Radicalizing female empowerment: gender, agency, and affective appeals in Islamic State propaganda

Women, from across the West, have increasingly joined Islamic extremist groups in a variety of roles. Why are women participating in movements which have a misogynistic and violent outlook? The dominant literature ascribes their motivations to conditions that make women vulnerable to extremist pulls. These include lack of marriage prospects, past experiences of sexual violence, and familial loss at the hands of ‘the enemy.’ This model of analysis sees the women as victims, rather than agents who determine their participation in extremism. Such an approach often locates women’s political motivations in a gendered private sphere, where their actions are determined by engagements with men. In contrast, the dominant descriptions of men’s religious extremism are situated through their political and public engagement as citizens. We argue that such a gendered binary does not provide a sufficient explanation of the political motivations of women who join Islamist extremist groups. Through a close reading of the Islamic State’s English-language propaganda materials, we explore how the group’s appeals to women rely on discourses of empowerment and agency. The Islamic State, we argue, reimagines Muslim women, not simply as mothers and wives, but as public agents of change in creating and shaping the global caliphate.