Coherence in Contradiction: The Spectacle of the Female Terrorist

In Writing and Difference, J. Derrida theorised the act of signification as a 'coherence in contradiction', which 'expresses the force of a desire' for conflicting messages to magically cohere. This chapter argues that the spectacle of the female terrorist and the naturalisation of messy gender as coherent sex follow a hetero-normative, binary script of continuous display. It considers the phenomenon of 1970s left-wing terrorism as a product of the increasing amalgamation of media, political, and social reality. The chapter aims to direct attention away from the public sphere of left-wing terrorist action, and towards what to date have been considered minor or secondary, private arenas. A prominent thesis was that women's political violence was a natural consequence of their liberation, and in that vein female terrorists were frequently depicted as tough, fearless, and masculine, and as foreign bodies, alien to the body politic of the nation.