Beyond the Headlines: : A Discourse Analysis on Gendered Narratives in News mediaCoverage of Female and Male Suicide Bombers

There is currently a knowledge gap in terrorism research and in peace and conflict studiesregarding whether international news media use gender normative language when reporting onfemale and male suicide bombers in three different Islamic terrorism contexts. The contexts areAl-Qaeda, the Islamic State and Boko Haram. This thesis aims to highlight how internationalnews media use a language that reinforces gender norms through their portrayal of female andmale suicide bombers in the three mentioned Islamic terrorist contexts. Therefore, this thesisaims to analyze and compare a limited number of news media articles. To achieve the purposeof the study, a discourse analysis combined with a feminist post-structuralist theoreticalframework via Gentry and Sjoberg's (2015) narratives “mother, monster, and whore”, has beenused as a lens to examine the language use of news media. The study shows that the languageused by international news media reinforces gender norms and creates power relations betweenwomen and men who commit suicide bombing. Furthermore, these results may have policyimplications in terms of suboptimal efforts to combat Islamic terrorist efforts by women