ABSTRACT
This chapter reconsiders the female terrorist of the current wars in relation to an older set of ideas surrounding female combatants in the mid-to late-twentieth century wars of decolonization, civil wars (like the ones in Central America), and anti-imperialist struggles. We have often heard that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter,” condensing the issue to a matter of perspective. I argue here, rather, that the female combatant has gone through an historical transformation from “freedom fighter” to “terrorist” by committing acts of violence represented as in line with neoliberal ideology. In particular, I contend that the appearance of the female suicide bomber on the historical stage expresses an ideology of dispossession that feeds neoliberal forms of aggressive possessiveness. That is, neoliberalism envisions a liberal social contract dispossessing citizenship of rights and association much in the same way that a colonial state dispossessed the colonized of their culture in the political and symbolic exchange it imposed on those under its governance. Though both colonialism and neoliberalism meet with, on the surface, similar violent oppositional reactions, they each induce rather different political framing. I am not advocating or defending suicide bombing nor expressing any kind of agreement with it; rather, I oppose suicide bombing partly because I see it as the last desperate recourse for the extreme forms of political alienation that neoliberalism invests in its subjects.
