Gender and the Political

Deconstructing the Female Terrorist

A. Third

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781349486809, 9781137402752
• eBook ISBN: 9781137402769
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Storia nordamericana

Analyzing women labeled as terrorists in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Gender and the Political examines Western cultural constructions of the female terrorist. The chapters argue that the development of the discourse on terrorism evolves in parallel with, and in response to, radical feminism in the US during this time.

CHAPTER 1

Conceptualizing Terrorism

Terrorism is terrorism when some (but which?) people think that it is terrorism.

Chalmers Johnson1

In 1981, Irving Louis Horowitz claimed that, over the course of the 1970s, a shift had taken place within the United States in the grammar of official politics that saw terrorism become “front and center in the political stage.”2 Indeed, this decade saw the US government recognize that terrorism was not the distant problem of foreign nations but one that increasingly threatened close to home. Anthony C. Quainton argues that in this very same period “terrorism” “became part of America’s popular political vocabulary,”3 highlighting that terrorism’s arrival in the vernacular occurred as the US government began to perceive itself as the victim of terrorism and mobilized the force of its institutional powers to contain the threat. A central premise of this chapter is that the ideas about terrorism that circulate in dominant culture in the Western world are largely the product of such institutional knowledges, formed in relation to the perceived threat of terrorism and the need for its “containment.”

The 1970s mark an important moment in the history of the West’s conceptualization of the practice of terrorism because, during this era, the new discipline of “terrorism studies” institutionalized the study of this “novel” and “menacing” political phenomenon. The ways terrorism is currently understood, in both academic analyses and popular culture, are the legacy, then, of a discourse on terrorism that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The proponents of terrorism studies shaped this discourse in a profound manner. Despite the proliferating literature on the subject of terrorism in the wake of recent so-called Islamic terrorist attacks on the West, however, a sustained analysis of the impact of terrorism studies’ conceptualizations of Western popular representations of terrorism is yet to emerge.

This chapter analyzes the formative texts of terrorism studies, foregrounding the ways the institution of terrorism studies delimits the meanings of terrorism that circulate within dominant culture and, in turn, conditions the responses mobilized to quash its threat.4 In so doing, this critique questions how dominant understandings of terrorism (re)produce the boundaries between illegitimate and legitimate forms of violence that have historically enabled social order, further considering the implications for Western culture’s renderings of the political as the terrain of lawful political engagement and activity.

Since the inception of terrorism studies in the early 1970s, its exponents have offered a variety of pseudo-scientific definitions and theoretical frameworks for delineating terrorism as a discrete and knowable political phenomenon. The majority of these approaches cannot account for terrorism’s success in generating affective responses in its audiences. Terrorism articulates with deeply embedded Western cultural anxieties about the stability of social order, particularly as it is inflected by gender. In the first instance, I turn to communication and cultural studies scholarship to situate terrorism in relation to the cultural milieu in which it operates and, in particular, its primary targets—namely, its audiences.

Terrorism: A Nebulous Term?

“Terrorism,” as many commentators have pointed out, is a highly loaded term.5 Debates over the definition and “correct” usage of the term have been tirelessly rehearsed within the literature of terrorism studies and, despite a vigorous debate over more than 35 years, the definitional problem still plagues academic, government, and security industry scholarship. In the ­context of this debate, it is often suggested that terrorism is a term with ­multiple, and frequently disparate, meanings. Philip Jenkins, a longstanding commentator on terrorism, has expressed concern that the word “terrorism” has been used “indiscriminately” in a variety of contexts to describe a wide range of “violent” actions. He notes that, while some commentators refuse to label the Irish Republicans terrorists, others “expand the description to fit groups and actions that would not normally be categorized by such a damning term.”6 Jenkins appears particularly concerned about the ways activists—specifically those on the political left—have appropriated the term to denounce their opposition “by applying the most harmful label possible.”7 As evidence, he cites UNICEF’s claim that the commercial sexual exploitation of children is a “form of terrorism”; the “feminist militant” claim that rape is an act of “gender terrorism”; and union activists’ claims that the deaths and injuries arising from unsafe working conditions, especially in the Third World, are a form of “corporate terrorism.”8 But he reserves his greatest criticism for the way “the use of the ‘terrorism’ card has become quite ­commonplace in radical denunciations of US foreign policy.”9

The seemingly myriad uses of the term “terrorism” have given rise to a general concern, articulated most often within but also outside the academic discipline of terrorism studies, that the term can mean “whatever anyone wants it to mean at any given time.”10 This anxiety over “perverted” meanings betrays an ideological investment in the term. As Chalmers Johnson alludes to in the epigraph to this chapter, “terrorism” is a term that is imbricated in struggles for power and legitimacy within dominant culture, a site for the contest of meaning. This concern over the multiple meanings of terrorism arises in relation to the ways the term circulates not only within the academy, but also within the spaces of public culture more generally. In 1978, Walter Laqueur, a professor of modern history and an expert commentator on international politics, argued that misconceptions about terrorism frequently stem from the “vagueness—indeed, the utter carelessness—with which the term is used, not only in the media but also in government announcements and by academic students of the subject.”11 Naming a range of activities for which terrorism is used as a synonym—“rebellion, street battles, civil strife, insurrection, rural guerrilla war, coups d’état, and a dozen other things”—he cites this “indiscriminate” use as the reason for inflated statistics on terrorism, the obfuscated nature of its character, and the difficulties these things present for finding strategies to deal with it.12 Laqueur is also concerned with delineating terrorism as a discrete political phenomenon—terrorism as politically motivated violence. More recently, Ghassan Hage has argued that, “through its intensive strategic use on the political market by the media and politicians, [the word ‘terrorism’] has become further loaded with ideological assumptions.”13 Certainly, a wide variety of agents with diverse political agendas have tapped into the rhetorical power of “terrorism,” and in the process have invested the term with their own particular ideological biases. However, it does not necessarily hold that the term has simultaneously become more ­confused, at least not at the level of dominant culture. Nor is it necessarily the case that counter-discursive uses of the term (such as the left’s appropriation of the term to denounce the practices of Western democratic states) undermines the cohesion of the term as it circulates in mainstream Western cultures. While the applications of the term “terrorism” are often disputed, “terrorism” nonetheless signifies in a very particular set of ways.

For example, commenting on the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon in 2001, Jenkins argues on the one hand that “even within the United States, the term ‘terrorism’ means very different things to different people.”14 On the other hand, he suggests that terrorism’s meanings are also at least partially fixed in the popular imagination: “most people would agree that certain actions indisputably represent terrorism (the horrors of September 11 being an obvious example).”15 Here Jenkins invites his audience to unquestioningly accept September 11, 2001 as an “obvious” and “indisputable” act of terrorism, raising the question of how “we” come to “know” as a culture what terrorism is. Like Giovanna Borradori, I would “deny that terrorism has any stable meaning, agenda, and political content”;16 indeed, I take issue here with the ways that terrorism presents as a narrowly defined and self-evident category in the cultural imagination.17

This task necessitates a different approach from that provided by terrorism studies. Terrorism’s meanings are produced in relation to the bodies of knowledge—institutional or otherwise—that circumscribe the term’s usage within the sphere of the everyday. That is, terrorism is a discursive construct called into being in the complex negotiations among terrorists, audiences, sites of institutional power, and texts—it is the discursive effect of a communication process.

Terrorism as Communication

As an academic discipline with strong links to governments and security industries, terrorism studies has been primarily concerned with generating solutions to the “problem” of terrorism. It has attempted to objectify and classify terrorism in “scientific” terms, resulting in limited analysis of why terrorism can so powerfully capture the public’s imagination.

One of the key defining features of terrorism is that it mobilizes a relationship with its multiple audiences. Terrorism can only be an effective, meaningful communication through the ways audiences perceive its incursions. It is a thinkable tactic precisely because of the modes of representation and meaning prevalent in Western societies. If we are concerned with understanding and negotiating the threat of terrorism, rather than focusing primarily on solutions that objectify, criminalize, and “contain” particular kinds of individuals and sets of practices, we must address the valencies of terrorism as a signifying practice.

For many commentators, it is terrorism’s desired outcome of affecting audiences—of conveying a message to a wider public—that marks it as distinct from other forms of violence. For Lawrence Zelic Freedman, terrorism is “the use of violence when its most important result is not the physical and mental damage of the direct victim but the psychological effect produced on someone else.”18 For terrorism studies, then, audiences are of key importance to the terrorist project, but this remains largely unexamined. In this respect, critical cultural and communication theory has much to offer to the analysis of terrorism.

A few terrorism studies texts engage with the idea of terrorism as a ­communicative practice, mostly concerned with the role of the media as a facilitator of terrorism.19 In an important 1982 book titled Violence as Communication: Insurgent Terrorism and the Western Media, Alex P. Schmid and Janny de Graaf famously suggested that “without communication there can be no terrorism.”20 Like many ot...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Conceptualizing Terrorism
• 2 Constructing the Terrorist: The Threat from Within
• 3 Feminist Terrorists and Terrorist Feminists: The Crosswiring of Feminism with Terrorism
• 4 Terrorist Time: Terrorism’s Disruption of Modernity
• 5 Conjuring the Apocalypse: Radical Feminism, Apocalyptic Temporality, and the Society for Cutting Up Men
• 6 Abjecting Whiteness: “The Movement,” Radical Feminism, and Genocide
• 7 Nuclear Terrorists: Patricia Hearst and the (Feminist) Terrorist Family
• Postscript
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index