Disordered Violence: How Gender, Race and Heteronormativity Structure Terrorism

216 Pages·2020·0.761 MB·English

by  Caron E. Gentry

Disordered Violence
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Series Editors: Victoria M. Basham and Sarah Bulmer
The Critical Military Studies series welcomes original thinking on the ways
in which military power works within different societies and geopolitical
arenas
Militaries are central to the production and dissemination of force globally but
the enduring legacies of military intervention are increasingly apparent at the
societal and personal bodily levels as well, demonstrating that violence and
war-making function on multiple scales. At the same time, the notion that
violence is as an appropriate response to wider social and political problems
transcends militaries: from private security, to seemingly ‘non-military’ settings
such as fi tness training and schooling, the legitimisation and normalisation of
authoritarianism and military power occurs in various sites. This series seeks
original, high-quality manuscripts and edited volumes that engage with such
questions of how militaries, militarism and militarisation assemble and disas-
semble worlds touched and shaped by violence in these multiple ways. It will
showcase innovative and interdisciplinary work that engages critically with the
operation and effects of military power and provokes original questions for
researchers and students alike.
Titles in the Advances in Critical Military Studies series include:
Published:
Resisting Militarism: Direct Action and the Politics of Subversion
Chris Rossdale
Forthcoming:
The Military-Peace Complex: Gender and Materiality in Afghanistan
Hannah Partis-Jennings
Inhabiting No-Man’s-Land: Army Wives, Gender and Militarisation
Alexandra Hyde
Making War on Bodies: Militarisation, Aesthetics and Embodiment in
International Politics
Catherine Baker
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Disordered Violence
How Gender, Race and
Heteronormativity
Structure Terrorism
CARON E. GENTRY
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I have had the distinct pleasure of being mentored and encouraged throughout my education and my
career by truth-tellers, dedicated teachers and talented scholars. Thank you Kavita, Nick, Mel, David,
Fred, Tony and Frank.
Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish
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sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values
to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website:
edinburghuniversitypress.com
© Caron Gentry, 2020
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
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printed and bound in Great Britain.
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 4744 2480 6 (hardback)
ISBN 978 1 4744 2481 3 (webready PDF)
ISBN 978 1 4744 2482 0 (epub)
The right of Caron Gentry to be identifi ed as the author of this work has been asserted
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and
Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction: Welcome to the Grey 1
1. The Structural Signifi cation of Terrorism 26
2. Intersecting Terrorism Studies 59
3. Strange Bedfellows: What Happens When We Ask the
Other Question? 84
4. Ir/rationality: Radicalisation, ‘Black Extremism’ and
Prevent Tragedies 121
5. What Does Not Get Counted: Misogynistic Terrorism 164
Conclusion: Disordered Violence 194
Index 201
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Multiple people have been instrumental in bringing this book to
publication. First, a very big thank you to Victoria Basham and Sarah
Bulmer as series editors and Jenny Daly at Edinburgh for their faith in
me and in this idea. It was a needed push to write the book I kept putting
off for later. Second, I have benefi ted from the feminist and Terrorism
Studies communities that surround me. This means I was able to work-
shop chapters out of the book in multiple places, fi nding both encour-
agement and challenges that helped me make this project stronger and
better. An early version of Chapter 3 was presented at the International
Feminist Journal of Politics annual conference in San Francisco, 2018. The
fi rst few chapters were workshopped at the Handa Centre for the Study
of Terrorism and Political Violence. Lydia Cole served as a discussant
par exemplar, daring me to throw down a larger gauntlet to the Terror-
ism Studies community. I raced to fi nish Chapter 4 for a School of Inter-
national Relations seminar here at St Andrews and benefi ted massively
from Kieran McConaghy’s feedback and positivity. In that seminar, Nick
Brook also provided needed commentary. I owe Kristen Harkness for
helping me nuance the rationality discussion in Chapter 4. I truly have
great colleagues – all mistakes, however, are mine alone.
Additionally, I was able to discuss this project at a Gender and
Terrorism workshop Swati Parashar and I organised for the European
Workshops in International Studies in Groningen 2018. That workshop
was a positive experience of bringing together those of us who have
been working on this topic for a long time, including Laura Sjoberg,
Katherine Brown and Claudia Brunner, with a newer crowd, including
two of my own PhD students, Rabea Khan and Toni Niehuss. Finally,
I was invited to give one of the keynotes at the Studies in Critical
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Acknowledgements / vii
Terrorism conference in September 2018 and I based it upon this book.
Thank you to Alice Martini and Michael Lister for inviting me.
Throughout my career I have found that my students energise me,
push me and help me formulate new ideas. This book is loosely based
upon the Gender and Terrorism module I developed when I moved to
St Andrews. As different students cycled in and out of that class they
brought with them new ideas and new perspectives; I have tried to cap-
ture this throughout the pages of this book. Indeed, in my fi rst year, a
student, Sophie-Charlotte Schippman, wrote a paper with me on inti-
mate terrorism. Without her and the other students in that module, the
chapter on misogynistic terrorism would not exist. I have also benefi ted
from the student research assistant internship programme provided by
the School’s International Security Studies programme. In 2017, two
students were instrumental in providing research for Chapter 3. Both
women were stellar research assistants, and I look forward to seeing
their career paths unfold: thank you Méabh Flanagan and Maryam
Nahhal for your insight and attention to detail!
And then there are those who need to be thanked and recognised in
a way that words are simply not enough. First, my husband. I promise: I
will never write two books in three years again. Thank you for putting up
with my crazy decision to go fl at-out on writing, while we also moved
house and then renovated said house. You are my favourite person.
Second, my life at St Andrews comprises two phases: my PhD and
then my return as a member of staff. In both phases, Nick Rengger was
always present. He was my fi rst lecturer at St Andrews when I began
the International Security Studies degree. I never knew someone who
could talk so much with so much knowledge without notes. Nick was
a source of encouragement: without him, I would never have centred
my PhD on feminist thought. He introduced me to Cynthia Enloe’s
and Jean Bethke Elshtain’s scholarship and interventions. He taught me
it was possible to be both a compassionate and challenging lecturer.
When I returned to St Andrews as a staff member, Nick was there to
welcome me. When I began to think about rationality and terrorism,
he pointed me to Stephen Toulmin. When I decided to write the book,
he could think of no better project. His death is a heartbreaking and
devastating loss to his family and to the fi eld of International Relations.
I do not know how to think of a School of International Relations at St
Andrews without him.
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Introduction:
Welcome to the Grey
In January 2016, an armed right-wing militia, Citizens for Constitu-
tional Freedom, took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in
Harney County, Oregon. During the siege, other militias set up a defen-
sive parameter around the headquarters and the police allowed mem-
bers to leave and enter the refuge at will. It was not until the fourth
week of the siege that law enforcement attempted to intercept some
of the leaders, resulting in a shooting, a car chase and arrests. Still the
siege went on for another two weeks before the remaining members sur-
rendered to the FBI. None of the men involved were charged with acts
of terrorism – even though they tried to supplant the US government’s
federal authority in this area; used the threat of force to achieve their
goals; and shot at the police and resisted arrest.
The founder of the Citizens for Constitutional Freedom, Ammon
Bundy, is a white, middle-class Mormon man who had managed a fl eet
of cars in Arizona but whose father is a rancher in Harney County.
Bundy believed he was ordained by God to end the federal govern-
ment’s ownership of the mostly rural land in Harney County. Imagine
if Bundy was not white, not middle-class and not a Mormon. What if he
was brown, an immigrant, and believed he was ordained by Allah, con-
vinced that the US federal government had perpetrated harms in other
parts of the world? Would law enforcement still have stayed away?
Would the charges have included terrorism? The label of terrorism was
largely avoided by the media and by the government response to the
occupation – instead this was largely seen as a protest of (possibly)
infringed upon white men. This is a rather telling and blunt example of
how race (and gender) is implicated in the narration and labelling of
political violence as terrorist.
Even though the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia in the summer
of 2017 forced Americans and other Western countries to realise that
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2 / Disordered Violence
terrorism and political violence linked to white supremacy and nation-
alism are indeed rising (this has been demonstrated by the University
of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database [START 2017] and somewhat
in Terrorism Studies [Rosenfeld 2017; White 2016]), the denial of it
continues on some level. The initial response of the Austin police to
a series of mail bombings between the 2nd and 20th of March 2018,
primarily targeting prominent members of the black community in
east Austin, revealed some of the racialised assumptions that drive
public responses to terrorism. The fi rst victim of the bomber, Anthony
Stephen House, was also one of the fi rst suspects. A black man, he was
apparently described as unsmiling and technically astute (Wallace-
Wells 2018). Three days after his murder, Austin’s associate police chief
explained why they were not yet treating it as murder: ‘We can’t rule out
that Mr House didn’t construct this himself and accidentally detonate
it, in which case it would be an accidental death’ (Wallace-Wells 2018).
When it was discovered that the bomber was a twenty-three-year old
white man from a Christian family who had been homeschooled, the
response from the police was tellingly gracious. The interim police chief
stated the actions were the
outcry of a very challenged young man talking about challenges in his life
that led him to this point . . . I know everybody is interested in a motive and
understanding why. And we’re never going to be able to put a (rationale)
behind these acts. (Hanna, Karimi, Morris, and Almasy 2018)
This was after the bomber died by setting off his own bomb, in his car,
while driving it along I-35, the interstate that runs through the middle of
the United States connecting Mexico to Canada, going straight through
Austin (Almasy 2018). Somehow, I fi nd it highly unlikely that a simi-
lar statement would be made if it had been a man of colour who had
perpetrated these bombings and died, effectively, as a suicide bomber.
I would also not imagine that the same conversations would have been
happening if the bomber were a woman.
It seems that it is still diffi cult to conceive of women who actively
participate in political violence, even after copious amounts of research
to demonstrate women’s long-standing involvement in terrorist groups
(Henshaw 2016; Gentry and Sjoberg 2015; Parashar 2014; Alison
2009; Eager 2008). Surprise and shock were the dominant reactions
to Tasheen Malik’s wilful participation in the San Bernardino shoot-
ings in December 2015. One terrorist expert from Brookings indicated
a woman’s involvement in terrorism was a complete surprise to him,
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