Femme Fatale, Freedom Fighter: Women Terrorists in Twentieth Century British Empire

Abstract

This dissertation, Femme Fatale, Freedom Fighter, investigates the legal, political, and representational dynamics of women’s participation in anti-imperial insurgencies across the former British Empire in the twentieth century. Writing the narrative and thematic history of three case studies—Malaya, Northern Ireland, and South Africa—it asks how colonial and postcolonial legal systems constructed and responded to women insurgents, and how these women deployed gendered tactics to challenge or exploit imperial authority and internal patriarchies. Bridging imperial history, legal studies, gender theory, and military historiography, this socio-legal history uses archival research from state, legal, and community repositories alongside feminist theoretical frameworks to reconstruct the lived experiences and strategic agency of women labeled as “terrorists.” Drawing on court records, emergency regulations, propaganda materials, prison memoirs, and oral histories, the project analyzes how legal categories such as “terrorist” and “enemy combatant” were produced through gendered, racialized, and imperial logics. The dissertation argues that women insurgents—far from being anomalies—were central actors in shaping colonial emergency law and its afterlives. Their political violence exposed the gendered underpinnings of carceral regimes and reconfigured the symbolic terrain of national liberation struggles. Across six chapters, this history traces the colonial legal genealogy of terrorism, examines women’s militant and carceral resistance, and explores global networks of anti-imperial feminist solidarity. It argues that femininity itself operated as a weapon, a site of state discipline, and a mode of insurgent agency. By re-centering the insurgent woman, this project challenges dominant narratives of decolonization and military history, offering a feminist reimagining of law, war, and political memory in the postcolonial world.Histor