Saving the Enemy

Abstract

The growing number of female suicide bombers in the Muslim world has recently received a lot of attention by academics and journalists in the West. This developing literature has tended to understand these women as victims or pawns of Islamic patriarchy. This article offers critical review of the causal accounts of female suicide bombing in order to show how these discourses of victimization reify a masculinist justification for American empire. This narrative of empire produces Islam as a religion/culture of patriarchy and, thus, reads Muslim women as needing rescue from their religion and their men in order to validate military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan. Working from the post-colonial insights of Gayatri Spivak, this article argues that female suicide bombers reflect a subaltern status in the war on terror. As such, these conceptualizations of the causes of female suicide bombing proffer a narrative of masculine rescue against the barbaric force of Islamic patriarchy, rendering the war on terror as a homoterritorial war over masculine dominance in the region.