Description
What roles did beliefs about gender and gender roles have in Western women’s decision to engage with and disengage from the Islamic State? The IS used religion to justify a patriarchal structure in the territory it controlled, with women considered subordinate to men and spending most of their time in their homes (Spencer 2016). As a result, much of the literature on these women describes them as passive victims of the organisation (Ali 2015, Ahram 2015, Chatterjee 2016), even if they joined voluntarily for political and religious reasons (Loken and Zelenz 2017). They are speculated to have found their domestic roles frustrating or disappointing, especially coming from societies that valued female emancipation (Peresin 2015, Peresin and Cervone 2015). But for Western women, travelling to Syria to join the IS could have also felt emancipatory (Kneip 2016). It is therefore not yet clear if the IS’ gender roles affected women’s decisions to join or leave the IS. This paper responds to this gap by exploring Western women's the impact that the organisation’s gendered structures and the feminine ideals it promoted had on women’s decision-making. Using cognitive mapping to analyse a collection of media interviews with Western IS women, this study investigates how expected gendered behaviours affected their engagement with and disengagement from the IS.
