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Radicalizing Her: Why Women Choose Violence
An urgent corrective to the erasure of the female fighter from narratives on gender and power, demanding that we see women as political actors.
"Violence, for me, and for the women I chronicle in this book, is simply a political reality."
Though the female fighter is often seen as an anomaly, women make up nearly 30% of militant movements worldwide. Historically, these women--viewed as victims, weak-willed wives, and prey to Stockholm Syndrome--have been deeply misunderstood. Radicalizing Her holds the female fighter up, in all her complexity, as a kind of mirror to contemporary conversations on gender, violence, and power. Centered in the Global South, the narratives at the heart of the book reveal the arrayed forces that have driven women into battle, the personal and political elements of these decisions, and the ways in which the agency of female fighters has been deeply misunderstood.
Gowrinathan spent nearly twenty years in conversation with female fighters in Sri Lanka, Eritrea, Pakistan, and Colombia. The intensity of these interactions consistently unsettled her assumptions about violence and made her look closely at how these women were positioned in relation to power--initially at home and later with empowerment-based NGO interventions. She noted in particular the tendency of contemporary political discourse to parse the world into for--and against--camps: an understanding of motivations to fight is read as condoning violence, and thus oppressive agendas are given the upper hand by the moral imperative to condemn it.
Coming at a political moment that demands an urgent re-imagining of the possibilities for women to resist, Radicalizing Her reclaims women's roles in political struggles on the battlefield and in the streets.
"Violence, for me, and for the women I chronicle in this book, is simply a political reality."
Though the female fighter is often seen as an anomaly, women make up nearly 30% of militant movements worldwide. Historically, these women--viewed as victims, weak-willed wives, and prey to Stockholm Syndrome--have been deeply misunderstood. Radicalizing Her holds the female fighter up, in all her complexity, as a kind of mirror to contemporary conversations on gender, violence, and power. Centered in the Global South, the narratives at the heart of the book reveal the arrayed forces that have driven women into battle, the personal and political elements of these decisions, and the ways in which the agency of female fighters has been deeply misunderstood.
Gowrinathan spent nearly twenty years in conversation with female fighters in Sri Lanka, Eritrea, Pakistan, and Colombia. The intensity of these interactions consistently unsettled her assumptions about violence and made her look closely at how these women were positioned in relation to power--initially at home and later with empowerment-based NGO interventions. She noted in particular the tendency of contemporary political discourse to parse the world into for--and against--camps: an understanding of motivations to fight is read as condoning violence, and thus oppressive agendas are given the upper hand by the moral imperative to condemn it.
Coming at a political moment that demands an urgent re-imagining of the possibilities for women to resist, Radicalizing Her reclaims women's roles in political struggles on the battlefield and in the streets.
152 pages, Hardcover
First published April 13, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 45 reviews
May 16, 2021
I was excited ordering this book and while waiting for its arrival. Unfortunately, it fails in almost every thing it tries to do. It’s organized poorly, for starters. Because there is no internal coherence to the two sections or the chapters, there’s no reason to have sections or chapters other than make the reader feel there is an organizing principle at work. There isn’t. The book would be improved if it ran straight through for 130 pages, perhaps with the occasional space between paragraphs. I’m guessing this is Nimmi Gowrinathan’s doctoral thesis because it has the feel of many books that are doctoral theses slightly lengthened and modified for print: written for a panel of experts in a particular field. The writer is submitting for their (the experts) approval and recognition that he or she has contributed a unique analysis to the field in question. This often means the general reader is adrift is he or she is not intimately acquainted with the field of study.
I can’t help but compare this book to Vincent Bevins majestic “The Jakarta Method.” Like that book, Gowrinathan is exploring war, torture, repression, and struggles for freedom is disparate locales. Like “The Jakarta Method,” “Radicalizing Her” weaves interviews with different people from different locales. Which brings up (if I had to pick one) the central problem I have with RH--it provides the reader almost no historical background about the people being interviewed. I knew (before I opened the book) the Tamil Tigers were a separatist group fighting against the Sri Lankan government, but that’s all I knew. Why were they fighting? In what ways was the Tamil minority being discriminated against? Religiously? Culturally? Why? To what extent? With what ends in mind? Gowrinathan alternates between interviews with former Tigers and a member of the FARC (again, the reader is given no historical background of Columbia to buttress the reader’s interest and/or appreciation of the interviewee’s words).
If I were generous, I could argue that context, background, and geo-political facts aren’t important because at its core this is a book about female fighters--the discrete imperatives and challenges for female guerrilla fighters. The problem here is the interviews are not evocative or thought-provoking, which is a fancy way for saying they’re boring. Not only are they not interesting, but Gowrinathan has a unorthodox, and ultimately distracting, way of presenting the material. Within the chapters there are quotes (I guess), poems (by Gowrinathan or someone else, I don’t know) and a surfeit of indented and italicized text. In fairness, she provides an endnote at the end of each segment of text, but I didn’t feel like flipping to the end of the book every other page. And when I did flip to the back, there wasn’t anything about the citation that illuminated the significance of the end-noted text.
Finally, without the historical background, without the text being presented in a if not linear fashion at least a coherent manner, what we’re left with is a ruminative meditation on feminism, war, women in war, sexual violence, etc. The problem with trying to simply appreciate the text with this project in mind is with the exception of a few paragraphs rendered poetically and with grace, most of the rumination on these topics has a haughty and dismissive tone. To whom? Men. White feminists. NGO functionaries. Seemingly everyone except the women who fought in these conflicts. “Radicalizing Her” has more than a little social justice warrior cant. Many passages in the text display unreflective, airy cant abstractly piled on top of itself, never hitting a target other than “patriarchy” and “supremacy” (white? Western?). These terms detached from discrete and robust analysis of political economy or geo-political statecraft end up grating to this reader. I get that Gowrinathan is leery of Western NGO types and their anodyne and sometimes patronizing engagement with former fighters, but with the text not grounded in a deeper analysis of Western motives (capitalism?--a word that doesn’t appear in the book once; imperialism? globalization?) the caustic comments about patriarchy don’t pack much punch nor illuminate the stakes.
I can’t help but compare this book to Vincent Bevins majestic “The Jakarta Method.” Like that book, Gowrinathan is exploring war, torture, repression, and struggles for freedom is disparate locales. Like “The Jakarta Method,” “Radicalizing Her” weaves interviews with different people from different locales. Which brings up (if I had to pick one) the central problem I have with RH--it provides the reader almost no historical background about the people being interviewed. I knew (before I opened the book) the Tamil Tigers were a separatist group fighting against the Sri Lankan government, but that’s all I knew. Why were they fighting? In what ways was the Tamil minority being discriminated against? Religiously? Culturally? Why? To what extent? With what ends in mind? Gowrinathan alternates between interviews with former Tigers and a member of the FARC (again, the reader is given no historical background of Columbia to buttress the reader’s interest and/or appreciation of the interviewee’s words).
If I were generous, I could argue that context, background, and geo-political facts aren’t important because at its core this is a book about female fighters--the discrete imperatives and challenges for female guerrilla fighters. The problem here is the interviews are not evocative or thought-provoking, which is a fancy way for saying they’re boring. Not only are they not interesting, but Gowrinathan has a unorthodox, and ultimately distracting, way of presenting the material. Within the chapters there are quotes (I guess), poems (by Gowrinathan or someone else, I don’t know) and a surfeit of indented and italicized text. In fairness, she provides an endnote at the end of each segment of text, but I didn’t feel like flipping to the end of the book every other page. And when I did flip to the back, there wasn’t anything about the citation that illuminated the significance of the end-noted text.
Finally, without the historical background, without the text being presented in a if not linear fashion at least a coherent manner, what we’re left with is a ruminative meditation on feminism, war, women in war, sexual violence, etc. The problem with trying to simply appreciate the text with this project in mind is with the exception of a few paragraphs rendered poetically and with grace, most of the rumination on these topics has a haughty and dismissive tone. To whom? Men. White feminists. NGO functionaries. Seemingly everyone except the women who fought in these conflicts. “Radicalizing Her” has more than a little social justice warrior cant. Many passages in the text display unreflective, airy cant abstractly piled on top of itself, never hitting a target other than “patriarchy” and “supremacy” (white? Western?). These terms detached from discrete and robust analysis of political economy or geo-political statecraft end up grating to this reader. I get that Gowrinathan is leery of Western NGO types and their anodyne and sometimes patronizing engagement with former fighters, but with the text not grounded in a deeper analysis of Western motives (capitalism?--a word that doesn’t appear in the book once; imperialism? globalization?) the caustic comments about patriarchy don’t pack much punch nor illuminate the stakes.
April 25, 2021
A disjointed, solipsistic, first-draft hot mess. Let me explain: The author seems to assume that the audience for her book fully understands the complicated dynamics of conflicts in Sri Lanka, Colombia, and Syria—the contours of those dynamics are never explained—and that the audience will fully and completely share her politics and various grievances. That is why I found the book solipsistic. It doesn’t even really attempt to explain or persuade or present a position: It’s mostly a long list of grievances, mostly, it seems, with white people in the academy, in NGOs, and in state bureaucracies. I guess that’s a critique of some sort? I don’t know.
This felt slapdash and poorly structured. There are some interesting questions about women and violence scattered throughout this very short book, but no real attempt to grapple with those questions in any systematic or thorough way—though I’m guessing the author’s first response to this type of criticism would be to guess at my race and point to that for my not getting it. (She’d probably guess wrong, but would likely then suggest my mind was still colonized.)
This felt slapdash and poorly structured. There are some interesting questions about women and violence scattered throughout this very short book, but no real attempt to grapple with those questions in any systematic or thorough way—though I’m guessing the author’s first response to this type of criticism would be to guess at my race and point to that for my not getting it. (She’d probably guess wrong, but would likely then suggest my mind was still colonized.)
May 16, 2021
The author is obviously very knowledgeable and passionate about the role of women in rebellions against state violence and this work is a culmination of extensive primary interviews and research. I think the problem is that the book tries to do too much and does too little.
Though it’s not entirely clear to me what the goal of this book is, towards the end, the author writes: “I want to reveal the ways in which women facing the barrel of the state’s gun absorb the impact, recoiling before they resist. These women did not offer up their trauma for others to pull into their agendas but held their pain inside their own fight for political change.”
I would have been interested in reading that book. Instead, RH takes some selections of narratives from these women, but the stories are never fully revealed, because they are interspersed in a haphazard fashion between broadside critiques of mainstream feminist and political theory, numerous quotations from individuals that don’t seem to relate directly to the preceding or succeeding sentences, and a poem (I think by the author?) in the middle that didn’t really work. The book tries to cram too much into too few pages and it somehow still felt arduous to read. It is possible that the book is intended to be chaotic and postmodern to emulate the fog of war or something, but it really just made it difficult to follow.
Another frustration is that the book assumes a fair amount of a priori knowledge about the Tamil Tigers and FARC. That’s fine; it may not be the goal of the author to educate the readers on these subjects in general, but it also limits what we can take away from the book.
Towards the end, the author also writes: “The raw narratives of moments of violence and vulnerability that shaped the women at war, the women chronicled here, disrupt dismissive constructions of female victimhood and force a new reckoning of the relationship of violence to political power in the pursuit of social justice.” If the sentence ends at “victimhood,” I would agree that the book does disrupt such a notion. But I honestly don’t understand what is meant by the second half of the sentence. Is it a justification of violence to pursue social justice? Is revolution a new concept? Is it merely to cause a reconsideration of the causes of violence by women? I just don’t think the book fully knows what question it is answering or, if it does, I guess I’m not smart or informed enough to know, because it may be about a fight with the ivory tower that I don’t fully appreciate. It could be that I’m not the audience.
Regardless, I will say that I’m thankful for learning a little bit of the stories of the women featured in the book and would actually be interested in reading more about their stories.
Though it’s not entirely clear to me what the goal of this book is, towards the end, the author writes: “I want to reveal the ways in which women facing the barrel of the state’s gun absorb the impact, recoiling before they resist. These women did not offer up their trauma for others to pull into their agendas but held their pain inside their own fight for political change.”
I would have been interested in reading that book. Instead, RH takes some selections of narratives from these women, but the stories are never fully revealed, because they are interspersed in a haphazard fashion between broadside critiques of mainstream feminist and political theory, numerous quotations from individuals that don’t seem to relate directly to the preceding or succeeding sentences, and a poem (I think by the author?) in the middle that didn’t really work. The book tries to cram too much into too few pages and it somehow still felt arduous to read. It is possible that the book is intended to be chaotic and postmodern to emulate the fog of war or something, but it really just made it difficult to follow.
Another frustration is that the book assumes a fair amount of a priori knowledge about the Tamil Tigers and FARC. That’s fine; it may not be the goal of the author to educate the readers on these subjects in general, but it also limits what we can take away from the book.
Towards the end, the author also writes: “The raw narratives of moments of violence and vulnerability that shaped the women at war, the women chronicled here, disrupt dismissive constructions of female victimhood and force a new reckoning of the relationship of violence to political power in the pursuit of social justice.” If the sentence ends at “victimhood,” I would agree that the book does disrupt such a notion. But I honestly don’t understand what is meant by the second half of the sentence. Is it a justification of violence to pursue social justice? Is revolution a new concept? Is it merely to cause a reconsideration of the causes of violence by women? I just don’t think the book fully knows what question it is answering or, if it does, I guess I’m not smart or informed enough to know, because it may be about a fight with the ivory tower that I don’t fully appreciate. It could be that I’m not the audience.
Regardless, I will say that I’m thankful for learning a little bit of the stories of the women featured in the book and would actually be interested in reading more about their stories.
May 26, 2021
I received this item through the Amazon Vine program in exchange for an honest review.
This is an interesting book. I'm still sort of digesting because there was so much new information!
I'm not familiar with the history of Sri Lanka, the Tigers, or the struggle of the Tamil. This was an eye opening book in many ways for me.
The book highlights women who become Tigers, their lives after their time in the military, and what drives women to join. Despite being a short read it highlights the contrast of marriage and talks about if being armed makes women feel empowered. We hear the stories of women who fought and faced extraordinary trauma. The book talks about the use of sexual assault as a tool and the ways that women adapt for survival. The author also talks about her work, which I was interested in hearing more about.
A thought provoking and interesting read!
This is an interesting book. I'm still sort of digesting because there was so much new information!
I'm not familiar with the history of Sri Lanka, the Tigers, or the struggle of the Tamil. This was an eye opening book in many ways for me.
The book highlights women who become Tigers, their lives after their time in the military, and what drives women to join. Despite being a short read it highlights the contrast of marriage and talks about if being armed makes women feel empowered. We hear the stories of women who fought and faced extraordinary trauma. The book talks about the use of sexual assault as a tool and the ways that women adapt for survival. The author also talks about her work, which I was interested in hearing more about.
A thought provoking and interesting read!
dnf
April 26, 2021I have personal policy to not rate any book I have not fully finished, otherwise I'd easily give this a 1-star review. I'm not going to finish this (even though it's only ~125 pages of content), because it's absolutely impossible to get through and I feel so annoyed every time I pick it up.
This is a hot MESS of a book, which is a complete shame considering I think the premise and topic seem like an important perspective to learn about. There are some glaring issues for me - a lack of background/context, confusing structure, and convoluted writing.
- Gowrinathan switches between different conflicts, ranging from the Tamil community in Sri Lanka, to a woman in Columbia's FARC, to the author's own background, to a former victim of sexual assault from ISIS in Tunisia. If there are more conflicts talked about, I never got to them. There is NO context or dynamics explained in any case - a new subsection starts and we switch to the author interviewing somebody else, and it would take a while to figure out that this was a different conflict (one that I hadn't heard of), at a different time. Forget understanding the politics or economics, I was just trying to figure out what was happening!!
- Secondly, the structure is super confusing. There's no systematic approach to the content. For example, the first chapter is entitled "A Battlefield" and different subsections are titled "Movement", "Retreat: The Boys", "Advance: The Battlefield", "Retreat: On Violence", "Advance: An Interview", "Retreat: The Female Fighter", etc. I never understood how it all connected! What was happening with the retreat/advance? The subtitles felt so random. I couldn't tell if one chapter would be about the Tamil conflict, or something else. This rapid switching from conflict-to-conflict without any context gave me whip lash trying to read this.
- Topping off my list of issues is the author's convoluted writing. I found myself rereading paragraphs, if not pages, trying to figure out what each sentence was saying.
I wholeheartedly do not recommend.
This is a hot MESS of a book, which is a complete shame considering I think the premise and topic seem like an important perspective to learn about. There are some glaring issues for me - a lack of background/context, confusing structure, and convoluted writing.
- Gowrinathan switches between different conflicts, ranging from the Tamil community in Sri Lanka, to a woman in Columbia's FARC, to the author's own background, to a former victim of sexual assault from ISIS in Tunisia. If there are more conflicts talked about, I never got to them. There is NO context or dynamics explained in any case - a new subsection starts and we switch to the author interviewing somebody else, and it would take a while to figure out that this was a different conflict (one that I hadn't heard of), at a different time. Forget understanding the politics or economics, I was just trying to figure out what was happening!!
- Secondly, the structure is super confusing. There's no systematic approach to the content. For example, the first chapter is entitled "A Battlefield" and different subsections are titled "Movement", "Retreat: The Boys", "Advance: The Battlefield", "Retreat: On Violence", "Advance: An Interview", "Retreat: The Female Fighter", etc. I never understood how it all connected! What was happening with the retreat/advance? The subtitles felt so random. I couldn't tell if one chapter would be about the Tamil conflict, or something else. This rapid switching from conflict-to-conflict without any context gave me whip lash trying to read this.
- Topping off my list of issues is the author's convoluted writing. I found myself rereading paragraphs, if not pages, trying to figure out what each sentence was saying.
I wholeheartedly do not recommend.
May 26, 2021
Such a good book.
The very beginning and the end might be a bit too memoiry.
about female freedom fighters in Sri Lanka, Colombia and other places.
“Violence, for me, and for the women I chronicle in this book, is simply a political reality.”
“Our view of the female fighter has been obstructed by both the moral compulsion to decry violent resistance and a societal drive to divide categories of thought along gendered lines.”
The very beginning and the end might be a bit too memoiry.
about female freedom fighters in Sri Lanka, Colombia and other places.
“Violence, for me, and for the women I chronicle in this book, is simply a political reality.”
“Our view of the female fighter has been obstructed by both the moral compulsion to decry violent resistance and a societal drive to divide categories of thought along gendered lines.”
April 2, 2024
i generally liked this book and the arguments gowrinathan makes regarding women fighters and state violence.
the formatting was a bit confusing but that may have been because of i was reading the ebook?
there were a few language choices i disagreed with but still an interesting read to rethink how women fighters are portrayed and discussed.
i picked it up because i saw at book culture that lila abu-lughod teaches it and would really love to know her thoughts.
the formatting was a bit confusing but that may have been because of i was reading the ebook?
there were a few language choices i disagreed with but still an interesting read to rethink how women fighters are portrayed and discussed.
i picked it up because i saw at book culture that lila abu-lughod teaches it and would really love to know her thoughts.
May 27, 2021
I was excited to discover this book, and eager to read it. Perhaps I would be less disappointed if I had not been so enthusiastic. This is a terribly disjointed, woefully unsupported, patchwork of 2-paragraph vignettes, snippets of poetry, and unsourced quotations. The asynchronous structure makes following the author's purpose difficult and her insistence on centering herself throughout the book is both irrelevant (staring at her phone after a breakup) and cringe-inducing (lying about being married, in order to defraud the very people she is there to support out of a few dollars on an entry visa).
Gowrinathan has one line where she talks about wanting to get a tattoo of the Tamil word for hope, only to find out the word does not exist in their language. She says "once one decides a tattoo is necessary, the lettering must be inked, even when the meaning remains to be determined." This quote effectively sums up the book itself. Once she decided that she wanted to write a book? She seems to have done so with little thought towards context, discernment, background, or even really answering the title question.
A brilliant mind, wasted on the effort here.
Gowrinathan has one line where she talks about wanting to get a tattoo of the Tamil word for hope, only to find out the word does not exist in their language. She says "once one decides a tattoo is necessary, the lettering must be inked, even when the meaning remains to be determined." This quote effectively sums up the book itself. Once she decided that she wanted to write a book? She seems to have done so with little thought towards context, discernment, background, or even really answering the title question.
A brilliant mind, wasted on the effort here.
March 19, 2022
ugh i wanted to like this so bad because the content is so interesting 😭 it’s clear the author put a lot of work into this research & all of the interviews but it was still so disjointed and hard to read :( i think that’s why it took me so long to get through because i had to be really intentional about sifting through the material. still a necessary work & amplified underrepresented perspectives just wish it had been fleshed out more!!
December 13, 2023
I really appreciate what the book is trying to accomplish and the author is obviously very knowledgeable and has a lot of passion and experience on the topic, the problem is she wrote it as if the reader would also have all the backstory and knowledge. The writing was haphazard and all the interviews were disorganized and unfinished and most the time I was confused about where we were, and how we got there.
December 27, 2020
What a necessary work on violence, feminism and political rights.
November 18, 2023
ONLY READ EXCERPTS FOR UNI
Violence is needed when your rights have been systematically ignored and shattered despite your resistance. It’s not violence for the sake of it. It’s violence to guarantee your survival despite the oppression.
Violence is needed when your rights have been systematically ignored and shattered despite your resistance. It’s not violence for the sake of it. It’s violence to guarantee your survival despite the oppression.
April 27, 2021
3 stars *may change
no comment
no comment
April 12, 2023
good, but could be much better lol not what I thought it was gonna be
November 14, 2023
“women facing the barrel of the state’s gun absorb the impact, recoiling before they resist”
i definitely need to re read
i definitely need to re read
September 28, 2021
This book was one of the most challenging texts I've read in awhile. Just difficult to get at the message, but it felt important to try. She directly challenged white feminist thinking around war, rebellion, and terrorism, and it's given me a lot to unpack in my thinking historically, but also as I encounter news in the future. I've been given a new lens to read things through, and that is quite exciting. The gist of it seems to be this: women do not choose violence because they snapped, because they were coerced, because their culture sanctions it. Women choose violence when the state is violent, when they are fighting for their survival. It is not against our nature to fight for our lives, or the lives of our children. Logic then tells us that once the violence from the state is removed, women will no longer choose to be violent. This is important to keep in mind when we consider criminal punishments or asylum seekers.
"The impulse to condemn violence in the resistance (while implicitly condoning the violence of the state) is a moral imperative that matters very little to the lives this violence permeates. Nonviolent protest in the face of state violence (reliant on mobilizing the moral conscience of others) has long been the prescribed, progressive pathway to political change. To access this space, violated women are most often expected to wear trauma as an identity card, their injuries used to incite outrage" (21).
"Latha had expected questions, an interrogation - but I had long since stopped asking women for the gory details of rape. I don't need to know. In the global plague of violence against women, the woman who pretends she is raped is an anomaly, driven by desperation in different ways. For the women I have worked with, rape is not a threat. It is an inevitability" (39).
"Try to understand this at any rate: if violence began this very evening and if exploitation and oppression had never existed on the earth, perhaps the slogans of nonviolence might end the quarrel. But if the whole regime, even your nonviolent ideas, are conditioned by a thousand-year-old oppression, your passivity serves only to place you in the ranks of the oppressors" (Sartre qtd. by Gowrinathan 56).
"'She says you have gotten fat.' I sigh. I explain that I have gotten divorced recently and have taken to sublimating emotional angst with breakfast sausage and chocolate coffees. Sandra is pleased. 'Ah. That is good. It is much easier to do political work when you are alone" (106).
"The impulse to condemn violence in the resistance (while implicitly condoning the violence of the state) is a moral imperative that matters very little to the lives this violence permeates. Nonviolent protest in the face of state violence (reliant on mobilizing the moral conscience of others) has long been the prescribed, progressive pathway to political change. To access this space, violated women are most often expected to wear trauma as an identity card, their injuries used to incite outrage" (21).
"Latha had expected questions, an interrogation - but I had long since stopped asking women for the gory details of rape. I don't need to know. In the global plague of violence against women, the woman who pretends she is raped is an anomaly, driven by desperation in different ways. For the women I have worked with, rape is not a threat. It is an inevitability" (39).
"Try to understand this at any rate: if violence began this very evening and if exploitation and oppression had never existed on the earth, perhaps the slogans of nonviolence might end the quarrel. But if the whole regime, even your nonviolent ideas, are conditioned by a thousand-year-old oppression, your passivity serves only to place you in the ranks of the oppressors" (Sartre qtd. by Gowrinathan 56).
"'She says you have gotten fat.' I sigh. I explain that I have gotten divorced recently and have taken to sublimating emotional angst with breakfast sausage and chocolate coffees. Sandra is pleased. 'Ah. That is good. It is much easier to do political work when you are alone" (106).
January 5, 2024
I wasn't sure I'd write a review of this, but it's interesting to look at some of the other reviews and it made me want to put my two cents down for the record. It seems a lot of people didn't like this book for two reasons that I very much relate to: one, it does not contain very much contextual information at all for the reader who's not well-informed about, for example, the Sri Lankan Civil War. Two, the structure is unconventional and sometimes confusing, especially at first.
Both of those things are true, and both really threw me early in the book, but by the end I didn't mind. I did some research on my own on basic facts about the conflicts under discussion, which I didn't mind because the topic is interesting and my lack of knowledge feels surprising (kind of the point). But also, not that much, because it's not actually needed to follow, at least in part, what Gowrinathan is saying.
This is not a history book, nor is it a sociology book. In part, it's the personal account of a Tamil activist and scholar with personal ties to the Tamil Tigers, and the cause of Tamil liberation. Partly it's also a polemic in a conversation about activism and politics, one statement in a larger and ongoing conversation that (I admit) only obliquely makes the statements it is responding too clear. This is a challenging book that demands attention and effort, but if you give it those things I think you'll be rewarded.
There's one passage that was one of my key moments with the book.
I think if I'd read that passage out of context before I read the book, as you may be now, it would have puzzled me. But when I read it, about two-thirds of the way through, I nodded my head excitedly; I knew exactly what Gowrinathan meant, and (I say this without necessarily saying I agree with everything she says or concludes) I agreed.
In other words: I learned a lot from this book, and it gave me a lot to think about.
Both of those things are true, and both really threw me early in the book, but by the end I didn't mind. I did some research on my own on basic facts about the conflicts under discussion, which I didn't mind because the topic is interesting and my lack of knowledge feels surprising (kind of the point). But also, not that much, because it's not actually needed to follow, at least in part, what Gowrinathan is saying.
This is not a history book, nor is it a sociology book. In part, it's the personal account of a Tamil activist and scholar with personal ties to the Tamil Tigers, and the cause of Tamil liberation. Partly it's also a polemic in a conversation about activism and politics, one statement in a larger and ongoing conversation that (I admit) only obliquely makes the statements it is responding too clear. This is a challenging book that demands attention and effort, but if you give it those things I think you'll be rewarded.
There's one passage that was one of my key moments with the book.
In a public conversation at Yale University, I was asked a question that would become a popular refrain in every lecture I gave: "Do you believe violence is empowering for women?" Before I could respond, a fellow panelist...quipped, "Well, of course, to hold a gun is to hold power. We all want that, but this is what we have to resist."
I do not agree with the question in the first place.
I think if I'd read that passage out of context before I read the book, as you may be now, it would have puzzled me. But when I read it, about two-thirds of the way through, I nodded my head excitedly; I knew exactly what Gowrinathan meant, and (I say this without necessarily saying I agree with everything she says or concludes) I agreed.
In other words: I learned a lot from this book, and it gave me a lot to think about.
December 20, 2025
Radicalizing Her: Why Women Choose Violence (Hardcover) is a memoir written by Nimmi Gowrinathan, a Sri Lankan feminist activist who moved to the U.S. in order to escape the Sri Lankan Civil War. I gained valuable insight into her firsthand accounts with female fighters from not just in Sri Lanka, but in Syria, Lebanon, Eretria, Pakistan, and Colombia. I appreciated getting a firsthand account of her personal war experiences in Sri Lanka, along with what she learned during her interviews with other female freedom fighters, along with why they chose to use brutal force in their fights for freedom. Being an activist is not easy, especially if you are a woman, because you will often face numerous criticism for protesting and for fighting what is right. Not only did these female activists get criticism for protesting, but they were also told that they were not fitting gender roles and that they should just mind their own business and not speak out on anything related to politics. Whenever they told their stories about the pain, torture, and abuse that they went through, they were often ignored and were told that they were exaggerating their stories and that they should have taken responsibility for their actions. The author uses these stories and the women's point of view to help defeat the myth that violence does nothing in solving political issues. I also got to know more about the long-term effects of the war on them, and everything that is being done to address their trauma. Overall, this was a great book, even though it was short, and I would recommend it to anyone interested in politics, history, leadership, or current events.
April 8, 2022
This is just amazing!
What an incredible book, I have been a recovering academic for the past four years and this book has finally broken my aversion to political feminist theory. My brain was just unable to retain any form of complex information like this for so long, but this magnificent boom is do damn well written its fantastic.
Buy one for you, one for each of your bffs, one for your mother, one for a stranger. Just go buy it.
Radicalizing her is a mix of journalistic and political nonfiction with a focus on the stories of former women-soldiers belonging to violent political organizations.
It is masterful. Go read it already
What an incredible book, I have been a recovering academic for the past four years and this book has finally broken my aversion to political feminist theory. My brain was just unable to retain any form of complex information like this for so long, but this magnificent boom is do damn well written its fantastic.
Buy one for you, one for each of your bffs, one for your mother, one for a stranger. Just go buy it.
Radicalizing her is a mix of journalistic and political nonfiction with a focus on the stories of former women-soldiers belonging to violent political organizations.
It is masterful. Go read it already
January 25, 2025
3.5 — Incredibly interesting and important yet historically neglected topic, the woman fighter/feminine resistance/violent revolution, and the author is clearly an expert and deserves to have space in this domain. However, it tried to cover a bit too much (Sri Lanka + Colombia + Mexico + on and on) in too little space, and the organization was a bit disjointed. It also read like a thesis, written for an audience of experts in the same field, so I had to do a good bit of background reading on the side.
April 30, 2024
Hard to read, both thematically and from the way it was written, though I have to confess, I had no prior knowledge of the struggle in Sri Lanka before, which I'd say was relevant for context.
One jumps from scene to scene, and each of them makes the reader ponder. After reading this, I have a feeling something in me changed, though I cannot pinpoint it at the moment.
The book is short, but one should be prepared to invest some time to understand it.
A good book.
One jumps from scene to scene, and each of them makes the reader ponder. After reading this, I have a feeling something in me changed, though I cannot pinpoint it at the moment.
The book is short, but one should be prepared to invest some time to understand it.
A good book.
September 3, 2021
3.5 stars, SOOOOO CLOSE to being four stars. The content is phenomenal and something that warrants deep discussion. But the author’s writing is… a bit too try-hard. She tries too hard to write very complex, philosophical sentences but they just read as disjointed and confusing. That aside, however, the content of the book was simply brilliant.
unfinished
September 5, 2021I found this to be, unfortunately, incoherent and unreadable. The organization within each chapter was nonexistent. The author assumes her audience understands the complicated histories of Sri Lanka and Colombia, and offers no historical context. I made it through only 30 pages of pure confusion before I gave up. This could have used a serious edit and a second draft.
July 16, 2022
While this text was dense within its limited page count, it was still engaging and interesting. It took me awhile to finish, putting it down for a few months and coming back to it, I am so glad I completed it. I encourage everyone to give this text a read. It may take time and it definitely takes focus, but it is so worth it.
January 12, 2024
I love and embrace the knowledge that the author adquire through the interviews she had with all these amazing woman and decided to share with us, I can’t help to feel that it needed a little bit more structure so it could lead the readers to a more specific conclusion, never the less I appreciate all the perspectives that I could read, and that is why I give it 4 stars.
April 19, 2024
An important book for rethinking our ideals of “peace” and “nonviolence”, as well as the oppressive structures they hold in place.
P.d. It reveals that the western world’s sense of security requires actively denying and controlling the capacity of other bodies to exercise violence — of being a certain kind of political subject.
P.d. It reveals that the western world’s sense of security requires actively denying and controlling the capacity of other bodies to exercise violence — of being a certain kind of political subject.
July 17, 2021
An important book about women who choose to fight and how society forever tries to pigeonhole females into passive, peaceful roles. An important book about women, anger, and the stupidity and harm of stereotyping.
September 1, 2021
Damn.
I wanted to love and learn from this book, but the other reviews are right. Radicalizing Her was disjointed, impossible to follow, and frustrating. Powerful quotes from the interviewees were buried in a confusing narrative structure. It was exhausting trying to dig them out.
I wanted to love and learn from this book, but the other reviews are right. Radicalizing Her was disjointed, impossible to follow, and frustrating. Powerful quotes from the interviewees were buried in a confusing narrative structure. It was exhausting trying to dig them out.
October 20, 2021
There's theoretically an important issue here, but the book itself is horribly scattered. It bounces from interview quotes to the author's personal life to anecdotes to theorizing and none of these are fleshed out.
November 2, 2021
A well written, complex narrative that tells an important tale of those without a voice. The writing style was flawless, and I really enjoyed it. I don't know what you're talking about, R C and others. It was an absolute masterpiece.
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