On the significance of titles, notes, and (civilian)? SWAT teams

On Monday, April 22, the esteemed Cynthia Enloe visited USF. First meeting with our class privately, Enloe gave a convincing sales pitch for the importance of notes (guess I should read those....) and a well-chosen title. I appreciated the concern that she took ensuring not to giving any assumptions to the women she wrote about in her book Nimo's War, Emma's War: Making Feminist Sense of the Iraq War. I was left with the question: Can writing (or even art) ever be prescriptive then? At some point, doesn't it take an assertion about what are universal values or rights? I don't actually have an answer for that but I absolutely agree with Enloe in that nonfiction writing and journalism should avoid assumptions, judgement, and pointed language. And when writing about others, whether in a nonfiction sense or as a representation in fiction, it should never be more about the author than the subject.

The evening lecture by Enloe got more into feminist material than the class had the opportunity to (since we were focused on research methods). She analyzed the Boston Marathon and its repercussions through a critical feminist lens. Her observations on the racial profiling, Islamaphobia, absurd media coverage and abjection of rights  in the aftermath echoed what I believe a lot of critical thinking observers felt. I thought of Cohn's piece that questioned the power involved in using terms like terrorism. As Enloe supported, it certainly is a political tool to help frame an event for the audience. Maybe not run of the mill terrorism, per se, but I imagine that the Saudi student who had his apartment searched in the aftermath felt terrorized.

I also really appreciated Enloe's comprehensive look at the costs of war. I'm doing a paper on forms of political protest and when, where, and why they work. A lot of the geopolitical analysis that I have come across only take things like financial price tags and estimated military deaths into cost-benefit calculations of potential wars. I keep wondering why things like the militarization of a society, sexualized violence, or psychological trauma (all of which long outlast the combat operations) don't get considered. Enloe applied this extended cost-of-war analysis to the militarization of civilian police, as observed in the Boston bombing suspects. Until people are convinced both of the connection of these other consequences of war and the magnitude of these consequences, I find it difficult to believe that people will see the police response to the Boston marathon as a problem. Until these connections are made, I imagine people will be grateful that the greater Boston area had such resources, considering the terror that they both reasonably felt and were made to feel by the media.


Cynthia Enloe (2010) Nimo’s War, Emma’s War: Making Feminist Sense of the
Iraq War. Berkeley: University of California Press.