Beyond Mothers, Monsters, Whores : Thinking about Women's Violence in Global Politics by Gentry Caron E.; Sjoberg Laura

Author:Gentry, Caron E.; Sjoberg, Laura
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zed Books
Published: 2015-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

In her subsequent articles, Bloom highlights rape, sexual abuse, feelings of powerlessness, alienation and revenge for family members or lost honour as women’s motivation to engage in suicide terrorism. She emphasizes that sexual abuse was common to Kurdish, Tamil and Chechen women (Bloom 2005b: 2, 2005c: 59). Bloom also focuses on Dhanu, arguing that it was being raped by a gang of men and her brother’s murder by peacekeepers that led her to her actions (Knight 2005: A16; Bloom 2005c: 59). While gendered violence may be among women’s (and men’s) motivations for the perpetration of some suicide bombings, the reduction of women’s reasons for political violence to the personal (and even sexual) sphere is problematic. These accounts emphasize women’s motivations for engaging in suicide terrorism as different from men’s, as associated with their femaleness rather than their humanity, and as personal rather than political (Bloom 2005a).

Returning to the specific context of the Middle East, Barbara Victor, author of An Army of Roses,10 also focuses on gender-differential motivations for suicide terrorism in the Palestinian territories. According to Victor a woman’s decision to become a suicide bomber is due to something deeply personal and emotional – in other words, something disordered. She links the decision to the relationship the woman has with her family. Specifically, Victor emphasizes a woman’s participation as related to her family’s honour. Even though she quotes researchers who place a woman’s motivation in the same category as a man’s (2003: 39–40, 236), Victor persists in treating women differently. To Victor, Palestinian female suicide bombers are marginalized, divorced, ridiculed, isolated and influenced by the death and/or humiliation of a male relative (ibid.: 199). Like many media depictions of Middle Eastern female suicide bombers, Victor’s entrenches the monster narrative by focusing on pathology and mental illness.

She explains women’s involvement in suicide bombing as related to mental illness, while men’s involvement is a natural result of an insult to his pride. According to Victor (ibid.: 28), in the second intifada:

There are two different dynamics … When an adolescent boy is humiliated at an Israeli checkpoint, from that moment, a suicide bomber is created. At the same time, if a woman becomes a shahida, one has to look for deeper, more underlying reasons. There are obviously cases where mental illness plays a part, since not all marginalized women within the Palestinian society kill themselves. Pathology plays an important role in these cases. Not all people who try to kill themselves and kill others are desperate to such a degree that they simply cannot tolerate their pain. Often there are other, more personal reasons.

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