Body and Terror:

Women’s Bodies as Victims andPerpetrators of Terror

Abstract

Bodies are vulnerable because they are intrinsically linked to death. Bodies are social and they are embedded with meaning. They cannot be extracted from their specific contexts. The nation is also often equated with body politic. As a result individual bodies become the site of security/ insecurity depending on the social location of bodies. Within this discourse, this article tries to locate the bodies of women. It will look at the bodies of women as victims of terror as well as perpetrators of terror. It will try to understand if in these differentiated roles, women are able to break away from stereotypes or are still caught in heteronormative narratives.