‘I pushed the button about twenty times to set off the bomb’, the Chechen terrorist Zarema Muzhakhoyeva confessed, shortly after her arrest following a failed suicide mission to Moscow in summer 2003, ‘but it just wasn't working’. Zarema Muzhakhoyeva is an exceptional terrorist. Not because she was willing to kill and be killed. Not because she was incompetent and survived. She is exceptional because she is a woman. For this reason she has an added fascination. She is one of the Chechen ‘black widows’. Muzhakhoyeva broke all the usual taboos which shroud the discourse of terrorism, plus the one that assumes that women do not ordinarily commit acts of political violence. Terrorism is supposed to be a ‘man's game’; much as politics is.

Of course there are some women to be found. But they have a particular role to play; the essentially passive role of victim. In one sense, such a role has a quotidian and all too familiar banality, as many feminist critics often allege. The grander meta-narratives of terrorism may be signified by planes crashing into New York skyscrapers. The micro-narratives of female terror, however, occur behind closed doors, in murky side-streets, inside police cells. In her drama written against the Irish ‘troubles’ Ourselves Alone, AnneDevlin's Frieda relegates the distant terrorism of car-bombs and RUC raids behind the everyday terror of being gang-raped in an alley-way. This, for many women, is the terrorism that dare not speak its name. In the last chapter we noted the difficulty that female victims in particular experienced in presenting personal testimonies of precisely this kind of terrorism before ICTY and the South African TRC.