Explosive Bodies and Bounded States

Abstract

The bodies produced by the violent practice of suicide bombing are a source of horror and disgust. They are, in feminist psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva's concept, abject: that which defies borders and is expelled to create the self. As ‘abject bodies’, suicide bombers' bodies frustrate attempts at calculation and rational control of security risks, and, in their mutilated flesh, expose as unstable the idea of the body as a whole with clearly defined boundaries between inside and outside. Female suicide bombers, whose bodies are already considered ‘abject’, produce a politics of the body that exceeds narratives of victimhood, and whose very monstrosity symbolically threatens the foundations of the nation-state. Attempts at constructing subjects out of the mutilated bodily remains of victims and perpetrators of suicide bombings are key practices in the production of the state and gendered subjects. The practice of suicide bombing and efforts to recover and resignify bodies reveals how power molds and constitutes the border of the body and state simultaneously. The explosive body of the suicide bomber thus has destabilizing effects beyond the motivations of its perpetrators and exposes the political work necessary to maintain the illusion of secure, bounded bodies and states.

Keywords:

• abjection
• bodies
• nationalism
• sovereignty
• suicide bombing
• territory

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Bud Duvall, Ron Krebs, Nancy Luxon, Jennifer Lobasz, the IFJP editors and anonymous reviewers, and audiences at the University of Minnesota and the panel ‘Women's Bodies, Women's Violence’ at the 2010 ISA Annual Meeting where earlier versions of this piece were presented.

Notes on contributor

Lauren Wilcox is a Charles and Amy Scharf postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. She received her PhD in 2011 from the University of Minnesota and is working on a book manuscript tentatively entitled ‘Practices of Violence: Theorizing the Embodied Subject in International Relations’.

Notes

1 The language used to describe this phenomenon is inherently political. Some scholars feel ‘suicide bombing’ is too narrow a term to address the range of tactics that require the death of their perpetrators, and use the term ‘suicide missions’. Others use the terms ‘suicide terrorism’, ‘suicide killer’ or ‘homicide bomber’. These latter three are considered to be biased against the various groups who use these techniques. Some groups have referred to such acts as ‘martyrdom operations’, a term which seems to euphemize the actions. In light of these controversies, I use the more familiar terminology of ‘suicide bombing’ because I intend the more narrow meaning of the term for the purposes of this article and precisely because of its familiarity.

2 ZAKA is a voluntary organization in whose members assist in rescue and identification work following acts of terrorism, road accidents and other disasters.

3 For a similar argument regarding the state-as-person debate, see Schiff (2008).

4 The Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism's database lists 125 total attacks by women in the years 1981 to 2011, covering all applicable conflicts. While this can give us a rough idea of the relative frequency of women versus men as suicide bombers, the high number of attacks in which the gender is unknown in this database suggests the numbers of women suicide bombers is almost certainly under counted. Their data indicate seventeen out of 198 in Israel/Palestinian territories/Lebanon were perpetrated by women, twenty-nine out of 107 total attacks in Sri Lanka were perpetrated by women, as were twenty out of sixty attacks in Russia by Chechen separatists (CPOST 2011). These data also do not take into account bombings that were thwarted: while there may have been seventeen successful suicide bombings by women in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, up to ninety-six women have attempted to complete a suicide mission (Bloom 2011: 128). Bloom (2011: 141, 214) estimates that 40 per cent of suicide bombers affiliated with the PKK in Turkey, around 43 per cent of participants in suicide attacks by the LTTE in Sri Lanka were women, and around a third of the al-Qaeda-in-Iraq bombings were perpetrated by women.

5 ZAKA's work is not confined to Israel/Palestine, as in recent years they have used their expertise at forensic identification after the South Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the 2008 Mumbai bombings and the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Nor, of course, are suicide bombings in general or by women specifically limited to Israel/Palestine: it is the conjunction of suicide bombings plus the work of ZAKA that makes this a valuable ‘case’ for thinking about bodies, borders and orders.

6 Of course, in the context of Israel/Palestine, not all victims are Jewish; approximately 25 per cent of Israelis are Arab or members of another minority group. Furthermore, as the group was founded and is largely made up of Haredim, or ‘ultra-Orthodox’ Jews, ZAKA's relation to the Israeli state is complicated. Haredim typically reject Zionism and the legitimacy of the state; however, ZAKA's humanitarian work and work on behalf of the victims of terrorism and other disasters has been acknowledged and accepted by the state, which coordinates efforts with ZAKA. In addition, the effort to signify bodies as Jewish in the context of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict has the effect of signifying bodies as belonging to a national as well as religious identity because of the promotion of Israel as a Jewish state.