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Over a long career as a scholar of international relations, Cynthia Enloe has been preoccupied with the query Where are the women? Without asking questions about gender, she warns, we can't get a complete picture of international politics.
In Nimo's War, Emma's War, she uses the experiences of four Iraqi and four American women as jumping-off points to examine the price women have paid (and continue to pay) in the Iraq War. Their stories help illustrate how gendered politics change over the course of a war and how this thing we call war itself changes over time.
Nimo, Maha, Safah, Shatha, Emma, Danielle, Kim, Charlene. In a book that once again blends her distinctive flair for capturing the texture of everyday life with shrewd political insights, Cynthia Enloe looks closely at the lives of eight ordinary women, four Iraqis and four Americans, during the Iraq War.
Among others, Enloe profiles a Baghdad beauty parlor owner, a teenage girl who survived a massacre, an elected member of Parliament, the young wife of an Army sergeant, and an African America woman soldier. Each chapter begins with a close-up look at one woman's experiences and widens into a dazzling examination of the larger canvas of war's gendered dimensions.
Bringing to light hidden and unexpected theaters of operation--prostitution, sexual assault, marriage, ethnic politics, sexist economies--these stories are a brilliant entryway into an eye-opening exploration of the actual causes, costs, and long-range consequences of war. This unique comparison of American and Iraqi women's diverse and complex experiences sheds a powerful light on the different realities that together we call, perhaps too easily, "the Iraq war".
Author Biography
Cynthia Enloe is Research Professor of Women's Studies and International Development at Clark University. She is the author of Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women's Lives, The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War, and The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire, all from University of California Press.
