The writing of heroines: Motherhood and female agency in political violence

Introduction

This article employs a post-structuralist feminist perspective to explore how female agency in political violence is discursively constructed through gender. It argues that representations of female agency in political violence told as heroine stories involve a tension between life-giving and life-taking identities, and that agency is only enabled if this tension is removed or overcome. Thus, the construction of heroines seems to depend on ideas of female bodies’ association with motherhood: motherhood seems to function as heroism’s constitutive other. What is more, the negotiation of agency through motherhood (or the lack of motherhood) means that an essentialist understanding of gender is constantly being reinforced in representations of female agency in political violence. This is problematic because an essentialist approach to gender proceeds from the assumption that sex/gender can be easily and objectively read from the body of the human subject. Accordingly, it fails to acknowledge the power invested in and forced upon female bodies through processes of subjectification and how ‘woman’ gets ‘said’ (Zalewski, 2000: 69). I suggest that we cannot understand female agency in political violence without paying attention to motherhood. In the theoretical and methodological framework of the next section, I relate to and build upon feminist contributions to literature on gender, agency and political violence, as well as theorizing of motherhood/maternalism. Furthermore, with this article I also aim to emphasize how understandings of ‘gender’, ‘security’ or ‘international politics’ are not limited to certain discursive spaces, to written texts or to particular ‘political’ contexts. Subsequently, I have chosen to illustrate my argument by using the mass media’s presentation of a ‘real’ case, together with a fictional case from popular culture. I put ‘real’ within citation marks because I see both ‘real’ and fictional cases as representations of events. I seek to demonstrate how the writing of heroines depends on notions of motherhood in both types of representations. As a result, the theoretical and methodological framework includes contributions that have engaged with visual and cultural analyses of international politics.

The two empirical cases have been chosen because of their exceptional focus on gender and heroism. First of all, Female Agents is a French/British-produced popular film from 2008 that was promoted with the slogan: ‘In times of war, heroism is not just for men.’ The film’s plot was inspired by the women who served as secret agents during World War II, when France was occupied by Germany. The subtitle on the DVD cover emphasizes the importance of these women, stating: ‘D-Day depends on them.’ The film follows four female agents – Louise, Jeanne, Gaelle and Suzy – who, after rescuing a British geologist from a military hospital in Normandy, are sent to Paris with instructions to kill an influential Nazi officer. In Paris, all of the agents but Jeanne soon find themselves caught by the Germans. Gaelle commits suicide in prison; Suzy is killed by the Nazi officer (who happens to be her former fiancé); while Louise, the main character, is tortured while in captivity before being rescued by Jeanne. At the end of the film, Jeanne diverts attention to herself to enable Louise to kill the Nazi officer, and is subsequently arrested. In the closing credits, we learn that Jeanne was eventually hanged in a concentration camp. Louise is thus the only one of the four agents who survives the war. Even though the film seemingly writes all of the female agents involved as heroines, it is Jeanne who – in comparison with the other three – is portrayed as the ‘real’ heroine throughout the film, which culminates in her sacrificing her own life for the mission. Thus, for the purpose of this article, I will pay particular attention to the way in which Jeanne is constructed as a heroine.

The second empirical case used in this article is that of Faye Turney, who was one of 15 British sailors and marines captured and held hostage in Iran for two weeks in the spring of 2007. Turney was not just the sole woman in the group, she was also a mother – a fact that was revealed on the fourth day of the group’s captivity when the Sun’s front-page headline declared, ‘Let Mummy Go’ (Newton Dunn and Parker, 2007), the words written in childish handwriting as though they were a message from her daughter. Once this information became known, most media representation focused on Turney and her role as a mother. Initially, she was the ‘Hero Mum’ (Coles, 2007), but a debate that started by questioning a mother’s role in the military soon turned into a debate regarding women’s roles in the military services altogether. After two weeks, the captives were dressed in suits, taken to see Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, pardoned and released. Once they were safely back in the UK, the Ministry of Defence opted to allow the hostages to sell their stories owing to the ‘exceptional media interest’ (Woodward and Taylor, 2007). Faye Turney was offered and accepted close to £100,000 to talk about ‘her ordeal’ in the Sun and in an hour-long interview with one of the UK’s main terrestrial television channels, ITV. ¹

The temporalities and spatialities of these two empirical cases may seem very different. However, each case forms part of discursive practices that construct knowledge about gender, agency and political violence in the cultural context within which this analysis was undertaken. In other words, both separately and in combination, these cases tell us something about how gender, agency and political violence are communicated and understood in a Western (British) culture permeated by a highly mediatized and visualized ‘war on terror’ with narratives of sacrifice, heroism, freedom, and ‘good guys’ versus ‘bad guys’. Crucially, although the storyline of Female Agents concerns heroism during World War II, the film came out in 2008. Accordingly, Female Agents is still produced, understood and made sense of within a Western ‘war on terror’ context.

Theoretical and methodological framework

Agency, political violence and motherhood

In contemporary (Western) cultural representations, women are seemingly portrayed as being unable to kill because they are, or could be, mothers. Importantly, however, what is considered appropriate or ‘natural’ feminine behaviour for women or mothers can shift dramatically within relatively short periods of time and by geographical location. As an example, historian Joanna Bourke (1999: 311) points to the American frontier, where hand-to-hand combat with the indigenous population was considered appropriate behaviour for the good American wife and mother. Furthermore, femininity has also been claimed as the reason for women’s participation in violence. According to this logic, women that kill do so because they are super-feminine. Miriam Cooke (1996: 36) argues that although such female combatants are sometimes caricatured and often feared, they command a much higher social prestige. Explanations for why women kill have also been linked to their maternal nature. According to this narrative, maternal passions, biological urges, transform women into fearsome killers. The argument is that women would have little difficulty killing in defence of their husbands, lovers and children (Bourke, 1999: 318, 321; Sjoberg and Gentry, 2007).

This discourse of motherhood explains women’s participation in violence as performances of ‘natural’ femininity, and thereby supports women’s roles as caring, nurturing and protecting their children, husbands or lovers. What is more, while this discourse enables agency, as the subject is performing ‘natural’ femininity along a maternal role, such a maternal relationship does not have to be biological. To use an example from popular culture, Sigourney Weaver as ‘Ripley’ in the science-fiction film Aliens is a fierce protector of a young girl called Newt, ‘promising her own death if need be to save the girl from the Alien Mama’ (Bundtzen, 2000: 105; see also Cooke, 1996: 36). Thus, this discourse of motherhood influences stories where female agency in political violence is explained through reference to the subject’s maternal relationship to others.

In contrast to cases where the subject performs femininity through a naturalized life-giving identity, female subjects are also represented as agents of political violence through masculinity and a lack of motherhood. Here, the subject departs from the norms and boundaries of femininity and a naturalized life-giving identity through being, for example, childless by choice, masculine, gay or a prostitute. Such representations incorporate a number of different and distinctive subject positions, but the common denominator is that the subject is already acting outside the boundaries of ‘natural’ femininity and is therefore not considered a ‘normal’ or ‘real’ woman anyway. These subjects are masculinized. Stereotypically, the gay woman is not interested in the act of ‘natural’ (heterosexual) reproduction, the masculine woman can ‘do it as a man’, and the prostitute is not using her womb for the act of procreation but her body for economic gain and is in this sense empowered. Examples include the popular film G.I. Jane (1997) about the first (fictional) woman to undergo training with the US Naval Special Warfare Group. As Terrell Carver notes, G.I Jane demonstrates the masculinization of the female body, because in order to turn G.I Jane’s soft, feminine body into a hard machine, it needs to be militarized – and this means masculinized:

O’Neil has to train hard, and she loses her period (the female physician describes this as ‘normal’ for female athletes). In the end she does well enough humping a very large man off a battlefield, albeit with buddy-assistance, and well enough to pass all the other physical hurdles, including pain endurance and psychological resilience. When she shouts ‘Suck my dick!’, context and metaphor triumph over all, and she’s in. (Carver, 2007: 314, emphasis added)

In this way, subjects are disciplined as subjects with agency through references to their lack of/difference from femininity and, I argue, a lack of motherhood. This is because these subjects are not using their capacity to give life, but are in fact ‘unable’ to perform motherhood. These subjects have agency in political violence precisely because they are already acting outside the boundaries of ‘natural’ femininity. The writing of these subjects as heroines and agents of political violence depends on the fact that the subject is lacking ‘natural’ femininity as in being caring, maternal or using her womb for procreation. In other words, in these discursive practices, agency in political violence is enabled at the expense of a life-giving identity; agency is enabled instead of motherhood. As I develop further below, I suggest that these subjects whose agency in political violence is enabled at the expense of their motherhood are seen to constitute a minority and are thus marginalized as different from – but ultimately not threatening to – the norm of ‘natural’ femininity. Importantly, this means that motherhood and a naturalized life-giving identity are still communicated as that which is different from the violent subject. Thus, even where representations of female agency in political violence are constructed as heroine stories at the expense of motherhood, motherhood is still present as a naturalized constitutive other.

Female Agents: Heroism and agency at the expense of motherhood

As already noted, Female Agents is a film about heroines and heroism. However, interestingly, the film also relates several narratives of motherhood. One of the agents, Suzy, had previously been pregnant but had given the baby up for adoption as the father was a German soldier:

Most obviously, however, motherhood is told through the pregnancy of the main character, Louise – more specifically, in terms of how Louise finds out that she is pregnant with her dead husband’s child, how she refuses to reveal that she is pregnant while she is being held in captivity and tortured, and how she loses her unborn baby as a result. The following conversation takes place after Louise and Jeanne find out about Suzy’s pregnancy and subsequent adoption:

Thus, Louise’s pregnancy is remarkable not only because her husband is dead but also because the audience learns that they had been trying for years. After Louise is captured, she is shown bravely enduring torture. Although these scenes communicate heroism, the audience later learns that she lost her unborn baby as a consequence. Moreover, at the end of the film, Louise, the only agent to survive the war, goes to a church to light candles for the other female agents who were not as lucky. As she walks out of the church, the following text is shown as an epilogue:

In 1949, Louise returned to France and married an architect. She was awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Legion d’Honneur. She died in 2004 at the age of 98, childless. [emphasis added]

In this sense, Louise’s heroism seems to be valued in relation to her sacrifice of motherhood. This sacrifice seems even greater owing to the fact that Louise and her deceased husband (who, also part of the resistance, dies in the opening scene of the film) had ‘been trying for years’ to have a child.

In addition, there is another, more subtle, motherhood narrative present in the way in which Jeanne is portrayed. From the point at which it is revealed that Louise is pregnant, Jeanne begins to be portrayed as the ‘real’ heroine of the film. I argue that there are two reasons in particular that enable the writing of Jeanne as the ‘real’ heroine with agency in political violence, and as such capable of killing. First, the fact that she is childless and ‘unable’ to give life, and, second, because she is a prostitute. These two traits are intimately interconnected, as being a prostitute possibly makes her ‘unable’ to have children or, alternatively, she is a prostitute because she ‘cannot’ have children. The bottom line is that both ‘childless’ and ‘prostitute’ signify Jeanne as different from ‘natural’ femininity, and this difference, in turn, is what enables her agency in political violence and facilitates her capacity to take life. Throughout the film, numerous references to her ‘thirst for money’ reinforce Jeanne’s masculine traits, but her capacity to kill, her agency in political violence, is actually established in the very first scene in which she appears. Jeanne is the first person to be approached by Louise and Pierre, who were given the task of putting together the group of female agents. The following conversation takes place when they visit Jeanne, who is then in prison for having killed a man:

In the next scene, Louise and Pierre are discussing Jeanne:

In these early scenes from the film, Jeanne is characterized as being capable of killing, a prostitute and ‘a nutcase’, which in combination communicate that Jeanne is unlike ‘normal’ women. Jeanne is a deviant woman who has already transgressed the boundaries of ‘natural’ femininity. She is deviant because she is a prostitute and because she has killed a man. She is not a ‘real’ woman associated with a life-giving identity. It is precisely because she is acting outside the boundaries of ‘natural’ femininity that her agency in killing is allowed – and, in fact, expected. Because her victim was a pimp who probably was exploiting her, Louise (and the audience) understands Jeanne’s motivations. ⁵ It seems killing in this case was justified.

As noted earlier, Jeanne’s identity as a prostitute is reinforced and re-emphasized throughout the film, which facilitates the writing of her as capable of killing and the ‘real’ heroine. For example, as the agents are on their way to Paris, the train on which they are travelling abruptly stops, whereupon a man puts his hands on Jeanne’s breasts.

Later, during a conversation with Louise in a safe house in Paris, Jeanne expresses her willingness to kill:

In addition, not only is Jeanne ‘using’ her womb outside the boundaries of ‘natural’ femininity, which is focused on giving birth, but she is also using her body as a commodity in order to make money, which indicates a level of agency and the possibility of being a subject rather than an object. Thus, the writing of Jeanne as a heroine is organized in part through her masculinized ‘thirst’ for money as a prostitute. In particular, her deviant behaviour as a prostitute is juxtaposed with that of the deeply religious character Gaelle. In this way, Gaelle acts as Jeanne’s other through binaries such as good/bad, moral/immoral, religious/non-religious, asexual/sexual, virgin/whore, etc., where the former is associated with Gaelle and the latter with Jeanne. The following conversation between them takes place in the first safe house the agents stay in:

Similarly, when the agents are walking to the aircraft that will take them to France, Suzy asks Jeanne if she has ever been blessed. Jeanne responds: ‘Never. If I get down on my knees it is not to pray.’

The writing of Jeanne as a heroine is intimately linked with her identity as a prostitute. As a prostitute, Jeanne does not represent the norm of ‘natural’ femininity but is instead defined in opposition to a naturalized life-giving identity: as someone who is capable of killing. Seemingly, as an isolated case, Jeanne is allowed agency in political violence because she does not challenge norms of femininity associated with motherhood and a life-giving identity. Crucially, the writing of Jeanne as a female agent of political violence means that her identity as a life-giver is denied. This is demonstrated when Louise and Jeanne are preparing for the shooting of the Nazi officer. Jeanne asks Louise, who has just found out she is pregnant, if she is ok. Worried, or perhaps envious, Jeanne looks at and touches Louise’s belly.

Jeanne’s capacity to kill, in fact, depends on her being denied an identity as life-giving, on her being denied motherhood. Furthermore, in the epilogue, the epithet ‘childless’ not only functions to remind the audience of Louise’s sacrifice, but also signifies that all of the heroines portrayed in the film in one way or another sacrificed or were unable to perform motherhood. Accordingly, what is communicated is that heroism and agency in political violence are enabled at the expense of a life-giving identity; agency is enabled instead of motherhood. This highlights that there is a tension between identities of life-giving and life-taking present in these representations of female agency in political violence, and that agency is only enabled if this tension is ‘removed’. In other words, in order to be written as a heroine, one has to sacrifice/deny/refuse motherhood. This suggests that, as agency in political violence, heroism is in a symbiotic relationship with motherhood: heroism functions as motherhood’s constitutive other. In order to explore this premise in greater detail, I now turn to the case of Faye Turney and the way in which her identity as a mother limited the construction of her as a heroine.

Faye Turney: Motherhood and the limitation of heroism

When Faye Turney’s identity was revealed, motherhood was everywhere. Front-page and other headlines included ‘Hero Mum’ (Coles, 2007), ‘A Mother Undaunted by 17-Hour Shifts and a Macho World’ (Judd, 2007), ‘Faye Knew the Risks when She Left Molly To Serve in Iraq: Courage of Sailor Held Captive in Iran’ and ‘Bravery: Faye Holds Daughter Molly’ (Lyons, 2007). It was reported that Faye ‘loves being a mum and her greatest concern right now will be for her little girl and how badly she is being affected by this’ (Newton Dunn and Parker, 2007; Beeston and Kennedy, 2007). Among the most circulated photos of Turney was one of her and her infant daughter, which thus not only failed to acknowledge that Turney’s daughter was three years old at the time, but also functioned to signify a historical and cultural icon of motherhood and thus emphasize a ‘natural’ bond between mother and child and the association of femininity with a naturalized life-giving identity.

What is more, a maternal language was also used to describe Faye Turney’s relationship to her fellow soldiers, in particular with regard to Arthur Batchelor, who was the youngest member of the crew. Batchelor and Turney were the only sailors that sold their stories to the media. Interestingly, even in Batchelor’s story, which was published in the Mirror, the main focus was on Turney. In an article entitled ‘Faye Saved Me: Brave Colleague Got Me Through My Kidnap Horror’, Batchelor describes how Turney comforted him after they were arrested and while they were being transported to the Iranian mainland:

Topsy [Turney] kept on whispering to make sure I was okay, she just reassured me that we were all together. The guards got really aggressive whenever they heard us communicating. Topsy really put her neck on the line to make sure I was holding up. (Hughes and Stansfield, 2007)

Then, speaking of the moment when they were reunited, Batchelor said:

I missed Topsy [Turney] most of all. I really love her, as a mum and a big sister and I can’t describe how that felt … just every emotion rolled into one. I ran up to her, threw my arms round her and cried like a baby…. When I’d calmed down, she asked, ‘Do you need another hug, a mother hug?’ and I said ‘damn right’…. Topsy said she’d always be there for me, to protect me and look after me. (Hughes and Stansfield, 2007)

Faye Turney’s maternal role in their relationship was portrayed in the Sun in the following manner: ‘Touchingly, Arthur, the youngest Brit, said: Faye was like a big sister or a mum to me, she gave me hugs when I needed them’ (Moult et al., 2007), and echoed by Turney in the ITV (2007) interview:

My boat crew had the youngest member, Arthur Batchelor, and I remember I put my arms around him and told him that if you ever need a mum or a sister or a hug, he was to find me and I would be there for him.

At this stage, the interviewer says: ‘I think he has since said that you were like a mother to him.’ Faye Turney responds: ‘Yeah, he was my main concern. He was the youngest of the group, he was the baby.’

In these representations, Turney’s heroism is made sense of through essentialist understandings of gender, as Turney’s value as a fellow soldier depends on narratives of motherhood and maternalism. At the same time, however, because Turney was a mother she did not fit the stereotype of a heroine. When her identity as a woman and a mother was revealed under the headline ‘Let Mummy Go’ (Newton Dunn and Parker, 2007), there was confusion. As a result, the representation of Turney split into two identities: the soldier and the mother. The tension between her life-giving and her life-taking identities dominated the media coverage: ‘I really do love my job – but I love my daughter also’ (Coles, 2007). Another caption read: ‘Action Woman: Faye on guard duty in Sierra Leone in 2000, far right; in the middle of an inflatable during training prior to being sent to the Middle East; with Adam and Molly as a new mum’ (Lyons, 2007). In stories like these, the tension inherent in the two Faye Turneys is demonstrated by the choice of images and their composition. On the one hand, there is the ‘Action Woman’; on the other, the ‘new mum’. In another article, the captions to the two photos read: ‘gun girl’ and ‘proud parents’. As the ‘gun girl’, Turney was described as a brave heroine who could ‘do it as a man’, a masculinized subject:

You can’t sit back just because you’re a girl. I love the satisfaction of being able to walk away from a job and know that I’ve coped and completed the task just as well as a man would have done it. (Kennedy, 2007)

Hence, in the discursive practices where Turney is ‘the soldier’, portrayed as the masculinized subject who can ‘do it as a man’, her heroism is organized through discursive practices at the expense of her identity as a mother, despite the fact that Faye Turney is a ‘real’ mother. In order for Faye Turney to be a good soldier, she has to temporarily give up her role as a mother. In these discursive practices, Turney’s identity as life-giving is thus temporarily put on hold, and the tension between the identities of life-giving and life-taking thereby temporarily ‘removed’.

In a similar fashion to the way in which Jeanne was allowed agency in political violence through her being an exception to the norm of femininity and a naturalized life-giving identity, it seems that Turney is allowed agency in political violence because she is seen as a cultural exception through her belonging to a minority:

The world has watched in horror as the brave mum has been paraded in front of the cameras by her Iranian captors. Faye’s courage has shone through during her ordeal, but she remains one of only a small minority of women in the military. (Smith and Jackson, 2007, emphasis added)

The headline ‘Mother Set Her Heart on Life in the Royal Navy’ was accompanied by ‘Leading Seaman Faye Turney is one of a small number of mothers who are serving in the war against terror’ (Payne and Britten, 2007, emphasis added). While the quote from the Daily Telegraph communicates a message of reassurance to the public that there are not many mothers serving in the war against terror, in the text we learn how many women are serving in the armed forces, in what roles, where they can serve and where they are excluded, and how many have been killed. Thus, ‘mother’ is used interchangeably with ‘woman’. As a female soldier, Faye Turney is an exception to the norm of ‘natural’ femininity, but because she is in a minority, her agency is temporarily allowed.

At the same time, however, the limitations to the writing of Turney as a masculinized subject were present in the form of her ‘natural’ feelings as a mother. In particular, feelings of guilt caused by her ‘sacrificing’ her daughter were used to emphasize her ‘real’ identity as a life-giver rather than a life-taker:

But it was Molly, her three-year-old daughter, that she spoke of most. She described the guilt of leaving behind her ‘bubbly, headstrong’ little girl to be looked after by her husband, Adam, also serving in the Navy but based in Plymouth. But she believed emphatically that this sacrifice would give her daughter every opportunity in life. The 25-year-old mother, one of 15 sailors and marines captured, said: ‘I know by doing this job I can give my daughter everything she wants in life and hopefully by seeing me doing what I do, she’ll grow up knowing that a woman can have a family and have a career at the same time.’ (Judd, 2007, emphasis added)

A front-page headline in the Independent, accompanied by a photo of Faye Turney as a soldier in Sierra Leone in 2000, proclaims: ‘My Little Girl Is Growing Up Every Day. I’m Missing That’ (Judd, 2007). One commentator expressed the tension between these identities specifically:

Faye Turney should not receive any criticism for having the natural feelings of a mother – or for expressing them; but they were clearly in conflict with what she knew was her duty as a member of the armed forces in an extraordinarily stressful situation. (Lawson, 2007, emphasis added)

In addition, media representations of the return of the captured Royal Navy personnel to the UK were above all structured as stories of a mother returning to her daughter. Turney, the soldier, was returning to her [proper] role as a mother. The return was described as emotional:

It was the moment she had prayed for during her darkest hours in captivity. Yesterday Faye Turney the young mother who became the face of the hostage crisis was finally reunited with her three-year-old daughter. The ecstatic 26-year-old wrapped her arms around little Molly, who had spent the last fortnight oblivious to the trauma that her mother was enduring thousands of miles from home. Cradling her delighted daughter, Leading Seaman Turney was also reunited with her husband Adam, who could barely contain his relief that the ordeal of the previous 14 days was over. (Kelly, 2007)

Much of the coverage of the homecoming was of an apologetic Faye Turney and a mother’s guilt. One of the Sun’s front-page headlines reads ‘Mummy Mummy’ and depicts Turney kissing her daughter. Inside the paper, the article headline is ‘I Burst Into Tears and Told Family I’m Sorry’. Here, ‘I’m Sorry’ is printed in capital letters in contrast to the rest of the text. The words are printed in a much larger font and are located at the centre of the page. There are also two smaller photos of Faye Turney, her husband and their daughter on the same page. Faye Turney is quoted as saying:

Adam had hold of Molly and we ran to each other. We all hugged and I said, ‘I’m sorry, I love you’. I felt guilty for what I’d put them through. (Moult and Newton Dunn, 2007, emphasis added)

In addition to portraying Turney’s apologies to her family and her feelings of guilt as a mother, the representation of Turney was also of a woman who through her ordeal had realized what her true role was – that of a mother:

Mum Faye Turney said last night she had cashed in on her hostage ordeal in Iran for the sake of the daughter she feared she would never see again … now [she was] considering quitting the forces to be a full-time mum. (Lawton, 2007)

In the article, an ‘anonymous friend’ of Turney’s is quoted as saying:

This has shaken her to the core. She had a long time to think about her life and what is really important. She’s just a mum who loves her daughter and her job. But she has to think of Molly and the future…. The way she feels right now, she can’t see herself going back to the frontline. She loves the Navy, but after what has happened she has to consider giving it up and just being a mum. (Lawton, 2007)

One of the photo captions reads ‘Love of her life: Faye holds on tight to Molly, the precious daughter she thought she would never see again’ (Lawton, 2007). Similarly, the Sunday Star’s headline reads ‘Faye: I’m Back to Being Mum’ (Chandler, 2007). I would argue that the focus on Turney’s return to her daughter communicates that Turney is finally back in her ‘proper’ element, that of being a mother, and that her temporary session as an agent of political violence is over. ⁶

I would also argue that in these representations Faye Turney’s heroism is conditioned by her identity as a mother. Her agency in political violence was limited to certain discursive practices where the tension between her dual identities of life-giving and life-taking could be overcome. In contrast to the writing of heroines in Female Agents, where the tension between life-giving and life-taking can be permanently removed or overcome owing to its fictional character, representations of Faye Turney’s agency in political violence at the expense of motherhood are temporarily limited. As a soldier, Turney has temporarily sacrificed her life-giving role; she is temporarily allowed agency; she is momentarily a masculinized subject. Still, the overall focus on her return to her daughter and her proper role as a mother functions to reproduce her life-giving identity as ‘natural’ femininity at the expense of her life-taking identity. Accordingly, agency in political violence and heroism still depend on notions of motherhood, while essentialist ideas about gender that associate female bodies with a life-giving identity are reinforced.

Conclusion

In this article, I have sought to demonstrate how representations of female agency in political violence include a tension between life-giving and life-taking identities, and how the construction of heroines depends on overcoming or removing that tension. Ultimately, this means that the enabling of female agency in political violence is communicated and negotiated through motherhood. In Female Agents, heroism depends either on the subject’s sacrifice of motherhood or on the subject’s being denied motherhood. In the case of Faye Turney, the tension materialized as two separate subject positions – the soldier and the mother – and the writing of Turney as a heroine was temporarily and spatially conditioned by her role as a mother. Moreover, I suggest that the construction of heroism through a sacrifice/denial of motherhood depends on the fact that the female agents of political violence constitute a minority. As such, these heroines do not challenge traditional ideas about gender, agency and political violence, but in fact act as cultural exceptions to the norm of a naturalized life-giving identity. Importantly, this means that motherhood is still communicated as that which is different from being a heroine. Thus, even in stories where agency is enabled through a sacrifice/denial of motherhood, overall, agency is in fact communicated, negotiated and made sense of through motherhood. The negotiation of agency through motherhood, moreover, means that an essentialist understanding of gender, which fails to recognize the power invested in the disciplining of bodies and the limitations imposed upon them, is reinforced. Consequently, female agency in political violence cannot be fully understood without paying close attention to ideas about motherhood.