The familialization of terrorism and the securitization of the family: gendered narratives of infantilization and demonization

Abstract

This article examines the recent proliferation of gendered narratives underpinning and shaping counter-terrorism laws, policies, and practices. Looking specifically at the United Kingdom, there has been shift in the place of women and gender within international and national security discourses and practices, from historic absence to contemporary presence and influence. The article identifies and critiques some of the gendered and racialized tropes through which Muslim women involved in or associated with Islamist terrorism have been represented since the advent of the ‘War on Terror’. Gendered narratives that oscillate between infantilizing and demonizing Muslim women underline, and are manifested in, two particularly important shifts in the global counter-terrorism landscape: the familialization of (Islamist) terrorism and the securitization of the (Muslim) family. These changes – which foreground the importance of the private realm in understanding and countering terrorism, and have turned the attention of the security state to the relationship between private intimacies and public threats – rest on gendered assumptions and have gendered implications. Their power is most clearly seen in the rhetoric of the family judiciary in cases that have recently emerged in the English family courts dealing with the radicalization of children and their construction of three discursive figures: the radicalized girl, the radicalized woman/wife, and the radicalized mother.