ABSTRACT
The ‘Jihadi Bride’ as a media icon is a figure that is neither human nor woman but coalesced through conflict and worship of an Eastern God. Drawing heavily on the orientalist gaze where her body is given over to the male terrorist, she emerges as the ‘nomadic subject’ and subsequently as a stateless entity who can’t be integrated into any land. Mutilated through her associations and vilified through the monster male terrorist, the Jihadi Bride is the ‘Other within the Other’, exemplifying feminism’s inability to claim or redeem her. In negating her as a unitary subject, she is projected as an entity incapable of consuming and producing desire within a landscape of advanced capitalism and its technological mediation of the corporeal and its senses. The Jihadi Bride, located through a mediated visuality of viral circulation and instant gratification, is a dislocated iconic entity who mediates between fantasy and the forbidden.
