Beyond Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Thinking about Women's Violence in Global Politics

by Caron E. Gentry, Laura Sjoberg

Beyond Mothers, Monsters, Whores takes the suggestion in Mothers, Monsters, Whores that it is important to see genderings in characterizations of violent women, and to use critique of those genderings to retheorize individual violence in global politics. It begins by demonstrating the interdependence of the personal and international levels of global politics in violent women's lives, but then shows that this interdependence is inaccurately depicted in gender-subordinating narratives of women's violence. Such narratives, the authors argue, are not only normatively problematic on the surface but also intersect with other identifiers, such as race, religion, and geopolitical location.

Genres: Feminism, Nonfiction, Academic, Politics, Gender

208 pages, Paperback

First published August 15, 2015

About the author

Caron Gentry is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Abilene Christian University in Abilene, Texas. Her previous work has been published in the journal Terrorism and Political Violence. Her research interests are gender, terrorism and political violence.

Reviews

[Sookie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not an easy book to rate. And current rating may change once the book sinks in.


Quotes:

For example, Mia Bloom’s 2011 book Bombshell relies upon a process theory to explain women’s involvement in suicide terrorism. On the surface, this is an excellent way of approaching women’s violence: to understand the events in a person’s life as precipitating violence. However, the book relies on gendered expectations and norms to theorize women’s participation, relying upon gendered notions of what women’s roles are in particular societies. For instance, if a woman becomes dishonoured in a conservative society along gender lines owing to rape or sexual discrepancy, then, according to Bloom, she is more likely to become involved in political violence.
-- Pg 34

The mother narratives appear in recent work and continue to locate a woman’s quest to use violence in a problem with her femininity (B. Williams 2014; Z. Williams 2014). Thus the narratives carry with them the weight of gendered assumptions about what is appropriate female behaviour. Even in the twenty-first century, women’s lives are still defined by the gendered conflation of womanhood, motherhood and wifedom (Barnett 2004: 668); while these elements are often discussed in terms of how they limit women’s involvement in the workplace, they clearly extend to women’s involvement in violence. Narratives of women’s violence often centre around
biologically determinist assumptions and arguments. In stories about violent women, their motherhood often defines them – their inability/failure to serve as mothers is so dehumanizing (or dewomanizing) that it drives a woman to violence. Traditional notions of womanhood
posit women’s action only within quasi-heteronormative boxes. Women, even if they are violent, must still want to be or act from the identities of wife and/or mother – even if this role of wifedom or motherhood does not include the actuality of a husband or children.
-- Pg 73

The mother narratives are, in many respects, a default setting for how women are constructed in global politics. At the Council on Foreign Relations luncheon at the 2013 International Studies Association meeting, Francis Fukuyama, in comments after his talk, stated that if more women were in politics, the world would be a more peaceful place. This echoes sentiments of his 1998 Foreign Affairs article on the topic of women, peace and world politics. It is a position related to maternal feminism, whereby women’s ability to give birth and mother children means they think differently – more peaceably – than men about how to resolve international political tensions (see Elshtain 1985). But this default position becomes ‘twisted’ when it is used to examine women’s involvement in political violence (Gentry 2009). As witnessed in this chapter, the mother narratives are used as a way of minimizing women’s participation in political violence. They minimize women’s ability to be involved in the politics and to make political choices, but furthermore they fail to see women as agents who are influenced, enabled and constrained by their wider context. Even more worrying is that the need by certain actors to locate women by their ability (or inability) to be mothers is a way of containing and thus refusing to see and to deal with the reality that women can make violent choices. The idea that women can make violent choices threatens multiple ‘truths’ that social norms hold dear: that extralegal violence is scarier than any other kind of violence; that women’s violence is scarier than a man’s violence; and that, therefore, women’s extralegal violence is horribly frightening and indicative of a world gone mad.
-- Pg 91 (conclusion of mother narrative)

the monster narratives in these accounts of women’s extralegal violence are implicitly tied to the assumption that women are unstable participants in any political project. It serves to proves misogynists right: women are disordered and they are so disordered that when they get involved in politics, their fragile pathology messes it up by becoming disturbingly violent.
-- Pg 111 (conclusion of monster narrative)

The mother, monster and whore narrratives take away women’s agency, obscure their real reasons for fighting, and legitimize war efforts against them while maintaining gender norms which require real women’s conformity. The whore narratives conceive of women’s violence as stemming from some sort of sexual deviancy within the woman that somehow makes it easier for her to commit violence. It displays a fallacious understanding of women’s sexuality and women’s engagement in violence. By focusing on women’s sexuality or in sexualizing their violence, the authors of the narratives and their wider audiences need to grapple neither with the political motivations behind the violence nor with the reality that women’s sexuality in all its many forms is healthy.
-- Pg 133 (conclusion of whorenarrative)

[Lucia · Rating 4 out of 5]

A critical review of how patriarchal demands strip women’s agency through their securitisation in the media as “mothers monsters or whores”. By reducing to these narratives we begin to see truly how gendered the often unquestioned elements of society are

[Ellie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have an incredibly difficult time rating this book because it talks about the "Mother, Monsters Whites" narrative which suggests women are depicted in these categories and no others which relies upon a binary patriarchal security discourse but at the same time the book does critique this narrative and expose the flaws that it has which is very important but it never even suggests the flaws of the mainstream security discourse which is what produces this narrative and I belive the issues with this narrative could also be argued with the issues of the mainstream security narrative which is sadly never brought up

[Chunchun · Rating 4 out of 5]

讨论政治领域女性暴力的叙事方式，认为应该强调的是人为什么进行暴力行为，而不是女性为什么进行暴力行为。 “The narratives cast violent women in a negative light, but they also make implications about what ‘normal’, ‘regular’ or ‘real’ women are. ”各类叙述将政治暴力的女性与母亲、怪物或放荡等联系起来，确实忽视了某些人性或制度的恶劣，也在巩固人们对女性的一般期待，导致某些女性自杀袭击分子利用这种期待对平民犯罪。
然而，我个人觉得，倡导性别平等还是不能强调去性别化，毕竟基因与生理因素决定了女性在某些方面更纤弱，性格可能更柔软、更富同情心、更少犯罪，这有何不对？视而不见男女客观存在的差异，那这世界还有什么趣味？当然女性一定要自强自立自尊，但是也别忘了自己也有男性所不具有的性别优势。

[Tiffany · Rating 4 out of 5]

I highly recommend this book for any scholar studying female perpetrators. Although there are some odd statements here and there, its theoretical framework is great!

[Rosalie · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.75/5