Abstract
In The Monstrous and the Vulnerable, Leonie B. Jackson offers a refreshing critical analysis of the British media’s representational war against the Islamic State (IS) by focusing on how 10 high-profile British “jihadi brides” were presented for public consumption. Situating her analysis in feminist studies, international politics, and media studies, Jackson undertakes a frame analysis of 966 mainstream British news articles published between 2013 and 2019 to answer two questions: How are female British migrants to IS territory represented by the mainstream print media, and what were the consequences of these representations? In six illuminating chapters, Jackson argues that British “jihadi brides” were framed and narrated through gendered, classed, and racialized frames that represented them as either “monstrous women” or “vulnerable girls.” She argues that the media’s construction of these women through these dual identities critically informed how the British state and public explored possibilities for action against these women.
While analyses of the IS, the global war on terror, and Muslim-led political violence largely focus on men as subjects of analysis and use a securitization framework that emphasizes men’s radicalization, Jackson’s work offers us the gendered insight we need to understand how the media frames the role and motivations of women-as-agents within a politically violent movement. Throughout the book, and especially in chapter one, she problematizes the media’s inclination to reproduce the securitization discourse in explaining the motivations of women migrants to IS territory. Drawing on intersectional feminism, she argues that the intricate complexities of the figure of the “jihadi bride” in media representation necessitate a distinction from men’s representation as political agents. Specifically, the “jihadi bride” fails to fall neatly within the category of the “jihadi terrorist.” Instead, she operates as a pariah femininity, disrupting and unsettling hegemonic femininity by supporting violence and sometimes perpetrating violence, while also migrating to IS territory to serve the patriarchal goals of the IS through feminized and reproductive labor.
Chapters one and three acutely illustrate the complexities and inconsistencies in the representation and understanding of British “jihadi brides,” while chapters four and five focus explicitly on the representation of specific “jihadi brides” who fit the ideal types of vulnerable victims and monstrous mothers. In chapter three, Jackson explores the media’s use of the “grooming” to explain the migration of “jihadi brides.” Expanding on her argument in chapter one, she further complicates the media’s utilization of frameworks of radicalization, child sexual exploitation, and lack of agency as explanations for these women’s migration. Chapter four builds on the grooming example to unpack the vulnerable victims/damsel-in-distress storyline, illustrating that depictions of vulnerability were contingent on classed and racialized symbols of British belonging, which involved framing these women as British-but-not-quite-British due to their academic achievements, racial and ethnic identities, and immigrant class backgrounds. Chapter five explores the representation of the monstrous woman as a gender traitor and bad mother. Using the examples of three high-profile women, Jackson unpacks how monstrous women were framed as beyond redemption and suitable for elimination due to their transgressions of femininity and gendered expectations of motherhood.
Jackson’s final chapter builds on chapter two’s metaphorical analysis of the “natural and supernatural” as tools that homogenize and dehumanize “jihadi brides,” and uses the examples of Shamima Begum and Sally Jones to show how the construction of the dual identities of the monstrous and the vulnerable were effective for developing and justifying the state’s management strategies, one of which was elimination (Jones) and the other revoking of citizenship (Begum).
Ultimately, Jackson’s book is a well-written analysis and deconstruction of gendered discourse and representation of Muslim women’s role in politically violent movements. While repetitive in some argumentative respects, Jackson offers critical nuances in deconstructing the representational complexities of the lives, motivations, and identities of these “jihadi brides.” For example, in chapters four and five, she offers an excellent discussion of the discursive transformation that occurs when these women migrate to IS territory, whereby they are “passive and reactive prior to their migration, and supernaturally altered and monsterized on arrival” (p. 79). Similarly, in chapter five, she offers another excellent nuance regarding the supposed threat that Muslim women pose due to their role as mothers and hence, as reproducers of culture and ideology within the ungovernable, un-regulated, and “un-surveillable private sphere” (p. 171). An expansion of these points would have been welcome, as would have an explicit comparison of the representational framings of specific British Muslim male migrants to IS territory in the first chapter. Regardless, this book is ideal for scholars in feminist, racialization, and terrorism studies who seek to complicate understandings of female participants of political violence.