Peace Corps Fantasies

In this intriguing analysis of the Peace Corps in the 1960s Molly Geidel argues that the agency helped create and sustain an ideal of masculine “heroic development workers” that seduced Third World populations with “modernization's promise of homosocial intimacy through participation in capitalist relations” (p. ix). Scholars of development should welcome this effort to critique the Peace Corps and provide insights into some neglected narratives, while others may find their interest sufficiently piqued to investigate the book's theoretical foundation. Peace Corps Fantasies draws on theoretically rich critiques of development by Arturo Escobar, María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, Catherine Scott, and others to interpret the Peace Corps as the perfect manifestation of failed efforts to protect American capitalism and masculinity by controlling nonwhite populations abroad. Geidel explores this fantasy through five topics: the “brotherhood” of social scientists and politicians who created the Peace Corps; discourses of “racial identification, frontier mythology, modernization theory,” and poverty that shaped the agency's approach (p. 57); portrayals and experiences of female volunteers; development's influence on the black freedom movement; returned Peace Corps volunteers who opposed the Vietnam War; and “birth control scandals” in Bolivia that led to the expulsion of the Peace Corps in 1971 (p. 206). Geidel draws on an impressive array of sources, ranging from interviews with former volunteers to field work in Bolivia. Geidel's reading of these sources produces some interesting insights: a 1964 speech by the Peace Corps associate director Warren Wiggins, for example, alludes to the agency's struggle to justify “equality-with-difference” for women (pp. 74–76). In Geidel's interpretation the Peace Corps emerges as an insidious embodiment of development's all-consuming, inherently violent effort to reinforce American domination and patriarchy

Agency (philosophy · Capitalism · Elite · Frontier · Ideal (ethics · Modernization theory · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Gender Studies · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · Law · Race, History, and American Society · Tourism, Volunteerism, and Development