‘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.”’

Cynthia Enloe is quoted by Farrah Jarral in this piece on the current coronavirus lockdown for The Guardian.

‘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.

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.’

Read Cynthia’s piece in full on the LARB website.

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.”

Cynthia Enloe is interviewed by PRAXIS, the Fletcher Journal of Human Security (FULL INTERVIEW HERE).

‘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.’

“Waging War” Against a Virus is NOT What We Need to Be Doing: an article by Cynthia Enloe for the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.

Cynthia Enloe, research professor at Clark University in the United States, has been awarded an honorary doctoral degree at the University of Iceland’s Faculty of Languages and Cultures.

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.

Cynthia Enloe’s most recent book is The Big Push: Exposing and Challenging the Persistence of Patriarchy, published by Myriad in October 2017.

Photograph by Kristinn Ingvarsson.

‘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.

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.

‘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