The subtitle is 'Making Feminist Sense of International Politics', and those very words make you realize how little we are used to seeing feminist analysis applied to the ebbs and flows of global power. We are used to bursts of solidarity with, say, African women farmers, with women suffering genital mutilation or with women confined to their homes in some Islamic societies. And we have latterly seen a feminist perspective informing the debate about nuclear weapons. But while we might note that international politics is conducted almost entirely by men, we are not usually aware of gender as we analyse it. Enloe sets out to prove not only that the personal is political but also that the international is personal .
Governments depend on a network of unacknowledged female support to survive.
Nevertheless this is, as she says, a way of thinking about international politics which is still more or less in its infancy. And Bananas, Beaches and Bases at least takes those vital first few steps. Two very English albums. The Lion and the Unicorn, for instance, sees the spirit of the Blitz as living on in London s army of homeless people. The sincerity is deep and bitter, the examples almost too close for comfort.