Description
This paper examines how media reporting in the United Kingdom on the so-called ‘jihadi brides’ continues to create and perpetuate racialised and gendered narratives. In 2015, the so-called ‘phenomenon’ of women traveling to join the Islamic State seemed to have taken over the news, with regular mentions of disbelief of why they would decide to leave their ideal Western lives to join a barbaric terrorist group. Media portrayals typically assume that they were forced into it by men in their lives, describing a gendered and racialised ideal where these ‘innocent young women’ are seduced into joining IS. The paper seeks to interrogate the relationship between the media and the government, as arms of the state, in the UK, and examine the media landscape and its nature, particularly when it comes to discourses of and about terrorism. The paper seeks to examine how this relationship perpetuates the dominant cultural order, in which dominant and colonial representations of gendered and racialised identities are sustained. Furthermore, the paper seeks to question how terrorism studies (both critical and ‘mainstream’) have neglected examining the media landscape in the UK and how the media acts in tandem with the government in complicity to perpetuate colonial discourses.
