Beyond mothers, monsters, whores: Gender and terrorism in Helena Taberna’s Yoyes (2000)

Abstract

When women choose to participate in violent or subversive organizations, they invert gender binaries and enter into what has traditionally been considered to be a male sphere. Both fictional and nonfictional accounts of this behavior often depict these actions as irrational and dehumanize the female actor via narrative techniques that strip them of their femininity and even their humanity. Using Sjoberg and Gentry’s Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women’s Violence in Global Politics as a base, this article argues that Helena Taberna’s film Yoyes (2000) moves beyond these punitive narratives by depicting Yoyes as a multifaceted human being instead of pigeonholing her into a stereotypical gender role. As such, it represents a new possibility for representing the complexity of violent women without recurring to dehumanizing narratives to account for their behavior.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• Helena Taberna
• terrorism
• Yoyes

Notes

Notes

1 Eileen MacDonald names these and other cases (2–3) and examines each one further in the chapters of Shoot the Women First. Likewise, Sjoberg and Gentry briefly introduce a few global examples (8–9) and discuss them more in-depth throughout Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women’s Violence in Global Politics.

2 Yoyes recounts a more active participation within ETA in the diary entries collected for Yoyes desde su ventana, but within the film she is never seen participating in the sorts of missions described there.

3 Yoyes was legally permitted to return to Spain under the Spanish 1977 Amnesty Law because she had no outstanding criminal charges from after that year. At the time of her return, however, the Spanish government had also implemented a separate reinsertion policy, whereby imprisoned ETA members who renounced violence were released and allowed to rejoin Spanish society. Yoyes did not return as part of this reinsertion program and did not make any such statement renouncing violence or her participation in ETA, but her return was so highly publicized that ETA accused her anyway of collaborating with the Spanish government.

4 In the film, Yoyes’s child is a young daughter named Zuriñe. This is a change from her real life, where she had a son named Akaitz. De Pablo speaks to the potential implications of this change within the film (301).