Gowrinathan (2021:2): “The closer I came to women branded as extreme, the more normal their decisions seemed. To the outside world, once she takes up arms the female fighter is simply a threat to be destroyed. To me, she takes up arms because she is the target. She is less extreme than she is mundane: every woman navigating layered circles of captivity.”
Gowrinathan (2021:4): It is state violence that radicalises women.
Gowrinathan (2021:4): Aims to “slowly reveal the myriad of external forces that threaten the existence of the woman who eventually takes up arms: the violent advances of state soldiers and the policymakers that hold the line; the role a woman plays in her own rape and the cultural constraints that hold her captive to trauma; the beatings at home and the guns on the street that she will eventually fight to reclaim. Each encircling her, reinforcing the other — until she makes the radical choice to break through.”
Gowrinathan (2021:7): “Every political activist will eventually settle into her site of struggle, moving through different spaces to find her fit. The female fighter, the one that chooses violence, must also find her place inside of a movement.” Calls for conceiving of the female fighter as a political activist that develops her own political consciousness through engagement with the world around her.
Gowrinathan (2021:10): “The most often repeated myth around the female fighter posits that her psyche — empty and untethered as it must be — was co-opted by the militancy, or ‘brainwashed.’ While many of the women I met over the years were indeed shown propaganda videos and participated in other forms of socialization into the movement, they describe their years on the battlefield, in both advance and retreat mode, as a deliberate participation in a process — one with access to a previously forbidden political space and where consciousness evolves slowly over time.”
Gowrinathan (2021:20): “Nonviolent protest in the face of state violence (reliant on mobilizing the moral conscience of others] has long been the prescribed, progressive pathway to political change. To access this space, violated women are most often expected to wear trauma as an identity card, their injuries used to incite outrage. A woman who slings a gun across her chest, resisting the commodification of her trauma, is jarring to a liberal sense of oneself.”
Gowrinathan (2021:20): Claims women have comprised nearly 30% of militant cadres worldwide.
Gowrinathan (2021:28): “The common myths shrouding the female fighter are born of deep-seated beliefs about gender more broadly and can be lumped into four oppressive myths: women are more peaceful that men by nature; women are brainwashed into militant movements; women join movements because of the men in their lives; empowerment programming can save the female fighter.”
Gowrinathan (2021:29): “Even in the fantasy, she is captive. Each of the liberatory superpowers offered will tether her to a limited imagination. The power of invisibility allows the feminists in search of missing nonviolent voices to disappear her; superhuman strength will offer her the physical abilities of masculinity that leave her unsuitable for marriage; invulnerability will place her outside the safety net of donors, charities, and empowerment advocates alike — she is neither the good victim to be saved nor the peaceful political agent to be supported.”
Gowrinathan (2021:52): On feminist writings on anger and rage: “while encouraging women to resist with (a singular) emotive response to injustice (rage), the form their political actions takes in these texts is also prescribed to both stay within the lines of an acceptable mode of resistance (nonviolence) and focus on the agreed-upon target (patriarchy).” Accuses them of restricting rage before it becomes violent.
Gowrinathan (2021:55): “To consider the decision to choose violence as a momentary lapse of rationality is to dismiss the expansive reservoirs of trauma that shape the makeup of the women who do. For the women I have known, political consciousness would form slowly as they moved through multiple emotional states to their own political territories. When the violations of the state are intimate, the injury to soft spaces hardens quickly. The female fighter is enraged.”
Gowrinathan (2021:73): Cites a female combatant from the FARC: “‘So if a soldier comes at you with a gun, women should respond with what?’ She asks rhetorically. ‘A bible? A book? Kindness?’”
Gowrinathan (2021:101-102): Argues that “On the inside, a woman from Afghanistan (or Colombia, Mexico, or Sri Lanka) is incessantly, relentlessly aware of the culture that can, at times, dictate her every movement. It is a minefield that both combatant and civilians are forever navigating. Not unlike violence, when it comes to culture, she is backed into a binary for the sake of the outside world: to either condone or condemn her own culture. [… But] women will always contest the binds of culture from the inside.”
Gowrinathan (2021:113): “Whether a pottu, a hijab, or a hoodie, the state asks besieged communities to sacrifice identity for security.”