Are women suicide bombers victims of patriarchal religions or vicious killers?
KO: This is a complicated question. Some feminists have suggested that women suicide bombers are forced into their situations by oppressive patriarchal cultures that give them no choice. For example, in her book Army of Roses, Barbara Victor suggests that Palestinian women suicide bombers are outcasts from their traditional culture because of failed marriages, divorce, the inability to have children, and other “amorous disasters” as French psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva calls them. Victor wonders how these “bearers of life” become “killing machines.” But interpreting their violent actions solely as a result of their marginal status within their communities denies their agency and figures them merely as victims. It is also important to acknowledge that their bombings are political acts in the theater of war. Again, it is telling that women suicide bombers attract more media attention than their male counterparts. This is not just because there are fewer of them. Rather, somehow the fact t
