Feminist author speaking at University of Auckland

Feminist author and academic speaking at University of Auckland

One of the world’s foremost feminist writers will speak at the University of Auckland later this month.

Professor Cynthia Enloe is a Research Professor of International Development, Community, and Environment at Clark University in Massachusetts and a former Director of the University’s Women Studies programme.

Professor Enloe studies and frequently commentates in the media on the way ideas of gender – of what is masculine and what is feminine– have shaped how conflict is waged.

She has also shown how these questions play out in peacetime. She has investigated the roles and impacts of foreign militaries on local populations during both war and peace, and how these impact both men and women.

In her work on the tourism and sex industries, on nationalism, pacifism and militarism, women in diplomacy, development and poverty, and on globalisation and industry, Professor Enloe has systematically revealed the ways that gender has always been and is central to global politics.

Her work has covered food and fashion industries, as well as the global domestic labour industry, and such wide-ranging military engagements as the long-standing American bases in Japan and Philippines and the sex industries around these bases, conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan, development and conflict in Turkey and the Pacific, the impacts of these wars on the ‘home-front’ and the relationship between war and the global market and financial institutions, and resistance to militarism.

A critically acclaimed author of 14 books, Professor Enloe is particularly known for her 1989 book, Bananas, Beaches & Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics which was revised and reprinted in 2014. In it, she reveals the crucial role of women in international politics today and 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.

In her lecture, “Syria, Ukraine, the Pacific: What Feminist Investigations Reveal About Current Militarizations”, Professor Enloe will discuss the politics of masculinities and the politics of femininities at work in Syria and the Ukraine and the Pacific and asks how we are more likely to effectively grapple with the causes and impacts of current militarizing developments in each of them if we take women’s diverse lives seriously. She will also look at New Zealand’s recent deployment of troops to Iraq and our role in the regions conflict.

The lecture is in Lecture Theatre 4, Owen G. Glen Building (260-073) the University of Auckland on Thursday 23 July at 5pm.

ENDS

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