Asset Details
Do you wish to reserve the book?
Dressed to Kill and Die: Russian Revolutionary Terrorism, Gender, and Dress
Hey, we have placed the reservation for you!
By the way, why not check out events that you can attend while you pick your title.
Oops! Something went wrong.
Looks like we were not able to place the reservation. Kindly try again later.
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
Dressed to Kill and Die: Russian Revolutionary Terrorism, Gender, and Dress
Do you wish to request the book?
Dressed to Kill and Die: Russian Revolutionary Terrorism, Gender, and Dress
Please be aware that the book you have requested cannot be checked out. If you would like to checkout this book, you can reserve another copy
We have requested the book for you!
Your request is successful and it will be processed during the Library working hours. Please check the status of your request in My Requests.
Oops! Something went wrong.
Looks like we were not able to place your request. Kindly try again later.
Journal Article
Dressed to Kill and Die: Russian Revolutionary Terrorism, Gender, and Dress
2010
Overview
This article makes a series of interlocking arguments regarding the way in which gender and dress contributed to the meaning of the terrorist act in revolutionary Russia. It argues that because “populist political terrorism” entailed political assassination targeting specific individuals, the individual attributes of both terrorist and victim acquired symbolic significance. The terrorist act was troped as a duel that staged a contest of superior and legitimate violence - and thus of sovereignty - between the regime and its opponents (representing “the will of the people”). Women were prominent participants in terrorist acts throughout the revolutionary period, and the relative novelty of female political violence enhanced the spectacularity of that violence. Female terrorists, however, opted for an anti-spectacular spectacularity, or renunciatory display, that was rendered by a means available to all women: through their dress. While period memoirs and literature, as well as the historiography, are equally enthralled by the self-renunciation of revolutionary women and characterize it as a moral/ideological stance, the female terrorists’ “great renunciation” in fact became the dominant trope in the (self) representation of the female Russian revolutionary terrorist. Textual reencodings of the relationship between dress and female gender in discourses of different orders, including the self-writing of female terrorists, find in “the great renunciation” the womens’ right to act politically - “to kill and die” in public - as well as the moral legitimacy of their act.
