№ 6 - 2003
Romanov P.V., Shcheblanova V.V., Yarskaya-Smirnova Ye.R.
Women-Terrorists in the Interpretative Models to Be Found in Russian Mass-Media (Discourse-Analysis of Newspaper Publications)

Models within the framework of which executrices of acts of terrorism happen to be represented by Russian printed mass-media, are investigated in the article, with newspaper publications on women’s participation in the terrorist actions of October 2002 and of July 2003 in Moscow subjected to qualitative content-analysis. The authors are considering the most significant types of symbolic contextualization of this topic as well as ethical aspects of discursive strategies. The problem of female participation in terrorist activity, as is demonstrated by detailed examination (with the methods of Toulmin and of Scriven applied) of the texts of 19 articles published in the “Komsomolskaya Pravda”, “Rossiyskaya gazeta”, “Argumenty i fakty”, and “Nezavisimaya gdzeta” within the periods of October 25 to November 3, 2002, and of July 6 to 17, 2003, is conceptualized mainly in terms of psycho- and moral pathology by means of comparing the women with men — a “norm” of its kind in the world of terrorism. The tendency of printed mass-media to explain female terrorism in the logic of the dichotomies of: public/private, rationality/emotionality, authority/subordination, warfare/household, — the authors perceive as a manifestation of deeply patriarchal character of our society, as an illustration of its being unprepared for scientific analysis of modern terrorist technologies.