Cynthia Enloe to speak about women and the U.S. war in Iraq

Cynthia Enloe, one of America’s pre-eminent theorists of gender and the military, and Research Professor of Women’s Studies and International Development at Clark University, will speak at the University of Wisconsin–Madison on Thursday, Nov. 9.

Enloe will give a noon talk titled “Where are the Women in the U.S. War in Iraq? Why Does it Matter?” in the On Wisconsin Room in the Red Gym, 716 Langdon St. It is free and open to the public.

Enloe’s feminist teaching and research has focused on the interplay of women’s politics in the national and international arenas, with special attention to how women’s emotional and physical labor has been used to support governments’ war-waging policies-and how many women have tried to resist those efforts. Racial, class, ethnic, and national identities and pressures shaping ideas about femininities and masculinities have been common threads throughout her studies.

In recent years, Enloe has been invited to lecture and give special seminars on feminism, militarization, and globalization in Japan, Korea, Turkey, Canada, Britain and numerous colleges across the U.S. She has written for Ms. Magazine and Village Voice and has appeared on National Public Radio and the BBC.

She serves on the editorial boards of several scholarly journals, including “Signs” and the “International Feminist Journal of Politics.” Among her nine books are: “Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics” (2000), “Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives” (2000), and “The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire” (2004).

Her talk is sponsored by the Transnational Feminism Research Circle of the International Institute, the Center for German and European Studies, Global Studies, the Women’s Studies Program and Research Center, and FEMSEM (the Sociology of Gender Brownbag).