Description
Female agents of political violence have gained increasing public and academic attention in the last 15 to 20 years. Seeking to trouble the multiplicity of gendered binaries around which (women’s) terrorism is rendered (un)intelligible, critical and especially feminist scholars have centred academic, media, popular cultural, and policy discourses. Yet, legal contexts have thus far largely escaped feminist scrutiny. In this paper, I argue that legal settings are important sites to interrogate the social construction of female political violence. Domestic proceedings are especially fascinating as they are structured around the encounter of women stylised as terrorists and various societal actors (not) doing this stylising. In this sense, the courtroom as a space of sense- and ‘truth’-making is a theatre in which the institutionalized violence of the state meets the violence of the terrorist subject against the backdrop of larger societal structures of power. Drawing on courtroom ethnographic data generated on multiple terrorism trials in Germany, I showcase the unique potential courtrooms offer to interrogate the relational, embodied and culturally as well as historically contingent dynamics inherent in gendered discourses on anti-state violence.
