of
a new constitution that many Iraqi women’s rights advocates believed
would undermine even the status women had under the former authoritarian regime (Al-Ali and Pratt 2009; Enloe 2010). Today, as the Syrian
war has spread to Iraq, Iraqi women continue to contend with this
patriarchal political system crafted by men waging the previous war.
Impacts matter. Wielding a feminist curiosity about impacts is a
valuable analytical activity. When that feminist curiosity is not used,
there are real-life consequences.
So, when we weigh whether we need to “go beyond impacts to
causes,” what is being considered is not that we should stop posing
gender impact questions. In fact, many women’s rights advocates have
urged that compulsory “gender impact studies” be included in the
negotiating process by which every piece of legislation and every international agreement is hammered out. No hurricane prevention or relief
plan should be approved, no constitution should be ratified, no foreign
investment should be okayed, no new military base agreement should be
signed until there has been a thorough and public accounting of the
potential impacts on women, on men, and on the relationships between
women and men (equalizing or unequalizing). Yet when we “go beyond
impacts to causes,” we gain something more.
To make sense of today’s complex world, we need to understand that
niany decisions have not only gendered consequences but also gendered causes-that is, causes flowing from presumptions or fears about
femininity or masculinity. It is only by using our feminist curiosity that
we can expose these gendered causes. For instance, certain phrases do
not merely have a destructive impact on certain women; the popularity
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of those phrases is caused in part by ideas about women, by presumptions about femininity and masculinity. Creating a feminist causal
analysis takes us to a deeper level of understanding of how and why the
world “works” the way it does.
Thus, one of our newest feminist revelations is that one cannot
explain why the international system works the way it does without
taking women’s lives seriously. “Experts” may be knowledgeable about
banking interest rates, about the oil industry, about HIV/AIDS; nevertheless, if those experts fail to think seriously about women’s lives, they are
certain to produce a deeply flawed understanding-explanation-of
today’s international political economy. An example: there is a rising
awareness that HIV/AIDS is being spread because of armed conflicts.
The simple causal explanation thus might be that “war causes AIDS.”
But feminist investigators have found that that level of causal explanation is just not adequate. After all, firing a gun does not spread the virus.
Rather, these investigators have found, it is the increasing sexual violence by men-men armed with weapons and with masculinized arrogance and often ethnic or racial contempt-against girls and women in
the midst of armed conflict that is causing the spread of the deadly virus
(Lewis 2005; Russella et al. 2015).
Saying that taking women’s lives seriously is necessary for developing reliable explanations about much of what is going on in the world,
including the interactions between militarizing change and globalizing
change, is a radical feminist assertion. The term radical comes from the
ancient word for root. So to say that this is a radical feminist assertion
is to say that it is going to the root of how we understand militarized
globalization or globalized militarization. It is an assertion that anybody
who is interested in international politics-a legislator, a journalist, a
professor, an activist, your boss, or your best friend-but refuses to take
women’s lives seriously is going to be an unreliable guide into today’s
and tomorrow’s international system.
True, this is a risky assertion to make. You should not just swallow
it. You can do your own evidence gathering, your own testing. Then, out
of that exploring, you can reach your own thoughtful conclusions about
the value of this’ feminist causal assertion about how globalization and
militarization work.
C
APTER
3
TRACKING THE
MILITARIZED
GLOBAL SNEAKER
Let’s start testing this feminist causal explanatory tool by looking at the
international politics of factory work. If we consciously use a feminist
curiosity, we can see how the promoters of globalizing factory work
maximize their profits by relying on manipulations of ideas about
“femininity” and the “dutiful daughter” and then enforcing those
manipulations with militarization.
That is, the efforts of companies and governments to make-and
keep-their factory workers’ labor cheapened often become dependent
on militarism. The result: many of the sneakers-and shirts, jeans, as
well as football, soccer, and basketball uniforms-that look white or
red or blue or neon pink on the surface may, turn out to be threaded
with khaki on the inside.
‘
“Cheap labor” is the work of some employees who are paid relatively
little for their skill and effort. Our challenge: to question this commonly
accepted (i.e., unquestioned) notion of “cheap labor” by using a feminist
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