Covert Operations

We may think of military and war as strictly male pursuits - but governments and militaries all over the world spend a lot of man-hours strategizing about the different kinds of women they need to control to do the war-waging, as well as in preparation for war and recovering from war, during so-called peace-time. As this episode's guest Cynthia Enloe puts it "they never want us to know they are strategizing about masculinity and femininity, but they're doing it all the time." 

In episode 7, Elle has a sweeping conversation with award-winning research scholar Cynthia Enloe about her groundbreaking gender analysis of military, war and international politics, and how feminist politics have shaped national and international conversations.

An influential feminist thinker, spell-binding orator and author of fifteen books on women's roles in economic markets, world conflicts, and power politics, Cynthia unpacks the very processes by which we, and everything around us, unknowingly get feminized, masculinized and militarized - but more importantly - how we can resist, and even stop or reverse these covert socializations.