Sexual economies of war and sexual technologies of the body: Militarised Muslim masculinity and the Islamist production of concubines for the caliphate

Abstract

abstractThis article analyses sexuality and subjugation in the context of Islamist militarism. It examines how the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and Boko Haram style themselves upon narratives of Islamist militancy that appear to be historically authentic narratives of Muslim militarism read out of classical legal texts. The article argues instead that because ISIS and Boko Haram read these narratives through contemporary understandings of militarism using contemporary sexual technologies of the body, they also read these narratives in entirely contemporary and modern ways. The product of this reading is therefore also a contemporary form of Islamist militarism, using contemporary sexual technologies of the body. The justifications for these modern enactments of militarism, law and sexual subjugation are not to be found in the historical texts, but in the modern readings of the text. To illustrate these modern readings of sexuality and subjugation, I take up three publications produced by ISIS, and further, two online fatwas (legal opinions). Viewed against their historical precedents, the first reveal the aberrant nature of ISIS and Boko Haram style sexual subjugation in terms of historical legal practice. The online fatwas reveal how ordinary Muslims have come to conceptualise the intersections of war and sex in ways contrary to the practices of ISIS and Boko Haram.