Castrating conflict : gender(ed) terrorists and terrorism domesticated

In the context of the discourses that shape hegemonic understandings of the Irish nationalist struggle, conflict, when positioned alongside terms such as war, revolution and terrorism, emerges looking decidedly castrated. In establishment discourses, conflict is increasingly used as an umbrella term to describe the final stages of centuries long armed struggle between Irish nationalists and the colonizing English state. Used in this way, the term conflict distances political agents from the atrocities of combat and in doing so displaces responsibility for those acts onto a generalized or non-specific body politic. This article argues that the colonial state enacts strategies of domestication on the bodies of politically active women that it designates terrorist, and in doing so, castrates the Irish nationalist war against English colonial power and produces the neutered conflict. This article will trace the ways the conflict in Northern Ireland has rendered politically active women invisible and will make an initial contribution to understanding how gendered critics of hegemonic discourses of conflict render these same women visible. It is argued that the discourse of terrorism has been, and still is, utilized to keep Northern Ireland a matter of domestic warfare.