The idea of violence from the state as a driver, as seen in perhaps helps explain NC women have been less prominent in conflict. Yes, the patriarchal nature of society and the central mobilising ideology are relevant, but they seem unpersuasive: women have navigated those elsewhere to participate in conflict. Rather, in the NC the state does not threaten women in the same way; it ignores rather than targets them. The same reasons that allow female human rights activists to operate explain lower mobilisation.
Gowrinathan (2021:3): “An intrusive, insistent violence punctures every woman’s life. As it violates, dismembers and destroys, she is expected to respond peacefully, carefully commodifying her trauma or other to rally around — the morally righteous path to political change. For more feminist-aligned thinkers, the female fighter is difficult to place.”
Gowrinathan (2021:19): “On the question of violence the tendency of contemporary political discourse to parse the world into ‘for’ and ‘against’ camps obscures our view of the female fighter. An understanding of motivations to fight will be read as condoning violence, oppressive agendas given the upper hand by the moral imperative to condemn it. In the end, the false dichotomy serves only as a salve for the selective consciousness of the audience and conversations on political violence are encircled inside an echo chamber. Violence, for me, and for the women I chronicle in this book, is simply a political reality.”
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.”