ABSTRACT

This chapter looks at gender and terrorism by starting at the same place that feminism did in International Relations (IR): with the women as per Cynthia Enloe. It describes the gendered hierarchical international system and how this automatically connotes legitimacy onto states and illegitimacy onto politically violent non-state actors, even if both states and non-states are using the same style of violence. The gender hierarchy forms and informs the perceived moral legitimacy of states versus non-state terrorist actors, which has only recently begun to be interrogated, with queer theory being the latest inroad. Gender hierarchy is often associated with Raewyn Connell and James Messerschmidt's work on 'hegemonic masculinity', where one form of masculinity dominates other masculinities and all femininities. The chapter concludes with the recent work on queering IR and Terrorism Studies, as sexuality is central to gender hierarchy of the international system and to the study of terrorism.