Salon has an interesting article on the psyche and the social conditioning of the female suicide bomber. It’s quite a piece, and I wish it were longer — but it’s well-written, and I’ll have to pick up Anne Marie Oliver’s book.
I don’t have much that I could possibly add, except to point out that understanding issues like women’s roles in particular cultures and societies often require a shifting of our perspectives and outlooks. One thing that I’ve learned from doing a little reading about women in the Middle East (usually written by those women, but not always) is the fundamental divide between the Western feminist idea of the woman as an individual and the view of many Middle Eastern, Arab and Muslim women of themselves as parts of a web. I’m not going to do a particularly good job of explaining it, but one of the big problems that many non-Western women seem to have with feminism is the idea that every person has a set of individual rights, regardless of physical sex, and that the ideal is to trancend constructed gender norms. That is, women and men may not be physically the same, but as human beings we should nonetheless have equal political, social and economic rights. One competing view is that women play an important role in society, and that such a role is complementary to the male role, with neither being superior to the other. From that view, the most basic ideas of Western feminism — like the idea that physical sex and constructed gender are separate categories, and that sex does not create gender — are difficult to comprehend, and are non-issues. The goal of that women’s rights movement, then, would be to give women the best possible resources within their domains — the focus would be on family law, maternity leave, etc. And that’s what we’ve seen many women’s rights advocates in the Middle East work on for decades now, with some very good results. Maternity leave policies in many Middle Eastern countries are far better than those in the United States. Family law policies are improving.
Anyway, I’m digressing quite a bit, but the general idea is that if we want to understand what motivates people to behave in particular ways, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to impose our own cultural frameworks onto them when they don’t subscribe to those values or ideas. And one big cultural difference here is the Western value of the individual as opposed to valuing the person for their role in the community.
My political philosophies obviously fall much more onto the Western woman-as-individual side, so this isn’t me acting as a proponent for views that I don’t hold. And it certainly isn’t me acting as a proponent for equal-opportunity suicide bombing, although I wish that could go without saying. But I do think it’s worth examining the social underpinnings of suicide bombings, and how those underpinnings reflect ideas of gender and sexuality in Palestine today. And if we’re going to make that examination, it helps to try and challenge our starting point.