Description
When those deemed terrorist die they are remembered in multiple ways, from television shows, to political speeches, video games and beyond. In this paper we offer a discursive analyses of mainstream newspaper obituaries of prominent ‘terrorist’ figures from Abu Nidal to Manuel Marulanda, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and beyond. These obituaries, we argue, reproduce dominant constructions of gender in their efforts to simultaneously appraise and biographise their subjects’ lives. Thus, on the one hand, we encounter depictions of the public ‘work’ and personas of terrorists as physically imposing soldiers, unrepentant in their use of violence to 'mastermind' ‘spectacular and brutal terrorist actions’. These stereotypical constructions of masculinity, however, are nuanced by feminised depictions of their private lives and relationships, such as bin Laden’s willingness ‘to submit to dressings down by his mother’. Taking these constructions seriously, we argue, sheds further light on the gendering of terrorist discourse and memory in this relatively neglected genre.
