Constructing Female Terrorism

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.