Description
The starting point for this paper is Cynthia Enloe’s ‘Base women’ chapter from Bananas, Beaches and Bases (1989). Reflecting on the gendered politics of US military bases overseas, Enloe gives a richly suggestive account of the diverse roles of women in both sustaining bases and problematizing them. Surprisingly, this has not spawned subsequent research from feminist IR scholars working on nuclear weapons. Instead the field continues to lean heavily on Carol Cohn’s rightly famous 1987 article unpacking the ‘technostrategic’ discourses of US ‘defence intellectuals’. While I am excited by recent research that extends Cohn’s discourse-analytic approach conceptually and empirically to more diverse political and cultural contexts, I suggest in this paper that we should also consider another research agenda, one that takes inspiration not only from Enloe but also from anti-colonial, anti-militarist scholarship on bases around the world (Lutz 2009; Frain 2017). Such an agenda would entail moving from the discursive to material relations of power, and from policy documents and cultural formations to the physical sites and infrastructure, and the economic, embodied and affective interactions, through which nuclear colonialism is sustained and sometimes contested. The paper sketches out some ways in which we might collectively take this agenda forward.
