Gendering Terror: Eine Geschlechtergeschichte des Linksterrorimus in der Schweiz by Dominique Grisard (review)

When one thinks about terrorism in the German-speaking world of the 1970s, Switzerland is not usually the first place that springs to mind. But as Dominique Grisard demonstrates in this monograph, it was through thinking about terrorism that questions as fundamental as what it meant to be a Swiss (male) citizen were negotiated and fought out during the period. Gendering Terror brings Switzerland into the larger debate on 1970s terrorism, and, more important, provides the analytical tools to apply a thorough gendered analysis to the material.

In this meticulously researched, cogently argued, and highly original study, Grisard carefully analyzes the different discursive fields that made up the already gendered discourse on terrorism in Switzerland in the 1970s and early 1980s. Against the backdrop of a deficit of research into gender and left-wing terrorism in the German-speaking world—particularly surprising given the degree to which the participation of women preoccupied commentators then and still today—Grisard demonstrates the complex ways in which discourses on terrorism and gender were intertwined. Indeed, for Grisard, gender had a "konstitutive Bedeutung für das Phänomen des Terrorismus" (17), and the discourse of terrorism played a significant role in influencing hegemonic understandings of gender. Relying on Foucauldian notions of discourse, power, and knowledge, Grisard shows how only a fraction of what terrorism came to mean in Switzerland was determined by terrorists themselves; rather, the production of knowledge about terrorism was the collaborative project of a variety of institutions, groupings, and individual persons, each with different interests and needs.

The study is clearly organized into three sections. The first, "Terrorismus und Geschlecht," introduces the reader to the theoretical underpinnings of the book, while situating it within the context of the existing literature on terrorism; the second, "Analyse der Diskursfelder," forms the bulk of the study and is divided into seven chapters, each devoted to one of the discursive fields; the third, "Synthese und Ausblick," draws together the arguments in a particularly clear manner, especially given the complexity of the study and the richness of the primary material.

Unlike the authors of many recent monographs on the subject who focus on one field or genre in particular—e.g., the print media, legal writings, or the entire oeuvre of Ulrike Meinhof—Grisard analyses seven different aspects. This enables her to put together a complete picture of the hegemonic discourse on terrorism in Switzerland, and to show how these different fields fed off and into each other. They include academic writing, print-media articles, crime-related legal discourse, terrorists' own "(Selbst-)Stilisierungen," political debates and discussions, police accounts, as well as the activities and interventions of Swiss citizens. Grisard holds these various strands together through a focus on four distinct cases: the group known as "Bändlistrasse," active in Zurich in 1972; the group associated with Italian-German terrorist Petra Krause, who was active around Zurich from 1971 to 1975; Gabriele Kröcher-Tiedemann and Christian Möller from the German group Bewegung 2. Juni; and Claudia Bislin and Jürg Wehren, who were arrested in 1981.

Grisard analyses gender on three different levels throughout the study. The first, the personal, pertains to the individuals who produced and were objects of the discourse: terrorists themselves, for example, so-called terrorist sympathizers, Swiss citizens, and the police. The second, the institutional level, pertains to the organization of different institutions in terms of gender: how, for instance, the space of the prison was gendered through the segregation of prisoners based on their sex and the effect that that might have had on how terrorists acted. Finally, the symbolic level pertains to the images, myths, and narratives that structured the discourse and determined what was and what was not "sayable" about terrorism and gender. Through this approach Grisard makes a break with previous research into gender and terrorism, which has tended to limit itself to the gender of women terrorists and...