Impaired, "easy prey" saved by the she-empowering state : official narratives of "Xinjiang women" in China's "People's War on Terror"

Abstract

Feminist approaches to international security have revealed persistent gendered stereotypes in the construction of women in contexts of political violence and terrorism, including the Global War on Terror. Acknowledging the parallelism with the United States-led enterprise in its endeavor to “save” a female population and re-posing one of the most significant questions in gender-informed security studies, this article asks “Where are the women in China’s ‘People’s War on Terror’ (PWoT)?” It takes the idea of agency as pivotal in answering this question and investigates how the Chinese state has (im)mobilized, through concealment or deployment, the idea of and potential for agency when positioning Uyghur and other Turkic Muslim women in Xinjiang as specific subjects in the context of the PWoT. The article reveals the establishment of a gendered hierarchy of power in the Chinese counterterrorism playbook, one that fixes “Xinjiang women” as securitized and passive victims in need of rescuing by a state that continues to suppress their agency, despite official claims to the contrary.