The Gender Perspective Of Contemporary Female Suicide Terrorism

Since 9·11, suicide bombing attacks have become more and more rampant throughout the whole world. Therefore, the international community has to pay more attention to this phenomenon with the study on its characteristics, origin and the history of its development and with the research on the logic of suicide terrorism. In these few years, the new trend that more women have committed suicide bombing missions has broken the gender stereotype where woman means non-violence and birth giver. Now, Female Suicide Terrorism (FST) is becoming an area in counterterrorism that needs more focus in order to develop awareness and understanding. In this paper, a panorama of FST is shown through a comprehensive and systematic study of the quantitative and qualitative analysis.This paper examines the increasing role of women in suicide terrorism and the characteristics of FST. It also provides a multi-level glimpse into the environmental background, terrorist groups and female individuals who become suicide bombers, in order to reveal what motivates and drives women to participate the suicide mission and what bears the responsibility for it. Furthermore, what FST means for the global society is considered, and some insights into terrorism and counterterrorism is given through comprehensive analysis of the phenomenon.As for the methods of study, the methods from social science, psychology, political science, economics and history have been used to analyze suicide terrorism. But the paper seeks to find what women do and think in the realm of terrorism by means of gender study. GENDER is the core concept of feminism theory as well as the new method to interpret international politics. Based on GENDER, the paper tries to make three major points:it is useful to employ gender to the study on suicide terrorism and terrorism generally; women also play the significant roles in terrorism studies, and they are also the subject of terrorist activities instead of marginal group; a comprehensive understanding of the war on terror needs the further study of FST by means of gender. Therefore, the significance of the research lies in:break the binary thinking that "the male is strong while the female is weak", "the male belongs to public and the female belongs to private arena", "the male is superior and female is inferior". So the paper offers a new perspective to the study of terrorism and international politics as well.