(PHOTO CREDITS: Tax Justice Network Africa)
In a world catering to every pleasure and individualistic desire, the banana seems to be the one thing rocking everybody’s socks off. Why else is this common denominator available at roughly the same price in your local supermarket winter to summer, 365 days a year? Is someone getting ripped off to maintain this price? In this blog, we will consider how the low price of bananas works, where women are in the global trade of bananas, and sketch out illicit financial flows within the process.
The global economy and international relations is often considered in gender-neutral language, unless you’re pursuing a specifically gendered issue like the gender pay gap. Yet as captured by Cynthia Enloe, renowned feminist and scholar of international relations, in her delightfully snarky read ‘Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics‘, gender relations are in fact entrenched in everything created by human beings, even in the international trade of bananas.
In her book (2014) Enloe, asks the question of where women are in the international politics of bananas. She calls on each one of us to ‘exercise genuine curiosity’ about each woman in this international system, whether she is the domestic worker in the CEO’s home, packing crates in a banana warehouse or the grocery-shopping housewife. Feminists are to think about those actors within the global economy system, extending your imagination to ‘those women you have yet to think about.
