ABSTRACT

This example fi ts perfectly the current models that we have of the re-imposition of cultural norms after the end of armed struggle. Scholarly and popular analyses of armed mobilization of women are premised on the assumption that such mobilization may be understood as a form of emancipation from “traditional society” that is then interrupted by the demobilization of armed women. Potential demobilization into “traditional society” is often presented as the scenario that would trigger re-imposition of normative gender rules. The most prominent cited example is that of the expansion of possibilities for European and American married women to work in World War II and their subsequent pushback to the home upon the return of male soldiers from war. In this chapter, I wish to discuss the dynamics of mobilization and potential demobilization. I argue that the ways in which ex-militants were made into civilian women again were not only because militancy promised emancipation from caste and gendered roles – the conventional assumption in scholarly studies of female militancy – but because in this case, LTTE militancy explicitly maintained such gender norms for civilian women through its arming of some women. While the voluminous literature on female militancy has been on whether these women are “agents” or “victims,” I suggest that the mere fact of possessing agency is only the beginning of scholarly inquiry. Instead, what is most important is to understand how that agency is shaped and mobilized and opposed to other categories of gendered roles. The militant woman has to be understood not only through the non-combatant woman she once was but the contemporaneous non-combatant woman against whom she is actively posed. A focus only on the sensationalized and often sexualized body of the female militant can in fact fetishize the

militant by associating the exceptional as emancipatory and foreclosing a deeper understanding of shifting gender roles within Tamil society.