Women Prosecuted for Terrorism in the Basque Country: Deconstructing Judicial, Media, and NGO Discourses from a Feminist Perspective

Abstract

This thesis aims to analyze how ‘women terrorists’ are produced as subjects by existing discourses (Foucault, 1986), such as those produced by the justice system, the media, or statements published by victims of terrorist organizations. Hence, the scope of this thesis comprises three case studies in which women took part in events that were—and, with nuances, continue to be—considered acts of political violence or terrorism. Two of these cases concern women who held important positions in the organization ETA and the third regards a young woman (twenty-two years old when the event occurred) prosecuted for taking part in a conflict, specifically a fight in a bar. In the opinion of one sector of society, her actions were related to political violence, but to others, it was nothing more than a bar quarrel: the so-called Altsasu incident. Understanding how discourse produces subjects is relevant because it provides us with a point of view that reaches beyond discussions of representation and agency in order to understand how the subject of the “female” terrorist or “female” militant is constituted (Gentry & Sjoberg, 2015: 326). In this regard, power and power relations from a Foucauldian perspective partially explain how power is gendered (Deveux, 1994: 224). According to Deveux, Foucault’s writing on power has a “certain heuristic value for feminists,” but she stresses that uncritical appropriations of Foucault’s concepts “erase women’s specific experiences with power” (Deveux, 1994: 224). To counter power dominance, according to Foucault, there is resistance. However, if the existing dominance is rendered invisible by gendered bias, it is materially impossible to counter it. Without a feminist lens, we cannot substantively change the existing conditions of power relations (Lazar, 2007). Gender is another system of oppression, more pervasive and complex than others (Eckert, 1989: 253-254 cited in Lazar, 2007: 143). In this line of thought, from the point of view of epistemological feminism, gender is an ideological structure. Thus, understanding the production of subjects by analyzing discourse has value for laying bare the nuances of patriarchal stereotypes embedded in current society.