Gendering Terror

This article problematizes the deployment of the concept of agency in contemporary international relations scholarship. It examines the problems of relying on a foundationalist conception of agency as a tool to achieve meaningful political action by exploring the case of scholarship on the topic of women and terrorism. I argue that scholars on the topic of women and terrorism inscribe agency into women's subjectivities, that is, they place agency as the goal of feminist political action. By tracing the way that scholars write agency into women's subjectivities through an examination of the literature on the topic, I am able to demonstrate how reliance on agency as a foundational concept hinders the goals of feminists. Keywords: agencyterrorismfeminismperformativity Acknowledgements The author would like to thank the participants at the ISA-NE Interpretive and Relational Methodologies Workshop 2007, where this work was first presented: Anna Agathangelou, Andreas Behnke, Janice Bially Mattern, Patrick Jackson and Ido Oren. Thanks also to Roxanne Doty, Richard Ashley, Stefan Borg, Miriam Elman and the IFJP anonymous reviewers for their comments. Notes Brigitte Nacos describes a study published in an American news magazine which linked terrorism to male hormones. The study stated that testosterone has a lot to do with terrorism (Nacos Citation2005: 435). As Brigitte Nacos argues, female terrorists are framed in a similar manner as women politicians. Stereotypes, essentially discourses of what is normal, are similar in the depiction of both female legitimate political actors (politicians) and female illegitimate political actors (terrorists). Women are framed in the media according to the way they look, in striking contrast to their actions, as if we cannot conceive of a beautiful woman engaging in violence. She argues that perception of terrorism as the domain of men and the pattern of social gender stereotypes which leads us to be surprised when women participate in terrorism limit our understanding of the topic (Nacos Citation2005). They do not acknowledge the social construction of gender norms, but rather argue that there is something inherent in women, separate from the way in which society has constructed them. They argue that society, a patriarchal society which objectifies women, is in fact the problem, and that we must acknowledge the inherent characteristics of women outside of this social framework. Cindy Ness describes how when she was asked to edit a special issue of Studies in Conflict and Terrorism on the topic of women and terrorism in 2004, there only existed one scholarly treatment of the subject and barely more journalistic ones (Ness Citation2007a: 1). In selecting the texts for this article, I have started from this issue and focused mostly on recent contributions specifically addressing terrorism rather than the larger theme of women and violence, though this does frame the article, especially in the first characterization I depict. As Judith Butler states, 'feminism ought to be careful not to idealize certain expressions of gender that, in turn, produce new forms of hierarchy and exclusion' (Butler Citation1990: viii). The expression in this sense is that women are inherently peaceful, which then creates exclusions which limit our ability to understand female participation in violence. One way in which these exclusions operate is to exclude women from recognition as legitimate political citizens. They are therefore deprived of the benefits of that citizenship for political action. An equally important problem with utilizing the concept of agency is that the concept of agency is linked to the concept of a primary productive force, a masculine and masculinist form and connotations of life associated with Him: the God, the Father, the King, the Man and so forth. While agency as a linguistic term does not need to be linked to these ideas, the way in which agency is deployed is linked to them. As such, the current conception of agency cannot simply be appropriated by feminists for their own usage; rather agency itself needs to be retheorized to allow for such an opening. The dichotomous categorization of agent/non-agent opens the door for exclusionary practices such as this one. Here these scholars are claiming to have attained agency and therefore are in the position/status to speak in the name of women and therefore to intervene in the lives of women with the claim of having the right to grant them liberation by making them as much agents as those who speak to them are, that is, by making them identical to them. This rhetoric is used by many scholars of terrorism and suicide terrorism. Rosemarie Skaine attempts to assess 'why women are used as bombers' (emphasis added), a subheading of one of her sections (Skaine Citation2006: 61). Kruger, a scholar who studies motivations for terrorism, revealed this in a personal interview conducted by Rosemarie Skaine (Skaine Citation2006: 35). This could be seen as a Freudian 'penis envy' argument, and indeed guns are often viewed as an apt representation of the phallus. This is the argument that women are seduced into violence because they can carry their own guns, they have the opportunity to possess the phallus that they have envied, yet not as completely as men. For a woman to claim the penis in the form of a gun is to attempt to gain that whose lack is leading to her objectification. My thanks to Andreas Behnke for encouraging me to think about the agency-inscribing performance of women terrorists themselves.