Special Issue Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies ISSN No. 1948-1853 Women as Weapons of War?: Women, Violence, and Agency in Terrorism, Kelly Oliver, W. Alton Jones JPCS Vol. 4, No. 1, 2013 85 Women as Weapons of War?: Women, Violence, and Agency By Kelly Oliver, W. Alton Jones Chair of Philosophy, Department of Philosophy Vanderbilt University Abstract In this essay, I argue that the U.S. and U.K. media describe women involved in military and political violence as dangerous weapons. Women’s bodies themselves are seen as dangerous. They are not described as women carrying bombs but rather their bodies themselves are bombs. Specifically, stereotypes of women’s sexuality and femininity as dangerous lures—black widow spiders and praying mantis—feed media images of women’s violence as more dangerous than men’s. From U.S. service women to women suicide bombers, women are seen as more dangerous than men. In her seminal essay “Can the Subaltern Speak,” literary theorist Gayatri Spivak shows the limitations of liberal notions of freedom, choice, and agency when it comes to discussing subaltern women, or possibly women and oppressed peoples in general (1988). She does this by discussing the ancient Hindu ritual of sati in which widows would immolate themselves alive on the burning funeral pyres of their husbands. Spivak demonstrates how within the rhetoric of the Hindu traditionalists, these women are depicted as “free” agents who had chosen to burn themselves; but within the Western rhetoric, these women are seen as the victims of repressive and deadly patriarchal customs of a “backward” culture and, thus, as women without agency or with a limited agency that requires them to violate themselves. The double-bind in this situation is that, on the one hand, we do not want to embrace a practice that not only serves patriarchal