Terrorist transgressions: exploring the gendered representations of the terrorist
Titelübersetzung:Terroristische Grenzüberschreitungen: Vergeschlechtlichte Repräsentationen des Terroristen entdecken
Autor/in:
Malvern, Sue; Koureas, Gabriel
Quelle: Historical Social Research, 39 (2014) 3, S 67-81
Inhalt: The primary aim of the Terrorist Transgressions network which is presented here was to analyse the myths inscribed in images of the terrorist and identify how agency is attributed to representation through invocations and inversions of gender stereotypes. Although terrorism, its contexts, histories and forms, has been the focus of intense academic activity in recent years, especially in the fields of politics and international relations, cultural representations of the terrorist have received less attention. While the terrorist is predominantly aligned with masculinity, women have been active in terrorist organizations since the late nineteenth century. Particularly since the 1980s, women have perpetrated suicidal terrorist attacks, including suicide bombing, where the body becomes a weapon. Such attacks have confounded constructions of femininity and masculinity, with profound implications for the gendering of violence and horror. The network established that there is a shift away from analyses of cultural representations of the Red Army Faction, which have dominated the literature since the 1980s. New work has emerged examining representations of the terrorist and gender, including investigations of material from the 1970s, recently made available in archives. There also has been a shift in terms of military discourses around the figure of the enemy or terrorist insurgent in relation to visualizing the invisible enemy. Emerging work on colonial insurgencies contributed to a historical understanding of such debates.
Titelübersetzung:Geschichte des Wissens, Terrorismus und Gender
Autor/in:
Grisard, Dominique
Quelle: Historical Social Research, 39 (2014) 3, S 82-99
Inhalt: This article focuses on 20th-century terrorist phenomena as gendered objects of knowledge produced and disseminated through history books, mass media and state institutions. By taking 1970s West German terrorism as my field of inquiry, this article will critically discuss how a bourgeois understanding of violence as fundamentally masculine has shaped the way terrorism has been represented, conceptualized and historicized thus far. I will go on to problematize the mas-culine gaze of mass media and state institutions and their tendency to objectify the terrorist. Last but not least, I will delineate how mass media and historiog-raphy of terrorism have relied on a narrative structure that pits rebellious sons and masculine daughters against figural and literal fathers, a frame that is overtly masculine and familial. In so doing I will point to blind spots in the study of 1970s terrorism, namely masculinity and the gender of state institutions. My goal is thus to show how not just individual and symbolic, but also institutional facets of the bourgeois gender order influence the way terrorism has been conceptualized and historicized thus far.
Schlagwörter:Massenmedien; Diskurs; discourse; gender role; Federal Republic of Germany; Geschlechtsrolle; historiography; RAF; Geschichtsschreibung; feminism; masculinity; mass media; gender; Stereotyp; Gender; stereotype; woman; Feminismus; political violence; Männlichkeit; terrorism; politische Gewalt; Terrorismus; RAF; oedipal narrative
SSOAR Kategorie:Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung, Sozialgeschichte, historische Sozialforschung
Titelübersetzung:Politikwissenschaft, Terrorismus und Gender
Autor/in:
Herschinger, Eva
Quelle: Historical Social Research, 39 (2014) 3, S 46-66
Inhalt: This contribution aims to give an overview on the state of the art of research on terrorism and gender in the field of Political Science and International Relations (IR). Contemporary analyses of terrorism have begun integrating gender aspects into their frameworks. This article supports the call for a much more coherent use of gender as an analytical category as this is beneficial for the analysis of ter-rorism in a threefold manner. First, gender as an analytical category in the study of terrorism exposes the gender blindness of the term terrorism; second, gender challenges the political myth of protection central to international politics, i.e. that states can legitimately fight wars to protect the vulnerable – vulgo women and children. Third, gender also challenges the myth of an intrinsic peacefulness/vulnerability of women. The paper closes with the plea to integrate a coherent historical dimension into a gendered analysis of terrorism in order to potentially achieve a more empirically attuned theoretical understanding of terrorism and political violence in current times.
Schlagwörter:international relations; gender; Stereotyp; victim; Opfer; violence; stereotype; Gewalt; woman; political violence; Täter; internationale Beziehungen; gender-specific factors; terrorism; politische Gewalt; Terrorismus; political science; Politikwissenschaft; offender
SSOAR Kategorie:Friedens- und Konfliktforschung, Sicherheitspolitik, Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung, Sozialgeschichte, historische Sozialforschung
Escaping/transgressing the feminine: bodies, prisons and weapons of proximity
Titelübersetzung:Weiblichkeit überwinden/überschreiten: Körper, Gefängnisse und die Waffen der Nähe
Autor/in:
Agra Romeo, María Xosé
Quelle: Historical Social Research, 39 (2014) 3, S 115-134
Inhalt: Assuming that gender relationships are essential to any analysis of terrorism and political violence, I shall examine how the sex-gender stereotypes work, as well as their transgressions. The female military protagonists in the Abu Ghraib media scandal and the women prisoners of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) during the dirty protest in Armagh (1980) are used as a framework in which issues of visibility/invisibility, independence/ dependence, invulnerability/ vulnerability of women will be addressed. The paper pays particular attention to both the violence against the body and also to the use of the body as a political weapon. From this perspective I analyse both the differences and similarities of menstrual blood as a weapon of proximity in both contexts. The two cases have in common the fact that they occurred in prisons and that women embodied non-traditional roles: soldiers, women political prisoners, allowing for reflection from feminist perspectives on the female inclusion in the citizenship, on participation in political violence and terrorism and on agency and autonomy.