Attacking the Body Politic: The Terroristin in 1970s German Media
Document Type
Article
Abstract
In a 1977 special feature on female terrorism, the German weekly newsmagazine, Der Spiegel, published a photograph of a woman with a bomb strapped to her front, masquerading as a pregnant woman. This image perfectly encapsulates the "paradoxical" quality of the female terrorist, who instead of giving life takes it. Furthermore, if, according to Tamar Mayer, women are represented in national and cultural narratives as "the nation's social and biological womb," the threatening quality of such representations for the body politic of the nation starts to become clear. As Mayer asserts "an attack on these [female] bodies becomes an attack on the nation's men" and so on the nation itself. This article will consider print media discourses on female terrorists as abject mothers and threatening "home wreckers" in 1970s German media. In particular, it will explore the way in which the radical left-wing female terrorist is staged as attacking and subverting the sacred private realm of hearth and home, the better to prop up notions of proper and sanctioned German motherhood and, by extension, nationhood. Central to this study shall be an analysis of divide and rule strategies, deployed by the German media in order to discipline and punish - in the Foucauldian sense - female subjectivity, bodies and the nation. This shall be situated in the context of the Federal Republic of Germany; a state with a deeply troubled sense of identity, not least because of its repressed Nazi past, its contested status as a state, and in the context of the Cold War.
Repository Citation
Bielby, Clare. "Attacking the Body Politic: The Terroristin in 1970s German Media." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 7, no. 1, 2007, pp. 1. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol7/iss1/44