Description
Terrorists have a strategic interest in rendering themselves visible or invisible at different times in different ways (see Mortensen 2019: 911), for example making themselves visible to spread terror, or invisible to ensure their own safety. As the scholarship demonstrates, terrorism is both a highly gendered realm, with terrorists’ representations following deeply gendered narratives, and a highly visual phenomenon. In this article, I explore the role of gender in rendering terrorism and terrorists (in)visible. Specifically, I argue that terrorists break or conform to dominant gender roles in their visual self-representations to render themselves (in)visible according to their strategic goals. From the Islamic State’s pictures of "jihadi brides" plastered over newspapers’ front pages, to the right-wing movement "Identitäre Bewegung" (linked to the recent terror attack in New Zealand) having left the militarised masculine Neonazi look behind in favour of images of modern, urban men in "hipster" style, to male members of Boko Haram dressing up as women to gain access to certain areas – gender matters to terrorism’s (in)visibility. Within a poststructuralist-feminist framework, I discuss this intersection of visuality, terrorism and gender that can contribute to understanding terrorists’ communications and thus also enable more effective counter-terrorism messaging.
