Female Suicide Bombers and Autonomy

Abstract

My aim in this chapter is to consider which theoretical understandings of autonomy are useful and appropriate for interpreting real-life violent women and for attributing them with autonomy where this might be fitting. I focus on the example of female suicide bombers because such women are often denied agency, as I will show. And — insofar as our goal in this collection is to recognize agency — if they and their actions can be better illuminated on certain philosophical frameworks, then such approaches, I argue, are to be preferred. To explore this, I first briefly illustrate the tendency to distort the agency of the bombers. I second examine which theoretical models of relational autonomy, procedural or substantive, might more fully represent their autonomy. I argue that common understandings of female bombers are problematic because they are based on societal (patriarchal, oppressive) norms about what women should be or can do, and that procedural theories of autonomy less satisfactorily capture the social self and degrees of autonomy than substantive notions. Thus, if better representations of the autonomy of violent women are being sought, substantive relational theories of autonomy should be preferred over procedural ones.