Power and Gendered Rationality in Western Epistemic Constructions of Female Suicide Bombings

Narozhna, Tanya

doi:10.1007/978-0-230-37024-1_5

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…This is similar to the way in which the motivations of female suicide bombers are often portrayed. See Gentry (2009), Brunner (2005 and Narozhna (2012). 6.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The writing of heroines: Motherhood and female agency in political violence

Åhäll

2012

Security Dialogue

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This article explores the way in which female agency in political violence is enabled through gender. It looks at two examples of heroine stories -the cases of British Navy sailor Faye Turney and the popular film Female Agents (2008) -to illustrate how female agency in political violence is constructed at the expense of motherhood. The article argues that representations of female agency in political violence involve a tension between a life-giving and a life-taking identity, and that agency is only enabled if this tension is removed or overcome. This suggests that heroism, as agency in political violence, is in a symbiotic relationship with motherhood: heroism functions as motherhood's constitutive other and vice versa. This means not only that the writing of heroines depends on ideas about female bodies' association with motherhood but also that essentialist ideas about gender are reinforced. Accordingly, this article suggests that female agency in political violence is communicated and negotiated through motherhood, even in cases where this might not be immediately apparent.

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“…This is similar to the way in which the motivations of female suicide bombers are often portrayed. See Gentry (2009), Brunner (2005 and Narozhna (2012). 6.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The writing of heroines: Motherhood and female agency in political violence

Åhäll

2012

Security Dialogue

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“…Recent efforts to develop a more complex understanding of gendered agency is mainly located in a lively area of research that investigates how gendered frames marginalize female perpetrators of violence, thus denying violent women agency, rationality, and womanhood (Alison, 2004; MacKenzie, 2009; Åhäll and Shepherd, 2012; Auchter, 2012). This points to an entrenched androcentric view that the realm of political violence is a man’s world, and violent women betray social norms that assert that women are passive, non-violent, and peaceful (Elshtain, 1995: 166–168; Narozhna, 2012: 82; Park-Kang, 2012: 122).For example, Sjoberg and Gentry (2007) argue that three dominant narratives of women’s agency, ‘the mother’, ‘the monster’, and ‘the whore’, provide gendered reference frames for understanding women involved in political violence.This in turn shapes what type of agency individuals can exercise, as agentive subjects’ narratives of intentions and desires are read and interpreted according to sometimes outspoken, sometimes silent, rules (Shepherd, 2012: 6).…”

Section: Advancing the Agendamentioning

confidence: 99%

Gendering agency in transitional justice

Björkdahl

Selimovic

2015

Security Dialogue

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Mainstream transitional justice and peacebuilding practices tend to re-entrench gendered hierarchies by ignoring women or circumscribing their presence to passive victims in need of protection. As a consequence we have limited knowledge about the multifaceted ways women do justice and build peace. To address this lacuna we conceptualize and unpack the meaning of gendered agency, by identifying its critical elements and by locating it in space and in time. The conceptual work that we undertake is underpinned by empirical mapping of the transitional justice spaces in post-conflict Bosnia-Herzegovina, where we point out instances of critical, creative, and transformative agency performed by women that challenge or negotiate patterns of gendered relations of domination. We collect women’s oral narratives and explore new sets of questions to capture women’s unique experiences in doing justice. Such research enables us to engage with the subjects of post-conflict peacebuilding and transitional justice processes directly and in their own spaces. This article thus renders women’s agency visible and attempts to grasp its contributions and consequences for transformations from war to peace.

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A Female Agent of Political Violence in Pre-revolutionary Russia: Gendered Representations of Maria Spiridonova

Petrusenko¹

2014

Kaleidoscope History

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At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Russian authorities were facing serious problems because of systematic political terrorism, which was mostly connected to the activities of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (the PSR). The most striking feature of that terrorism was that many of the terrorists were women-a feature that makes it justified to maintain that by taking part in political terrorism women entered the domains that in patriarchal societies were considered to be exclusively male: the domain of violence and the domain of politics. Such intrusion to the male territory was especially shocking for the traditional patriarchal society of pre-revolutionary Russia. Despite this striking feature however, systematic historical research on gendered representations of the Russian female terrorists at the beginning of the 20 th century is still in short supply whereas in other academic disciplines portrayals of women as agents of political violence are a frequent topic in the research on contemporary terrorism. To help fill up this void, the purpose of the article is by using the case of Maria Spiridonova, the most famous female terrorist in pre-revolutionary Russia, to see whether the conclusions made by non-historians about gendered representations of contemporary female terrorists can be used for historical research in order to identify eventual distortions in the representations of violent female agency in the past and, thus, obtain deeper knowledge about gender order in historical perspective.

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Power and Gendered Rationality in Western Epistemic Constructions of Female Suicide Bombings

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

The writing of heroines: Motherhood and female agency in political violence

The writing of heroines: Motherhood and female agency in political violence

Gendering agency in transitional justice

A Female Agent of Political Violence in Pre-revolutionary Russia: Gendered Representations of Maria Spiridonova

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