Agency?

            Scholar Karla J. Cunningham brings to the book a perspective that denies differences across gender lines. She notes that women are viewed differently than men in many places (especially where the bombings take place), but that their motivation and significance are the same. She states, “Importantly, the ‘invisibility’ of women both within terrorist organizations, and particularly their assumed invisibility within many of the societies that experience terrorism, makes woman an attractive actor for these organizations, an advantage that female members also acknowledge. This invisibility also makes scholarly inquiry of the phenomenon more difficult and may lull observers into the false assumption that women are insignificant actors within terrorist organizations.” (62) She makes a good point—obviously there is a strategy behind using women as bombers due to their “invisibility,” but just because they are used as human smart bombs does not necessarily mean that they are significant actors in terrorist organizations. Where are the female dispatchers? Where are the female heads of political organizations? Ironically, their invisibility might just make them invisible even within power structures such as in terrorist organizations where their importance seems to lie in the fact that they are the bombs—strategically necessary, but dispensable.

“Women join politically violent organizations for reasons similar to men’s, such as political change, Cunningham concludes. The argument that women join for personal reasons suggests women do not choose their participation.” (132) Of course women and men join for a variety of reasons, political change being among them. But personal motivation does not necessarily exclude agency. Even women (and men) driven my personal loss, grief, whatever, typically decide themselves to become bombers and seek out dispatchers. At the same time, there are a good number of women who actually do not choose to participate, but are instead forced. This should be taken into account, as well. Force includes physical, social, and religious (psychological).

V.G. Julie Rajan says, “Recent interest in suicide bombers is rooted in the seemingly unlimited and unknown power they possess.” (167-8) She states that their influence comes from the fact that “as women continue to participate in suicide bombing they symbolically assume the power to disrupt traditional patriarchal female gender notions and thereby destabilize current social and political, economic and ethic and religious identities worldwide.” (168) This is a perspective that can most definitely be justified. At the same time, these types of arguments beg the question of whether manipulating or employing one’s patriarchally designated gender is equally as subversive or disruptive as challenging it. Are these women promoting their own agency as individuals by committing these acts or are they simply women who are instead being used by men as political tools? Maybe it’s both. I propose that many of these women most likely see themselves as liberators of women and believe that their actions are aiding not only Palestine and their personal path to Paradise, but also bettering the lives of living women by demonstrating individual freedom, while they are simultaneously (maybe even unknowingly) being used as political pawns in the hands of the patriarchy who cloak political goals in religious and individual ideology.