Rhetoric against terrorism excludes female scholarship and ignores the reality of many female terrorists

It is important to note at the outset that there is not one feminist perspective on ter-rorism, but many. As women are different, feminists are different. As there is variety among IR theories, there is variety among IR feminist theories – IR feminist realism, liberalism, constructivism, critical theory, postcolonialism and postmodernism. 1Since this short discussion piece cannot cover comprehensively IR feminisms’ various potential contributions to the study of terrorism, I choose to present a collage of feminist perspectives on the question of terrorism. Some of these are related or complementary, others are divergent and sometimes conflicting. What they share is being inspired by various observations of gender subordination in global politics. The first set of observations in this collage is inspired by one of the oldest questions in feminist IR – where are the women? 2 Women are underrepresented in the study of the perpetration and consequences of the actions that fall within our traditional understandings of terrorism.3 Most recent work on terrorism omits women altogether. Several recent important books on terrorism, including Bruce Hoffman’s Inside Terrorism, Ken Booth and Tim Dunne’s edited Worlds in Collision, and Walter Enders and Todd Sandler’s The Political Economy of Terrorism, do not contain a listing for ‘women’ in the index or serious discussions about the gender dynamics or impacts of terrorism.4 Much work on terrorism treats the ‘terrorist’ as a subject gendered male by definition. Both media presentations and scholarly work that do acknowledge women ‘related to’ terrorism in some way or another portray them in very gendered terms. Scholars are increasingly recognizing, for example, that women participate in terrorism as terrorists, a role that is not a new development.5 Still, even work which explicitly addresses women’s terrorism frequently characterizes participants as women ter-rorists rather than as terrorists who happen to be women – placing their gender at the forefront of accounts of their motivation. For example, Mia Bloom’s work on women suicide terrorists links their motivation almost exclusively to their status as rape victims.6 While Robert Pape claims women, like men, are rational actors when they commit acts of terrorism, one of his case studies explains that a woman suicide terrorist was acting rationally when she blew herself up, because it was the practical alternative in her society for woman who was unlikely to marry or have children because she had been raped.7In our recent book, Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women’s Violence in GlobalPolitics,8 Caron Gentry and I argue that women’s agency in their political (or even criminal) violence is denied even by those claiming to study women as women because women’s incapacity to commit acts of terror is essential to maintaining our current idealized notions of women and femininity. At the same time as women are being ignored and downplayed as terrorists, the question of where the women are also leads us to recognize that ‘terrorist’ organiza-tions are increasingly incorporating women into their ranks, both in support roles and as perpetrators.9 The organizations claim various reasons for increasingly including women: their increasing interest, the strategic advantages of women’s participation, an interest in gender equality, and the dire emergency of the political cause. Feminist perspectives on terrorism would at once interrogate gender relations within terrorist organizations and the gender dynamics of terrorist attacks. If ‘terrorism’ discourse does not pay enough attention to women as terrorists (as traditionally defined), it also omits women as victims of that terrorism. Another feminist approach to terrorism, then, looks for the differential impacts of terrorism and counterterrorism on those understood as men and those understood as women. Terrorists target civilians as a method. Many suicide bombings claim a disproportion-ate number of women victims, given the times and places of their attacks. Additionally, a recent study I did on criminal prosecutions of those involved with terrorism showed that the wives, sisters, and mothers of male terrorists are disproportionately arrested for the crimes of their relatives.10 That does not even get into counterterrorism – where civilian women are often the ‘collateral damage’ in counterterrorist attacks. Another piece of the collage, then, may be a feminist approach to the question of the perspective from which we study terrorism. As Ann Tickner has noted, feminist scholars are interested in starting the study of IR at the level of individual women’s lives.11 This commitment means that feminist IR can be seen as a research program with a political commitment to studying global politics from the viewpoints of those marginalized in the international arena – from the ‘bottom up’, if you will.12Feminists contend that perspective influences both how and what we know about global politics generally – that knowledge is both interested and political.13 We know what we know about terrorism because we see it from our perspectives – in my case, as someone who would never be in a situation where perpetration was a serious option, as someone extremely unlikely to experience terrorism first-hand, and as someone who is not directly connected to a political cause for which terrorism is frequently used. This is true of most (though not all) scholars who write about terrorism. Feminist scholarship suggests that there are alternative voices out there who see, experience and know terrorism differently – women, but not only women. People identified as women are, as Alison Jaggar noted, ‘at the vortex of contending social forces in the international arena’.14 An individual woman’s voice, then – be she a suicide terrorist, a victim of terrorism, a devotee to a cause which terrorism is often used to further, or a peace activist arguing against the use of violence for political ends – might both debunk our stereotypical understandings about what women are and tell us something more about terrorism than our social-scientific investigations alone can. Additionally, widening our perspective to look not only at those women who perpetrate and experience terrorism, but also those people (generally) who do so without being noticed, studied or counted, would bring us a different perspective – one that focuses on individual narratives rather than a globalized and hyper-securitized discourse of good and evil.