By Cynthia Enloe, World BEYOND War, September 26, 2024
Remarks at #NOWAR2024
I’m in genuine awe. The new on-line Overseas Military Bases interactive site is mind-expanding – and energizing! What David and the whole World BEYOND War have created for all of us is a true gift. THANK YOU.
No military base – overseas or in our own back yard – is natural. No military base is inevitable. Military bases are established and sustained by political processes designed to make each of them seem normal, part of the local landscape, appear “ordinary,” woven into the fabric of daily life.
In the reality that World BEYOND War exposes, every military base – in Yokohama or Crimea or North Carolina – is the result of a long string of specific decisions, each growing out of certain people’s assumptions and calculations.
Every one of those assumptions, calculations and decisions can be exposed, challenged, even reversed. Most of those assumptions are gendered. That is, each depends on ideas about , and practices of distinct masculinities and distinct femininities, together with particular relationships between diverse men and diverse women. Exposing those gendered dynamics reveal any military base, at home or abroad, to be the political creation it is. That exposure, in turn, makes a military base more vulnerable, more open to popular resistance.
Put another way, for us to be uncurious about the workings of masculinities and femininities and to be inattentive to the relationships between diverse women and men that undergird any given military base is for us to risk making any military base seem easier to sustain than in fact it is. That uncuriosity and inattentiveness can make us unwitting enablers of any military base’s sustainability.
Every military is managed. Base commanders and their subordinates manage the men and the women – uniformed and civilian – whose complex relationships sustain that base’s damaging operations. The men on a base are virtually always of unequal ranks, unequal social classes and often diverse ethnicities and different sexualities. They can see each other as comrades or as rivals; they can trust or despise one another. Men, who usually comprise the majority of people on any base, have a wide range of relationships to the diverse women – and girls – who live on or enter the base any day or who support those diverse base men with their own emotional and physical labor at a distance: mothers, wives, daughters, uniformed female personnel, secretaries, laundresses, cooks, cleaners, girlfriends, women in prostitution. There may be violence or exploitation. But successfully “managing” any base requires, minimally, avoiding “scandal.” Optimally, the base commander and his (rarely her) superiors back in the capital, can arrange these tricky gendered interactions so that they appear unexceptional, routine. That arranging takes power, all sorts of nuanced and blatant gendered power.
Luckily, we have feminist tutors to guide us in exposing these disparate workings of gendered power that sustain any military base. Katherine Lutz, with her book, Homefront, and Katherine Moon, with her Sex Among Allies, together broke intellectual and political ground by raising the curtains of patriarchal normalcy to reveal for all of us to see the myriad racialized, classed and gendered assumptions, calculations and decisions that sustained US military bases on mainland US and in South Korea. Today, we have more feminist tutors. We could start a reading list to accompany the amazing World BEYOND War interactive web site.
Let me offer three new books that can empower us in our efforts to make military bases vulnerable to popular resistance: Lauren Hirshberg’s Suburban Empire, exploring the complex racialized and gendered politics of the US missile base on the Pacific islands of Kwajalein; Holly Miowak Guide’s Alaskan Native Resilience, revealing Alaskan Native women’s and men’s myriad responses to Washington’s attempts to use their land and labor to wage its World War II; Vron Ware and her co-authors’ England’s Military Heartland, delving deep into the British government’s political maneuvers to make the sprawling military base in southern England seem uncontestably normal.
Every military base operated by every government is made more vulnerable to popular accountability and eventual closure by political action informed by feminist gender curiosity and attentiveness.
