Female Terrorism and Militancy

For scholars who have studied female terrorism and militancy for a number of years now, this sensationalistic, narrow, and gendered coverage was no surprise. Instead, it is characteristic of media, scholarly, and policy world reactions to women’s participation in violence classified as terrorism. In these reactions, as we have chronicled before (e.g., Sjoberg and Gentry 2007), women’s terrorism is treated as not terrorism but women’s terrorism, and women terrorists are at once characterized as aberrant, personally motivated, and beyond the agency of the female perpetrator. This chapter looks briefly at the existence and prevalence of female terrorists before turning to the question of how those women are represented and understood. It discusses the advancement of feminist research on female militants, gender dynamics, and terrorism before concluding with some suggestions for future research.