Radicalizing Her

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

Though the female fighter is often seen as an anomaly, women make up nearly 30% of militant movements worldwide. Radicalizing Her holds the female fighter up, in all her complexity, as a kind of mirror to contemporary conversations on gender, violence, and power. Centered in the Global South, the narratives at the heart of the book reveal the arrayed forces that have driven women into battle, the personal and political elements of these decisions, and the ways in which the agency of female fighters has been deeply misunderstood.

In 1969 Leila Khaled, a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was the first woman to hijack an airplane, diverting TWA Flight 840 en route to Rome. A few years later, in Oakland, California, Elaine Brown became the first female militant to chair the Black Panther party. In 1983 Mathavani Erambu vowed to fast until death, protesting the treatment of the Tamil minority in Sri Lanka, before eventually becoming one of the first female cadres in the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. Today, Colombian women who fought in the FARC are refusing to lay down their arms; and women in Pakistan are both enlisting in the national army and supporting the Taliban.

Gowrinathan 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 and made her look closely at how these women were positioned in relation to power. As this particular political moment 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.