Doctoral Researcher Imtashal Tariq Publishes New Article on Women and Violence

UMass Political Science doctoral student Imtashal Tariq published a new article this week in Criminology and Criminal Justice, entitled “Women and Violent Extremism: Concepts and Theories.”

According to the abstract, ““Women” who engage in “violent extremism” are often portrayed in ways that disassociate femininity from agency in violence, sensationalize the violence that women do commit, and manipulate traits associated with femininity to portray women’s violence as femininity gone wrong. The study of “women” and “violent extremism” suffers on a variety of levels. First, both the category of “women” and the label of “violent extremism” are definitionally fraught, political, and politicized. Second, there are gendered obstructions to recovering and representing histories of women’s engagement in violent extremism that make learning about the extent of the relevant behavior difficult at best. Third, both existing theories themselves and the existing contours of the enterprise of theorizing “women” and “violent extremisms” make the project of figuring out why “women” commit “violent extremist” acts both difficult and problematic. But why “women” engage in “violent extremism” is only an interesting question if you believe that women necessarily have something in common. Otherwise, why “women” engage in any given behavior is not any different than why people engage in that same behavior. We argue that, rather than focusing on a causal relationship between an essentialist understanding of gender and a politicized understanding of “violent extremism,” it is more productive to think about the role that gender plays in shaping “violent extremism,” conceptually and as it is practiced across a wide variety of groups and locations around the world. “Violent extremism” is indeed gendered, just not in the simple way where some generic motivation can be assigned to the participation of “women” therein.”