New technologies allow multinational corporations to move the production of goods for sale in the industrialized countries from high-wage Western countries to the Third World. In the process, gender roles are moved as well. Bananas, Beaches and Bases goes beyond most feminist commentaries on this subject by examining the sexist political arrangements that underlie the new international division of labor.
Separate chapters examine the political pillars supporting the edifice of the international economy.
The focus on the service sector is a useful corrective to the disproportionate attention Third World women workers in formal, industrial sectors like textiles and electronics have received in the past. International finance and politics rely upon private relations between men and women defined by patriarchal conventions of masculinity and femininity. Immigrant women, forced to leave behind their own children and families to find jobs as nannies and servants in rich countries in the West and the Persian Gulf, have become the largest single source of foreign currency for the Philippines and Sri Lanka. Enloe connects the swelling ranks of women in hotels, brothels and affluent households to the debt crisis which makes earning hard currency the top priority of debtor countries. Enloe provides a very readable analysis of the gender inequalities that lie at the heart of the modern-day world system.