Radicalizing Her: Why Women Choose Violence

by Nimmi Gowrinathan

Overview

An urgent corrective to the erasure of the female fighter from narratives on gender and power, demanding that we see all women as political actors.

“Violence, for me, and for the women I chronicle in this book, is simply a political reality.”

Though the female fighter is often seen as an anomaly, women make up nearly 30% of militant movements worldwide. Historically, these women—viewed as victims, weak-willed wives, and prey to Stockholm Syndrome—have been deeply misunderstood. Radicalizing Her holds the female fighter up in all her complexity as a kind of mirror to contemporary conversations on gender, violence, and power. The narratives at the heart of the book are centered in the Global South, and extend to a criticism of the West’s response to the female fighter, revealing the arrayed forces that have driven women into battle and the personal and political elements of these decisions.

Gowrinathan, whose own family history is intertwined with resistance, spent nearly twenty years in conversation with female fighters in Sri Lanka, Eritrea, Pakistan, and Colombia. The intensity of these interactions consistently unsettled her assumptions about violence, re-positioning how these women were positioned in relation to power. Gowrinathan posits that the erasure of the female fighter from narratives on gender and power is not only dangerous but also, anti-feminist.

She argues for a deeper, more nuanced understanding of women who choose violence noting in particular the tendency of contemporary political discourse to parse the world into for—and against—camps: an understanding of motivations to fight is read as condoning violence, and oppressive agendas are given the upper hand by the moral imperative to condemn it.

Coming at a political moment that demands an urgent re-imagining of the possibilities for women to resist, Radicalizing Her reclaims women’s roles in political struggles on the battlefield and in the streets.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807055465
Publisher:	Beacon Press
Publication date:	02/22/2022
Pages:	152
Sales rank:	496,787
Product dimensions:	5.07(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.45(d)

About the Author

Nimmi Gowrinathan’s writing on the female fighter has been featured in publications as varied as Vice, Harper’s Magazine, Foreign Policy, Freeman’s Journal, Guernica Magazine, and The New York Times, among others. She is the Publisher of Adi Magazine, a literary magazine aiming to rehumanize policy, and creator of the Female Fighters Series at Guernica Magazine. She is Professor and the Director of the Politics of Sexual Violence Initiative at the City College of New York. Follow her work at deviarchy.com and on Twitter (nimmideviarchy).

Table of Contents

Introduction

SITES OF STRUGGLE

CHAPTER 1
a Battlefield

CHAPTER 2
The Stage

CHAPTER 3
The Streets

THE BATTLEFIELD

CHAPTER 4
A Panel: The Third Line

CHAPTER 5
The Second Line

CHAPTER 6
The Front Lines

Acknowledgments
Notes
Credits

Editorial Reviews

A captivating, essential perspective on a neglected conversation.”
—Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

“A seminal and original work of simply outstanding scholarship that will be met with substantial appreciation by both academia and the non-specialist general reader.”
—Midwest Book Review

"In her incisive new book Radicalizing Her: Why Women Choose Violence, Dr. Nimmi Gowrinathan presents a pressing analysis that reveals just how little the struggles or achievements of female fighters in other countries are valued by mainstream white feminists."
—The Baffler

“Nimmi Gowrinathan has a political imagination like no other. It is playful, yet profound; it is compelling, yet unimposing; it is unafraid of complexity, yet always pushing us toward clarity. With its agile prose and completely innovative form, this book gripped me from beginning to end, forever changing the way I understand how women emerge from layers of oppression and systematic state violence—and teach themselves how to fight back.”
—Valeria Luiselli, author of Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions

“Radicalizing Her stands out for its clear-eyed exploration of a little-understood human terrain. Talking with former female fighters, and writing in an intimate, often poetic style, Gowrinathan examines the relationship between women, power, and violence in a bracing, sometimes wrenching narrative. This is a book born out of a great degree of personal commitment, and the author deserves high praise for her persistence.”
—Jon Lee Anderson, author of Che Guevara

“Dr. Gowrinathan has spent two decades with women militants—and this brilliant, lyrical book is both a meditative engagement with the aftershocks of state violence and an explosive exercise in telling deeply uncomfortable truths about the gendered lens of our social outlook. This is the kind of book that will unravel your understanding of the world. Reading Gowrinathan is a rare treat: when she narrates a story, she is as gripping and lyrical as Arundhati Roy—when she presents her philosophical takeaways on violence, she is precise and incisive, the Hannah Arendt of our times.”
—Meena Kandasamy, author of When I Hit You

From the Publisher

01/18/2021

Gowrinathan, a journalist and director of the Politics of Sexual Violence Initiative at the City College of New York, debuts with a nuanced and deeply reported look at female guerilla fighters and what motivates them to take up arms. Though often portrayed as an “anomaly,” female fighters “make up nearly 30 percent of militant movements worldwide,” Gowrinathan writes. Raw, in-depth interviews with members of the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, FARC in Colombia, and other resistance movements reveal that violence is both a “political reality” and “the only option to access power” for Gowrinathan’s subjects, who have legitimate rage against their oppressors and are passionately committed to saving their communities. Gowrinathan also critiques Western progressives who expect victimized women to “wear trauma as an identity card” in order to incite public outrage, and finds fault with NGO programs that attempt to rehabilitate ex-fighters by teaching them traditionally feminine skills, such as embroidery, rather than providing the legal help they need. Blending academic research, reflections on her own family’s connection to the Tamil separatist movement, and the harrowing yet often empowering stories of women who choose to fight, Gowrinathan casts a thorny subject in a revealing new light. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

02/12/2021

In this debut, journalist Gowrinathan (director, Politics of Sexual Violence Initiative) analyzes the motivations of women resistance fighters, explaining how contemporary explorations of resistance movements omit or stereotype women. Over a ten-year period, she interviewed former resistance fighters in Sri Lanka, Colombia, and Syria in order to learn more about their motivations for participating. She finds that women are primed to join movements when they have become politically minded because of state oppression. Gowrinathan focuses her analysis on several thematic areas, including sexual violence, guns, reintegration, culture, and territory. She emphasizes women fighters' desire to continue to exist rather than adhering to ideologies. The analysis also critically interrogates Western feminist theory, which underpins current discourse on women fighters and empowerment. However, readers unfamiliar with conflicts in Sri Lanka, Colombia, or Syria will need to obtain background information elsewhere. VERDICT While the author compactly lays the groundwork for research on resistance movements, readers may long for more details of and resolutions for the interview subjects, as well as a broader international scope. Best suited for serious students of the nature of extremism in the modern world.—Rebekah Kati, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Library Journal

★ 2021-01-23
An intimate dive into the lives of female freedom fighters in the Global South, correcting long-standing American misconceptions of women, violence, and politics.

As the director of the Politics of Sexual Violence Initiative at the City College of New York, Gowrinathan is perfectly equipped to tackle this significant yet overlooked subject, and she forces readers to reckon with the erasure of freedom fighters as political actors. Interspersed with her own family’s history with resistance in Sri Lanka, the author uses a combination of sociological critique, philosophical texts, political theory, and interviews she conducted over the span of 20 years to provide a new understanding of gender and power. “Violence, for me, and for the women I chronicle in this book, is simply a political reality,” she writes. Though the author is astute in her analysis of the complex issues at play, she is candid about her inability to offer concrete solutions. “As a part of a lifelong project that took shape in the image of the female fighter,” she writes, “Radicalizing Heris open-ended: offering no recommendations, only an exploration of new landscapes of political possibility.” Regardless, this book is a well-informed jumping-off point for any further study. From the heart-wrenching separation of Kala, a Tamil Tiger fighter, and her mother, Latha, who sought refuge in London, to Sandra, the senior commander in Bogotá’s branch of the FARC, the Marxist guerrilla group in Colombia, Gowrinathan examines the roles of rape, marriage, motherhood, and policies to create a necessarily complicated picture of why some women choose violence and some choose nonviolence as their preferred form of resistance. “Our view of the female fighter has been obstructed by both the moral compulsion to decry violent resistance and a societal drive to divide categories of thought along gendered lines,” writes the author, and this limited view perpetuates a host of oppressive myths about female fighters, myths that she corrects in this powerful book.

A captivating, essential perspective on a neglected conversation.

Kirkus Reviews