In this brand new radical analysis of globalization, Cynthia Enloe examines recent events—Bangladeshi garment factory deaths, domestic workers in the Persian Gulf, Chinese global tourists, and the UN gender politics of guns—to reveal the crucial role of women in international politics today. With all new and updated chapters, Enloe describes how many women's seemingly personal strategies—in their marriages, in their housework, in their coping with ideals of beauty—are, in reality, the stuff of global politics. Enloe offers a feminist gender analysis of the global politics of both masculinities and femininities, dismantles an apparently overwhelming world system, and reveals that system to be much more fragile and open to change than we think.

In Seriously!, Cynthia Enloe, author of the groundbreaking analysis of globalization, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases, addresses two deeply gendered and contested questions: Who is taken seriously? And who gets to bestow the label “serious” on others? With a strategy of taking both women and gender dynamics seriously, Cynthia Enloe investigates the Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair and the banking crash of 2008, the subsequent recession, as well as UN peacekeeping and the ongoing Egyptian revolution. Each case study highlights the gritty experiences of women in diverse circumstances—in banks, on the job market, in war zones, and in revolutions. The results of taking women seriously are fresh insights into what fuels the cultures of hyper–risk taking, of sexual harassment, and the denial of women’s post-war security.

Maneuvers takes readers on a global tour of the sprawling process called "militarization." With her incisive verve and moxie, eminent feminist Cynthia Enloe shows that the people who become militarized are not just the obvious ones—executives and factory floor workers who make fighter planes, land mines, and intercontinental missiles. They are also the employees of food companies, toy companies, clothing companies, film studios, stock brokerages, and advertising agencies. Militarization is never gender-neutral, Enloe claims: It is a personal and political transformation that relies on ideas about femininity and masculinity. Films that equate action with war, condoms that are designed with a camouflage pattern, fashions that celebrate brass buttons and epaulettes, tomato soup that contains pasta shaped like Star Wars weapons—all of these contribute to militaristic values that mold our culture in both war and peace. Presenting new and groundbreaking material that builds on Enloe's acclaimed work in Does Khaki Become You? and Bananas, Beaches, and Bases, Maneuvers takes an international look at the politics of masculinity, nationalism, and globalization. Enloe ranges widely from Japan to Korea, Serbia, Kosovo, Rwanda, Britain, Israel, the United States, and many points in between. She covers a broad variety of subjects: gays in the military, the history of "camp followers," the politics of women who have sexually serviced male soldiers, married life in the military, military nurses, and the recruitment of women into the military. One chapter titled "When Soldiers Rape" explores the many facets of the issue in countries such as Chile, the Philippines, Okinawa, Rwanda, and the United States. Enloe outlines the dilemmas feminists around the globe face in trying to craft theories and strategies that support militarized women, locally and internationally, without unwittingly being militarized themselves. She explores the complicated militarized experiences of women as prostitutes, as rape victims, as mothers, as wives, as nurses, and as feminist activists, and she uncovers the "maneuvers" that military officials and their civilian supporters have made in order to ensure that each of these groups of women feel special and separate.

In this collection of lively essays, Cynthia Enloe makes better sense of globalization and international politics by taking a deep and personal look into the daily realities in a range of women's lives. She proposes a distinctively feminist curiosity that begins with taking women seriously, especially during this era of unprecedented American influence. This means listening carefully, digging deep, challenging assumptions, and welcoming surprises. Listening to women in Asian sneaker factories, Enloe reveals, enables us to bring down to earth the often abstract discussions of the global economy. Paying close attention to Iraqi women's organizing efforts under military occupation exposes the false global promises made by officials. Enloe also turns the beam of her inquiry inward. In a series of four candid interviews and a new set of autobiographical pieces, she reflects on the gradual development of her own feminist curiosity. Describing her wartime suburban girlhood and her years at Berkeley, she maps the everyday obstacles placed on the path to feminist consciousness—and suggests how those obstacles can be identified and overcome. The Curious Feminist shows how taking women seriously also challenges the common assumption that masculinities are trivial factors in today's international affairs. Enloe explores the workings of masculinity inside organizations as diverse as the American military, a Serbian militia, the UN, and Oxfam. A feminist curiosity finds all women worth thinking about, Enloe claims. She suggests that we pay thoughtful attention to women who appear complicit in violence or in the oppression of others, or too cozily wrapped up in their relative privilege to inspire praise or compassion. Enloe's vitality, passion, and incisive wit illuminate each essay. The Curious Feminist is an original and timely invitation to look at global politics in an entirely different way.

"Nimo's War, Emma's War is unique in examining the gendered dimension of the Iraq war, particularly its impact on ordinary Iraqi and American women, thereby revealing an important long-term cost of the conflict. Cynthia Enloe's approach and analysis are extremely original and innovative."--Nadje Al-Ali, author of What Kind of Liberation?: Women and the Occupation of Iraq "Nimo's War, Emma's War is Cynthia Enloe's darkest and most strikingly conceived text to date. War is not 'in' Iraq and Afghanistan, where foreign militaries confront local people, rather it is everywhere, most particularly in 'peacetime' domestic spaces, 'civilian' employment, marital bedrooms and high schools."--Terrell Carver, author of Politics, Language and Metaphor "Cynthia Enloe has pioneered the subject of women, militarism, and war in a series of revelatory books, including Bananas, Beaches, and Bases, The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War, and Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women's Lives. Nimo's War, Emma's War is her best one yet."--Chalmers Johnson, author of The Blowback Trilogy "Brilliantly researched, vividly written, Cynthia Enloe has gifted us with a new and different story of modern warfare. Entirely gripping and profoundly humane, every page raises new issues. To factor in Nimo and Emma--all the women and families touched by the carnage and agony of war, is to see the bitter range of tragedy community by community. To read this book is to ask: What are we doing to our children--all our children, combatants and civilians? How do women cope with post-war wounds and violence--agony, wreckage, displacement? Cynthia Enloe's book is essential reading for all students and journalists, public citizens and peace activists, who seek women's dignity, healthy societies, humane alternatives to the insanity of careless military destruction."--Blanche Wiesen Cook, author of The Declassified Eisenhower, Eleanor Roosevelt (vols I & II, III forthcoming)

Militarism is being globalized today not only in war zones such as Ukraine and Syria, but in “peaceful” arenas such as families and football stadiums. Ideas and practices of masculinities and femininities are fuel for this global militarization. Who is presumed to be “weak” and who “tough”? Who is the “protector, who the “grateful protected”? Written by one of the world’s leading feminist scholars, this masterful and provocative newly updated edition tracks how women’s desires to be patriotic yet feminine and men’s fears of being feminized each have been exploited to globalize militarism—and thus what it will take to roll back militarization anywhere. Here are explorations of how governments shrink the meaning of “national security,” how Nike and Adidas rely on militaries to keep women workers’ wages low, how ideas about feminization were used to humiliate male prisoners in Abu Ghraib, and of why “camo” became a fashion statement. Cynthia Enloe offers readers a practical gender analysis tool kit with which to expose militarism’s blatant and subtle workings. Focusing her lens on the “big picture” of international politics and on the not-so-small picture of women’s and men’s complex everyday lives, Enloe challenges us to chart militarism in all its forms in this updated edition.

A woman did that? The general reaction to women's political violence is still one of shock and incomprehension. Mothers, Monsters, Whores provides an empirical study of women's violence in global politics. The book looks at military women who engage in torture; the Chechen 'Black Widows'; Middle Eastern suicide bombers; and the women who directed and participated in genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda. Sjoberg & Gentry analyse the biological, psychological and sexualized stereotypes through which these women are conventionally depicted, arguing that these are rooted in assumptions about what is 'appropriate' female behaviour. What these stereotypes have in common is that they all perceive women as having no agency in any sphere of life, from everyday choices to global political events. This book is a major feminist re-evaluation of women's motivations and actions as perpetrators of political violence.