25 - Gender Politics and Terrorist Histories

Summary

For a long time, studies on terrorism as a historical phenomenon have neglected gender as an analytical category. In political science, and especially Gender Studies or gendered Security Studies, however, gender has become an issue since 9/11 and the growing participation of Muslim women in terrorist attacks. These studies, however, mostly interpret terrorism as a phenomenon which emerged first in the twentieth century and, if they work historically, they compare case studies dealing with post-Second World War phenomena with recent examples of political non-state violence. The important varieties of nineteenth-century terrorism are frequently neglected. Moreover, these authors use terms with a centuries-old gendered tradition, for example ‘hero’ or ‘martyr’, without reflecting the historically rooted gendered implications of these terms and without taking account of the gendered traditions of the representation of male or female political violence which go back more than two hundred years. This paper wants to address this lack of historical contextualisation. In a gendered historical perspective we ask: what role has gender played in the development of modern terrorism during the nineteenth century? What are the gendered stereotypes concerning political violence which have been constructed and transmitted since the early nineteenth century? And in what way do these stereotypes influence recent interpretations of terrorism and historical research on terrorism?