Maneuvers

In Maneuvers, Cynthia Enloe defines militarization as a gradual social process, not merely the expansion of armies. A person, workplace, or community becomes militarized when it increasingly depends on military ideas, priorities, or resources and accepts that dependence as common sense. Enloe follows military wives, women soldiers, sex workers around bases, nationalist mothers, factory workers, and peacekeepers to show that armed institutions require intimate labor and gendered legitimacy far beyond the battlefield.

The book’s method is to ask apparently small questions: who moves when a base opens, whose marriage stabilizes a soldier, who manufactures uniforms and weapons, whose sexuality becomes a security concern, and who is expected to absorb deployment’s emotional cost? These questions expose how desire, respectability, wages, and family aspiration can recruit women into militarized arrangements without reducing them to dupes. Women negotiate, benefit, resist, and sometimes reproduce the institution; agency and constraint must be analyzed together.

Because the cases range widely, the book offers a diagnostic map rather than an exhaustive history of every site, and its late-twentieth-century language needs extension through queer, trans, disability, drone, and privatized-war research. Its lasting feminist intervention is to make demilitarization more demanding than troop withdrawal. If housing, employment, citizenship, and intimate belonging have been organized around military needs, peace requires rebuilding those dependencies—not simply declaring the fighting over.