Counterterrorist framing erases women, families, and queer immigrants from kinship narrative

Evidence

Framing Muslim bodies through race, gender, and sexuality has naturalized the idea of the male body as a terrorist and, indeed, a migrant. The process of exclusion has eliminated women and families from this narrative in favor of ideas of cell structures as the language of kinship and family structure—thus eclipsing the notion of a transnational family structure. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 331 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Böllinger argues that joining a terrorist organization was the last of a series of attempts at identity formation. These potential terrorists were searching for meaning, structure, and a stable social role. They hoped to gain purpose and assurance from the terrorist organization. The group became the family that had never provided the warmth, protection, security, and support the individual had needed. The opportunity to join a terrorist organization allowed the individual to submerge himself in a collective identity and, thus, to lay down the burden of personal responsibility. The group met a need to idealize authority figures, to express aggressive tendencies, to feel omnipotent, and to belong. Its ideology of violent resistance to the state and to imperial domination allowed collective identification simultaneously with the victims of oppression and the aggressive authority figure, while neutralizing guilt through intellectual and emotional justifications. The group provided the structure and integration lacked by the isolated individual. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 4124 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Many of the catering and retail entrepreneurs were single women; and few of the men had conjugal relations which allowed them to enter into partnership with their wives, since the traditional role pattern is typically both patriarchal and segregated. Few had children old enough to be much help, and most of those were busy acquiring the qualifications for a career of literate employment. The fact that descent organization did not travel to the south meant that kinship ties were much more fluid and the authority of household heads was frequently weak. Here the contrast is with Asian minority communities whose tight cohesion provides patriarchs with external support to domestic hierarchy. Frafra migrants were mostly an undifferentiated brotherhood of mobile single men, linked to a few prominent married men by ties of patronage and pseudo-kinship or descent. Such a community did not lend support to domestic hierarchy. Consequently, family labour was problematic. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2377 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Terror-cell framing erases migrant women and transnational family structures — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in…, 331; Portraying terrorists as failed heterosexuals suppresses analysis of political causes; Migrants’ fluid kinship structure weakens household authority and family labor — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2377 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Terror-cell framing erases migrant women and transnational family structures #corroborates (0.95) — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 331
• Terrorist groups function as substitute families meeting unmet developmental needs #complicates (0.72) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 4124
• Migrants’ fluid kinship structure weakens household authority and family labor #complicates (0.70) — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2377