Reading agency into the domestic and supportive roles of women in violent political organisations

While for a long time the literature on political violence treated women as passive victims, a feminist turn in the research in recent decades has shown women to be agents of violence (e.g., Alison, 2004). Research on women in violent political groups usually focuses on their roles (e.g., Vogel, Porter and Kebbell, 2014; Rodriguez Lara, 2017), motivations (Bloom, 2007; Jacques and Taylor, 2009), and agency (Sjoberg, 2018). With their equal participation in violence being acknowledged, women are now seen as political agents in these contexts. But what about women who are members of these violent organisations but are not directly involved in violence? Women in supportive and domestic roles in violent organisations are often described as “passive” or are considered to have had traditional gender roles externally imposed on them (Jacques and Taylor, 2008; Vogel, Porter and Kebbell, 2014), especially if the group has a conservative belief system that encourages a patriarchal gendered order. This is particularly troubling for state-building organisations, where women’s primary role is to help build and maintain an internal societal structure through the managing of domestic duties (Khelghat-Doost, 2019). Either all of these women are passive and have had the manner of their participation imposed on them, or a different understanding of what it means to be an agent and what being a member of a violent political organisation is needed. This article uses data on Western women's experiences in the Islamic State and IS documents to explore how agency can be located in women participants in violent groups even when they are acting in line with gendered expectations. While some Western women in the IS were members of the morality police, most would primarily stay home and take care of their families (Spencer, 2016; Vale, 2019). While these roles are regularly described as “passive” (Perešin, 2015; Veilleux-Lepage, Phelan and Lokmanoglu, 2023), I argue that Western IS women exhibit agency in how they voluntarily inhabit the group’s gendered norms (Mahmood, 2005), allowing us to decouple women’s agency from the act of violence.