Bananas, Beaches And Bases: An Analysis

Banana is one of the most commonly consumed fresh fruit in the world. One of the episodes of the Secret Ingredient, a US National Public Radio show, focuses on this specific fruit discussed by feminist professor and a writer Cynthia Enloe and in her latest book, “Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics.” In this essay, I am going to discuss the extensive history of exploitation in the banana enterprise, and the elaborate power configuration involved in transporting this yellow fresh fruit to grocery stores worldwide. Almost all food commodity has its own political and gendered history. Food and its association with men’s history is completely different from that of the females’. Throughout the global South, female are quickly becoming the dominant waged workforce
Labour contractors are men and depend on male-dictated community networks to acquire semi-proletarian labourers and secure their allegiance despite poor working conditions. Local female population have individually and collectively opposed to their loss of plantation employments — objecting to community leaders, company managers, and labor contractors by participating in demonstrations and walkouts (Raynolds). Despite their complaint, women have been generally incapable to counter assembling patriarchal association and industrial interests. Labour contractors and male labourers articulate a clear inclination for working with all-men workers and eagerly seek to preclude women. Rather than employing practices for dismissing women from plantation labor, corporate managers accuse ‘Dominican machismo’ (Raynolds). Nevertheless, this apprehension disregards managers’ complicity in the reconstitution of the labor force via their support of men becoming labour contractors and their resentful attitude towards working with the sole women labour