Beyond Mothers, Monsters, Whores:
Thinking Well-nigh Women's Violence in Global Politics

by Caron Due east. Gentry and Laura Sjoberg, Zed Books, 2015

Book review

This is a second and significantly revised version of the original title by Caron Gentry and Laura Sjoberg, published in 2007. A central plank of their statement is that women'south involvement in political violence is systematically denied, denigrated, or assumed to be driven past personal, and thus apolitical forces – and hence is explained abroad by 'maternalism, mental instability or deviant sexuality' (p. 41). Second, and related to this, is that women's political violence is e'er understood as different to men'south: in this view, 'men who commit violence make autonomous decisions, while women who do so are controlled, coerced or insane' (p. 44) – although in reality, of course, 'all decisions are contextual and contingent, non only women'south, and all decisions are fabricated, not only men'south' (p. 46).

Third, while contrasting representations and readings of male person and female violence are largely attributable to patriarchal and essentialist assumptions most what 'normal' or 'existent' women and men are and should do, sure gender and evolution and fifty-fifty feminist discourses likewise advise that women are necessarily more than nurturing and peace-loving than men – and that, by extension, in that location is something especially troubling about women whose behaviour transgresses these

These gender-subordinating narratives hateful that while male person violence is viewed as inherent in (hegemonic) masculinity – men have the potential to exist fierce, even though nigh men never human action on it – women's violence is seen non only as exceptional but, more importantly, as disrupting the 'natural' gender order. A trivial only familiar example is that the media betoken a person's sex only when referring, disapprovingly, to women who take on an assumed masculine role – a 'female suicide bomber' or 'female person soldiers' – every bit if such women were perversely impersonating men.

Following the introduction and a chapter unpacking the implicitly gendered theories of political violence, the authors continue to examine women's extra-legal violence with detail reference to ethno-nationalist insurgencies in the form of Chechen and Palestinian martyrdom and female jihadis associated with Al-Qaeda; and in relation to female person génocidaires in Darfur, the sometime Yugoslavia and Rwanda, along with the sexual abuse of male prisoners boasted past female US prison guards at Abu Ghraib. The authors' point is that whether or non the women who commit extralegal political violence have anything in common, the female parent, monster and whore narratives signify these women as similar if not the same/monolithic.

These narratives describe very various women similarly: as unlike from and outside of normal femininity, every bit constituted by flaws unique to femininities, and equally without agency and therefore outside the realm of legitimized political actors (p. 69). The following three capacity and then look at the aforementioned case studies, often focusing on individuals responsible for incitement of and/or egregious (and much sensationalised) acts of violence, through each lens or trope.

In the last chapter Caron Gentry and Laura Sjoberg underscore that the question is not 'why women (and people more generally) cull political violence' (p. 137), which raises circuitous problems about what constitutes free selection; but rather of how such violence is represented, depending on the sex of the perpetrator. Women's violence 'is a property of womanhood gone wrong – a broken or flawed femininity', whether 'a mother nurtures bad men' or has 'lost her purpose in life when she has lost those for whom she serves as wife and mother' (p. 141), or 'a particularly disturbed version of femininity – one which is scary and even monstrous – to commit the particular sort of violence that women commit' (ibid.). Or considering women's 'sexuality is something other than the desire and ability to please and reproduce with men – whose traditional, feminine sexuality is somehow cleaved – are themselves broken, and therefore more likely to commit this special form of violence that is women'south violence, (pp. 141–2, all italics in the original). The rather wellworn ascertainment is that these 'idealized gender stereotypes' (p. 143) 'trap women (and men) into idealized roles, which threatens gender equality in a number of ways' (p.144), including by leaving intact the 'discursive structures of gender oppression (ibid.) and in item past casting 'emotion, experience and sense' (p. 159) as peculiar to women's political violence, and not to men'southward.

While the volume contains many disquisitional insights, I found the 'mother, monster, whore' construction was occasionally laboured and, by revisiting the same examples from the iii angles, often repetitive. Some of the arguments are strained or have been shoehorned in – such drawing on Rudyard Kipling's poem 'The Female of the Species', for instance (p. 72); Kipling'southward reputation has had its ups and downs, but he is hardly an influential writer on women. In add-on, while the authors convincingly show that women'southward acts of violence are differently represented because they are women, the focus on named individuals opens up the possibility that their notoriety is because their behaviour was exceptionally cruel, rather than exclusively because women behaved with unspeakable cruelty. I can't help thinking, too, that since men perpetrate most acts of violence, political and otherwise, the 'man bites dog' most women'southward political violence fuels the media fascination with and sensational accounts of women who, for instance, bring together religious fundamentalist organisations, whether the and then-called White Widow backside the Nairobi shopping mall attacks, or European women barely out of their teens joining Daesh. Xenophobic and knee-jerk responses to international terrorism (which is exactly what it hopes to accomplish), and a blanket refusal to offer sanction to non-European refugees fleeing war and its economic consequences, make information technology all the more imperative to understand that, as Cynthia Enloe so perceptively notes, 'the personal is international and the international is personal' (cited on p. 18). While it is non always written in the most accessible way, this book makes a nuanced and thought-provoking feminist contribution to achieving such understanding.

© Deborah Eade
Independent author and editor, France

Review originally published in Gender & Evolution 24.1 (2016)