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Still just victims or villains? The “jihadi brides” and the representation of politically violent women

In February 2015, three schoolgirls from Bethnal Green Academy left the UK to join the Islamic State (IS). Kadiza Sultana, Amira Abase and Shamima Begum became emblematic of the group’s “pull” and were the focus of intense media interest as authorities attempted to intercept them before they crossed the border to Syria. The journalistic framing of their story invited the public to engage as mediated witnesses in a familiar drama, complete with heroic police officers, grieving families and the three so-called “jihadi brides” as classic damsels in distress: naïve, vulnerable and unaware of what awaited them in IS territory. The defection of these three in particular, and the “jihadi brides” in general, was situated simultaneously as a novel trauma in an ongoing ideological and material war against jihadism, and as more of the same as far as women’s political violence was concerned. On the one hand, the ability of IS to attract women to its cause indicated a new rupture in the war on terror. Of the 41,490 foreign IS affiliates in Syria and Iraq between 2013 and 2018, 4761 were women, including 1023 from Western Europe (Cook and Vale 2018, 14), and the visibility of women in IS as recruiters and propagandists on social media was understood as requiring urgent intervention and surveillance. On the other hand, the domestication of this rupture, through the familiar representation of these women as victims of jihadist men, is familiar territory for feminist scholars of political violence. This narrative draws on Jean Bethke Elshtain’s sketch of the (female) Beautiful Soul, for whom wars are fought, and the (male) Just Warrior, who fights for her honour and protection (Elshtain 1995), and has been ever-present during the twenty years since the 11 September 2001 attacks. The war on terror was famously sold as a rescue mission to save the women of Afghanistan, through the portrayal of the entire female population as damsels in distress who needed saving by brave American soldiers (Masters 2009; Eisenstein 2016), and gendered stories have surfaced whenever the war was not going well. As Caron Gentry and Laura Sjoberg have noted, the “rescue” of Private Jessica Lynch in March 2003 and the focus on and sacrifice of Lynndie England for her role in the Abu Ghraib abuses relied on gendered narratives of ideal victims and femininity gone awry (Sjoberg 2007; Gentry and Sjoberg 2015). This victim/villain discourse that has enveloped narratives about women’s participation in the war on terror, has resurfaced in the recent war against Islamic State. Women loyal to IS were portrayed as victims of IS men and villains in comparison to other women involved in the conflict, particularly female Kurdish fighters and Yazidi women (Kollarova 2016).