Abstract
Twelve Feminist Lessons of War is not a book about the adjudication of “just” versus “unjust” war, what side one might or should take in any given war, or indeed about the conceptual status of war. Rather, this is a book about the lived experience of war, of war as a major component of the fabric of social life not just for individuals currently living in war zones, but as the basic geopolitical condition of the globe in the post-World War II era. Enloe gives a compelling, important account of the foundational nature of war in relation to the minutiae of women's lives, built upon her extensive work in this area over the course of many years. Written to be accessible and engaging to a wide audience, this book is appropriate for undergraduates and for anyone interested in grappling with the myriad implications of war's thorough infiltration of our minds, the modes of relationality we enact, and the institutions we navigate.
Organized as 12 chapters, each of which offers a different lesson about the gendered nature of modern war, and which build upon each other culminating in a call to end warfare through feminist means, this study is at its most compelling in its detailed attention to actions by everyday people that might not commonly be recognized as worthy of note or as having political impact. In this way, Enloe traces the complex negotiations of privilege and power that define women's varied relationships to war. Along these lines, we learn about how the mothers and partners of wounded soldiers care and advocate for them and for each other; that in the wake of their own military service, women have often experienced an intensification of (rather than a continued challenge to) gendered roles in labor and politics; and about the development of international legal statutes regarding wartime sexual violence based on the experiences of individual women. Enloe reflects on what it actually means for the lives of individual women that the “feminization of sacrifice is … integral to patriarchal war waging” (85): the constant, demanding work involved, the emotional labor, the paperwork required to access medical and other forms of care. She also, crucially, considers the stakes of war's facilitation of greater access to more stable work, and/or an escape from quotidian routinized violence and the imposition of gender and sexual normativity, for women and LGBTQ + individuals.
One of the results of Enloe's emphasis on the deep and widespread nature of gendered wartime violence in shaping human reality is that both “war” and “women” are invoked largely as transhistorical phenomena, an approach which opens up critical possibilities even as it takes others away. The distinctions between various conditions and forms of war that multiple thinkers have found crucial—colonial warfare, asymmetric warfare, “internal” warfare against a nation's own citizens, counterinsurgency, permanent warfare, etc.—fall out of the picture. Simultaneously, war is largely described as complicating and amplifying gendered inequalities that are characterized as preexisting it; it would make for a quite different analysis to posit gender and gender norms as themselves reinterpreted and produced anew by war. And in invoking “women” largely as an internally undifferentiated category, the role of, for example, racialization in constituting gender and shifting norms for femininity and womanhood is elided. This contributes to the tendency for certain forms of women's negotiation of life within war and resistance to gendered forms of war-induced suffering to be emphasized over and against others. For example, forms of anti-war work that women have long engaged in as part of larger, organized, and transnational anticolonial and decolonial movements are not discussed extensively here.
Insofar as one of Enloe's main goals is to contribute to the project of putting an end to war, how “war” is constituted as an object of knowledge in her argument matters. In couching the book as offering a corrective to common errors in the understanding of the gendered nature of war, Enloe argues that “[p]erpetuating those errors makes the outbreak of a next war more likely” (8), thus placing the production of accurate knowledge about war at the center of the larger anti-war project. She makes a persuasive claim that “not being curious about the precise workings of militarization—tracking its ups and downs, its stumbles, its contradictions—makes militarization look more unstoppable than it actually is” (40). At the same time, left unexplored is the question of what gives rise to the specific forms of war that characterize the here and now, and, thus, what might be the specific actions required to bring about their end. Perhaps instead of more knowledge about what happens in warfare, what we need is the abolition of racial capitalism and gender norms and a redistribution of wealth and of life chances—which are projects that are less about acquiring more knowledge and more about learning different ways of relating to each other, ones not premised on hierarchy and competition.
