Maneuvers : the international politics of militarizing women's lives

In this text feminist Cynthia Enloe shows that the people who become militarized are not just the obvious ones - executives and factory floor workers who make fighter planes, land mines, and intercontinental missiles.

They are also the employees of food companies, toy companies, clothing companies, film studios, stock brokerages, and advertising agencies.

Militarization is never gender-neutral, Enloe claims: it is a personal and political transformation that relies on ideas about femininty and masculinity.

Films that equate action with war, condoms that are designed with a camouflage pattern, fashions that celebrate brass buttons and epaulettes, tomato soup that contains pasta shaped like Star Wars weapons - all of these contribute to miltaristic values that mould our culture in both war and peace.Taking an international look at the politics of masculinity, nationalism, and globalization, Enloe ranges from Japan to Korea, Serbia, Kosovo, Rwanda, Britain, Israel, the United States, and many points in between.

She covers a broad variety of subjects: gays in the military, the history of "campfollowers", the politics of women who have sexually serviced male soldiers, married life in the military, military nurses, and the recruitment of women into the military.