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News media reporting on female political violence invariably portrays the perpetrators as duped, naïve and exploited, acting from personal rather than political motivations, as anomalous intruders in a masculine realm and de-feminized as monsters. In diminishing the agency of politically violent women, the challenge that female terrorists pose to the gender order is contained. However, the gender order is always in flux, culturally specific and subject to contestation and struggle over the meanings of masculine and feminine.
Using five comparative case studies, spanning more than 70 years, this book demonstrates how politically violent women in terrorist campaigns targeting the UK and France have been represented to contain challenges to nationally specific gender orders. Discourses of belonging via race, ethnicity, religion, geography, and class, are intimately tied to these representations and specific ideas of femininity emerge depending on the threat that particular ideological terrorist campaigns are believed to pose.
Ariane Bogain is Senior Lecturer in French and Politics at Northumbria University. Her research critically investigates the terrorism discourse in France, focusing on legitimisation of counter-terrorism measures by state authorities, the construction of national identity as a reaction to terrorist attacks, and the role of gender in the construction of French men and women who joined ISIS.
Leonie B. Jackson is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Northumbria University. She is the author of The Monstrous and the Vulnerable: Framing British Jihadi Brides (2021) and Islamophobia in Britain: The Making of a Muslim Enemy (2018). She is an editor of the journal Critical Studies on Terrorism.