Abstract
Necropolitics and Muslim Female Bodies in Online War on Terror
Since 2013 the war on the ground in Syria expanded to the online sphere where ISIS used social media with very advanced and sophisticated strategies to create a climate of fear, recruit people from across the world and advocate its propaganda. On the other side, groups opposing ISIS have also deployed the social media platforms to raise awareness about the threat of ISIS for freedom, human rights, and democracy in the world. In this online encounter both groups have used female bodies, as gendered power relations to accelerate their propaganda machine’s speed and in result have provoked a hyper-masculine nationalist and anti-terror sensations.
Although scholars and researchers investigated the impacts of “a gendered rhetoric” of post 9/11 war on terror, nonetheless since Islamic States of Iraq and Syria officially emerged, these narratives reinforced by western and Muslim nations confronting ISIS, still remain understudied. Acknowledging the brutality of ISIS, this paper will examine the ways in which both ISIS and its opponents portray female subjects in their online confrontation. Using discourse analysis, I attempt to review intertextual animated and contested narratives in Fox News, Iraqi government, and ISIS affiliated online materials to unfold the portrayals of Muslim female bodies on both sides. I argue that ISIS and the anti-ISIS rhetoric have leveraged a very gendered imagery and language in online social media through which they subordinate Muslim females and center their bodies at the heart of radicalization, human security, and militarization of Iraq and Syria. Reflecting on the post colonial scholar Achille Mbembe’s idea about necropolitics or politics of death, which is a corrective complement to Michel Foucault’s idea of bio-politics, I argue that the current online discourse of ISIS and anti-ISIS groups highly consists of subjugations or representation of subjugated Muslim female bodies that intertwines violence and terrorism with gender to reconstruct the narratives on war on Islamic radicalism and create a climate of fear for western societies.
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