Gendering counter-narratives: militarized masculinity and ‘intrinsically peaceful’ women in Tunisian awareness campaigns against terrorism

The unprecedented Jihadi Salafi mobilization that took place in the period following the Tunisian revolution of 2010-2011 resulted in a harsh security response known as the War on Terror or "ḥarb ḍid al-irhāb". The political, juridical and military repressive responses have been accompanied by a counter-terrorism discourse that far from being gender-neutral has been marked by symbolism and stereotypes articulating through verbal and non-verbal language. This contribution aims to investigate the gendered representations conveyed in the context of counter-narratives developed with the aim of countering and preventing violent extremism (CVE-PVE) in Tunisia. The paper applies multimodal discourse analysis to a corpus of audio-visual materials belonging to awareness campaigns issued by Tunisian government and international organizations from 2015 to 2020. In particular, the contribution aims to explore how counter-terrorism discourse contributed to transmitting and consolidating gender roles and stereotypes by producing and reproducing patterns of gender inequality and unequal power relations. For this reason, this contribution will question militarized masculinity, as a specific form of hegemonic masculinity conveyed by the discourse of the 'war on terror', as well as femininity seen as intrinsically peaceful and linked to social reproduction contributing to obscure the plural experience of women in political violence.