Cynthia Enloe is Research Professor at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Her feminist teaching and research explore the interplay of gendered politics in the national and international arenas, with special attention to how women’s work is made cheap in globalised factories and how women’s emotional and physical labour has been used to support many governments’ war-waging policies—and how diverse women have tried to resist both of those efforts. Racial, class, ethnic and national identity dynamics, as well as ideas about femininities and masculinities, are common threads throughout her studies.
Her career has included Fulbrights in Malaysia and Guyana, guest professorships in Japan, Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, as well as lectures in Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Germany, Portugal, Chile, Vietnam, Korea, Colombia, Bosnia, Turkey, and at universities around the USA. Her books have been translated into Spanish, Turkish, French, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Swedish, Icelandic and German. She has published in Ms. Magazine and The Village Voice, and appeared on National Public Radio, Al Jazeera, C-Span and the BBC.
She has been awarded Honorary Doctorates by Union College (2005), the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (2009), Connecticut College (2010), the University of Lund, Sweden (2012), Clark University (2014) and the University of Iceland (2020).
Cynthia Enloe was awarded the International Studies Association’s Susan Strange Award in 2007, in recognition of ‘a person whose singular intellect, assertiveness, and insight most challenge conventional wisdom and organizational complacency in the international studies community during the previous year.’ In 2008, she was awarded the Susan B. Northcutt Award, presented annually by the Women’s Caucus for International Studies, of the International Studies Association, to recognize ‘a person who actively works toward recruiting and advancing women and other minorities in the profession, and whose spirit is inclusive, generous and conscientious.’ She has been awarded Clark University’s Outstanding Teacher Award three times.
In 2010, Cynthia Enloe was awarded the Peace and Justice Studies Association’s Howard Zinn Lifetime Achievement Award. The American Council of Learned Societies awarded Cynthia its Charles Haskins Award in 2016.
Cynthia currently serves on the editorial advisory boards of International Feminist Journal of Politics, Security Dialogue, Women, Politics and Policy,International Political Sociology, Critical Military Studies, and Politics and Gender. She is a member of WILPF’s International Academic Network.
Interviews and Features
Mansplaining Feminism with Cynthia Enloe
‘Patriarchy is always being updated – being made more modern, being made more hip. That’s how it survives.’
Cynthia Enloe’s most recent book is The Big Push: Exposing and Challenging the Persistence of Patriarchy, published by Myriad. The essays within The Big Push explore the resilience of patriarchal beliefs and values, and identify the unwitting nature of our complicity. She shows how, simply by noticing, questioning and crafting fresh feminist concepts, we can update our resistance and challenge patriarchy’s self-perpetuating core.
R&R Lab: Real talk with feminist visionaries Episode 63 with: Cynthia Enloe
‘This week’s radical is Dr. Cynthia Enloe, an internationally renowned academic and thought leader on feminism, particularly in the context of militarism. She has taught generations of young minds around the globe, and is a prolific author of books including The Curious Feminist, Seriously! Investigating Crashes and Crises as if Women Mattered, and The Big Push: Exposing and Challenging Persistent Patriarchy, among many others.’
Listen again to the wonderful Cynthia Enloe talk to Continuum Collective in Episode 63 of their podcast, Radicals and Revolutionaries Lab: Real Talk with Feminist Visionaries.
"We aren’t all in this together. We’re in the same rough seas, but we’re in very different boats."
‘The idea that the coronavirus pandemic might have some upsides that could help us live better lives seems almost distasteful in the face of the destruction and death it has caused so far. Domestic violence has surged in the UK, low-paid workers on zero-hours contracts are sleeping rough on the streets, and poor families in Britain are experiencing worsening food insecurity.
‘Even for those with a stable income, managing childcare, home schooling, domestic chores and work from home can be overwhelming, with a disproportionate burden falling on women. And it’s still early days. We have yet to see what the full extent of the fallout from this pandemic will be on our mental health, particularly for the most vulnerable people. As academic Cynthia Enloe put it, “We aren’t all in this together. We’re in the same rough seas, but we’re in very different boats. And some of those boats are very leaky. And some of those boats were never given oars. And some of those boats have high-powered motors on them. We are not all in the same boat.”’
COVID-19: Turning Swords into Ventilators? Or is it Ventilators into Swords? Cynthia Enloe for WILPF
‘They weren’t dressed in their usual khaki. They weren’t wielding guns or grenade launchers. Their combat zone was a civilian airport, not a battlefield. Their enemy was invisible to the naked eye.
Yet these were soldiers. Outfitted in bulky, white hazmat suits and wielding elongated disinfectant hoses, they were Spanish military personnel, spraying down Barcelona’s airport, to protect members of the public from coronavirus infection.
For a critic of militarism, is this a reassuring sight?
This is not a new quandary. Those resisting militarization have tussled with this puzzle before. In the wake of the tsunami, Japanese feminists pondered the implications of the Japanese Self-Defense Force being deployed to clean up the Fukushima region after the terrifying nuclear reactor meltdown. Chilean and Turkish feminists have debated the post-disaster consequences of their states’ militaries taking on the roles of first responders in the aftermaths of devastating earthquakes. While most Americans seem to have taken pride in their soldiers being sent to Thailand and the Philippines to aid in natural disaster relief efforts, many American feminists remained skeptical.’
Professor, feminist and theorist Cynthia Enloe writes about the harm done by using the military in disaster relief. Read the article in full on the WILPF website.
The Quarantine Files with Cynthia Enloe for LARB
Brad Evans, writer for the LA Review of Books invited several critical thinkers, artists and poets to share their thoughts and concerns about COVID-19, including Cynthia Enloe.
‘It has sounded so normal: “We’re in a war zone.” “We’re all soldiers now.” “We’ll defeat this enemy.” None of us seems to be immune to drawing on the language of war to describe this current state of affairs and this odd new way of living. It’s as if wartime were the only remembered (even if vicariously) time that can provide us with the metaphors and similes we need to address the global pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus. The virus is new. The scale of our collective effort to address it is new. But the linguistic repository we’re drawing upon to describe both is ancient — and unhelpful at best, risky at worst.’
Be Curious, Do Research: An Interview with Professor Cynthia Enloe for PRAXIS
How do you define human security?
I have a really broad notion of security. Something I’ve learned is that people are very insecure in a lot of different ways. One really has to be curious about what makes somebody feel insecure, or what makes somebody feel secure. I think unless you’re curious, you won’t actually know what that person’s sense of security is because you don’t know what their insecurity is like. So, the first thing about human security is that one has to really listen to people to find out what makes them feel secure or insecure. It’s not a given.
The other thing to think about is about the word ‘human.’ There are some things that all humans share. Still, women and men can experience security and insecurity so differently. As a feminist, I never take “human” as my starting point. I’m always interested in a more intersectional and especially an intersectionally feminist curiosity about what an individual human person is experiencing. So, curiosity, I think, is where I start when I investigate both “human” and “security.”
“Waging War” Against a Virus is NOT What We Need to Be Doing: an article by Cynthia Enloe for WILPF
‘As towns and whole countries shut down in order to “flatten the curve” of outbreaks of the coronavirus, we are at risk of choosing the wrong analogy for what we collectively need to do in these perilous times. “Waging a war” is the most deceptively alluring analogy for mobilizing private and public resources to meet a present danger. We should, however, resist that allure.
We have learned – feminist investigators have taught us repeatedly – that in myriad countries and across generations war waging has fueled sexism, racism, homophobia, autocracy, secrecy and xenophobia. None of those will prevent a pandemic. They will never promote trustworthy science and functional medical infrastructures. They will not protect the most vulnerable among us. They will not keep us all safe. They most certainly will not lay the groundwork for post-pandemic democracy.’
Her feminist teaching and research have explored the interplay of gendered politics in the national and international arenas, with special attention to how women’s labor is made cheap in globalized factories and how women’s emotional and physical labor has been used to support many governments’ war-waging policies—and how diverse women have tried to resist both of those efforts. Racial, class, ethnic and national identity dynamics, as well as ideas about femininities and masculinities, are common threads throughout her studies.
‘Rather than focussing on making women more brave to speak out we need to focus on what the rest of us are doing to make it so difficult to speak out. The moment a woman speaks out about being raped, or a man or a boy, the focus is on them and half the time you forget to talk about the fact that there’s a criminal out there who did this.’ Sohaila Abdulali
‘It’s not only the assaulters who should be accountable. Complicit are all the enablers: people who make it hard to report, people who give a culture of disbelief to prosecutors who only want to win their cases they don’t want to actually believe victims unless they think they can win the case.’ Cynthia Enloe
‘Sohaila’s book is absolutely amazing, unlike anything I’ve ever read before… I would urge everybody to read it. It’s about feminism and women’s place in society, not only about rape.’ Jane Thurlow
PSA Annual International Conference 2019
‘One of the most seemingly intractable formulas for dismissing patriarchal behaviour is the facile assertion that “Boys will be boys.”‘ Author Cynthia Enloe discusses this damaging phrase at the PSA Annual International Conference 2019 in Nottingham, UK.
Women Now At Top of Military-Industrial Complex. A Feminist Reaction.
Cynthia Enloe is part of an influential generation of feminist scholars who, during the Vietnam War, began to trace the contradictions between militarist ideology and feminist logic. Enloe joins Worldview to discuss women in the military-industrial complex and “lean in” feminism. Listen to the full feature over on WBEZ 91.5 Chicago now.
What Is She Thinking?
‘Tracking gender and the gendered international political economy of insecurity takes exploration and is really important. But a feminist believes that you are exploring something for a purpose. You are exploring so that you can reveal things that will activate people to challenge injustices.’
Cynthia Enloe discusses feminism, writing and gender studies with Natalia Felix for SciELO. You can read the full article here: 0102-8529-cint-2018400300435
Cynthia Enloe on “Gender and the Rise of the Global Right” with Signs editor Suzanna Danuta Walters.
On the #MeToo 'push-back': Cynthia Enloe takes The Big Push to Iceland
Cynthia was invited to speak at the United Nations University Gender Equality Studies and Training Programme (UNU-GEST) at the University of Iceland in Reykjavík. She talks not only of The Big Push but also about the ‘push-back’. You can watch her here.
What it takes to challenge patriarchy in the 21st century
Many millenials who are coming of age in the era of #MeToo and the push back to rampant sexism in the White House, Congress, Hollywood, and America in general are likely identifying as feminists for the first time. It is indeed a good time to be a feminist. Cynthia Enloe is interviewed by Sonali about the importance of internationalism for women as well as listening to and being curious about the experience of others. You can listen to it here.
‘Never be the most feminist person you know’ – Laura Bates meets Cynthia Enloe
Cynthia Enloe, professor and activist, has tackled marital rape and changed the language of feminism. She remains a force to be reckoned with in the fight to make sure all women’s voices are equal and heard as Laura Bates found out in her interview with Cynthia for the Guardian newspaper.
I grew up a Yankees fan. My mother, who couldn’t tell a home run from a quarterback sneak, gamely took 10-year-old me and my pals to Yankee Stadium. Now I’m a Red Sox fan. I still love major league baseball. Today, though, I’m far more conscious of the insinuation of militarized patriotism into the game...