Book Review: On the Rocks: Straight Talk About Women and Drinking by Susan D. Stewart

Abstract

Ultimately, Jackson’s book is a well-written analysis and deconstruction of gendered discourse and representation of Muslim women’s role in politically violent movements. While repetitive in some argumentative respects, Jackson offers critical nuances in deconstructing the representational complexities of the lives, motivations, and identities of these “jihadi brides.” For example, in chapters four and five, she offers an excellent discussion of the discursive transformation that occurs when these women migrate to IS territory, whereby they are “passive and reactive prior to their migration, and supernaturally altered and monsterized on arrival” (p. 79). Similarly, in chapter five, she offers another excellent nuance regarding the supposed threat that Muslim women pose due to their role as mothers and hence, as reproducers of culture and ideology within the ungovernable, un-regulated, and “un-surveillable private sphere” (p. 171). An expansion of these points would have been welcome, as would have an explicit comparison of the representational framings of specific British Muslim male migrants to IS territory in the first chapter. Regardless, this book is ideal for scholars in feminist, racialization, and terrorism studies who seek to complicate understandings of female participants of political violence.