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Cynthia Enloe, University of California Press, 2010, $24.95,
ISBN: 0520260783
(Pbk); $60.00,
ISBN: 0520260775
(Hbk); Kindle ASIN B003T0FMD8, $9.99
Cynthia Enloe's work has consistently revealed previously unseen gendered dynamics in war, militarism, diplomacy, international trade and tourism, in pursuit of the question 'where are the women?' (see, e.g., Enloe, 1990, 1993, 2000, 2004), but Nimo 's War , Emma 's War represents a new level of innovation and theoretical importance.
Through the stories of eight very different women - four Iraqis and four Americans - soldiers, widows, refugees, prostitutes, caretakers, workers, politicians and sometimes many of those at once, Enloe leads the reader through literally hundreds of ways that the war in Iraq is misunderstood if scholars, students and media personnel do not look for its gendered operations, gendered impacts and gendered silences.
Some of the gendered lessons feminist scholars of security have heard before (yet many scholars in the 'mainstream' of the discipline and more practitioners in positions of power in the security sector ignore) recur in this book, but also come to life in it. For example, feminists have long talked about defining security differently, more broadly, and more carefully to account for the realities of women's lives (e.g., Tickner, 1988; Grant and Newland, 1991; Peterson, 1992). Enloe 'tells' this story through the gut-wrenching tales of increasing insecurity for and sexual violence against Iraqi women, who classify themselves now as less secure than they were in 2006 though dominant accounts of the 'progress' of the war tell us how much more security Iraqis have now. But Enloe also 'tells' this story in terms of increasing violence in United States military marriages, the psychological and physical risks of post-traumatic stress disorder to not only soldiers, but also families left to...