 So thanks everyone for coming to what is the last in the new direction of the history of warfare and violence seminar series being hosted here at the Sir Michael Howard Center for this year. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Dr Mark Kondos. I'm a lecturer in War Studies here at the Department of War Studies. And it is my great pleasure to introduce our speaker this evening, Dr Claire Bilby, who is a senior lecturer at the Center for Women's Studies at the University of York. Dr Bilby's work draws upon methods for cultural and literary studies and examines a variety of issues, including terrorism and gender, which I believe she'll be speaking about this evening. The relationship between violence, representation, gender, subjectivity and emotion, as well as the field of perpetrator studies. Dr Bilby is the author of violent women in print representations in West German print media of the 1960s and 1970s, which came out of 2012. And more recently, he's co-editor of perpetrating selves, doing violence, performing identity. Dr Bilby is also the co-PI on a DAD funded research project entitled Violence Elsewhere, Imagining Violence Outside Germany Since 1945. So I'll leave it to you, Claire. Please take it away and start your PowerPoint here. There we are. And I can just use the arrows. Okay, thanks very much, Mark. And thank you so much for the invite as well. It's really nice to be here. Thank you all for attending. And so my paper today is taken from a chapter on time and temporality provisionally titled Terrorist Time in my current monograph project, which explores a selection of post-terrorist autobiographies written by former members of West German leftist terrorist groups, the Red Army Faction, henceforth the RAF, and Movement 2nd of June. Emerging from the West German student or anti-authoritarian movement, which became increasingly radical from 1967, both groups formed in the early 1970s and were at the most active in that decade. The groups were marked as Leninist in orientation, inspired also by Latin American guerrilla struggles and strategy among other influences. Regarding themselves as guerrilla groups rather than terrorists with the legitimacy that that former term conferred on their violence, they saw themselves as part of a transnational armed struggle against capitalist imperialism. Now, of the texts that I focus on in my broader project, two of them are written by women. In the feats, Nevae Fuskels' 11-year design More Fearless, first published in 1996, and Mavit Shillers' Spine-Hartekamp for minor interval. Remembering the armed struggle is how it's been translated into English, first published in 1999. Also, of those texts, three are by men. Michel Bauman's The Alice Anfeng, how it all began at 1975, TMI of Schwarzwein, enemy of the state of 1996, and Karl-Heinz Deovo's Stas-Poliet-Tiersen-Vier, we are the projectile of 2007. Now, in the monograph, I'm particularly interested in how the intersecting categories of gender and class mark the subjectivities of these post-terrorist authors, and that both in the narrated past, but also in the narrating present. This is a context in which women and men were pretty much equally represented and pretty much leading equally dramatic lives in both groups. And women's roles in those groups in particular were a much-commented phenomenon in the 1970s and subsequently. Women's roles generated a great deal of misogynistic media coverage and speculation, indicative of gender trouble, not least in the context of the emergence of West Germany's second wave women's movement from 1968. So just to give you a bit of an overview of the project more broadly, key research questions for my book project are, what did it mean to be a terrorist and function as part of a terrorist organization in this cultural and historical context? What are the gender and class attractions of joining a terrorist organization and doing terrorism in this particular time and place? What cultural models or cultural narratives do these authors mobilise in order to render intelligible their use of violence and their political and historical agency? Finally, what do these texts have to tell us about the gendered and classed everyday life of and the affects and emotions bound up with terrorism? So coming to the topic of time, there are a number of reasons why I think that time matters for thinking about terrorism and that both in a general sense, also in the context of my particular case study with my research questions in mind. So first of all, and most generally, involvement in terrorism leads to particular experiences of time, to particular temporalities where temporalities is understood as the lived experiences of time or what's sometimes called subjective time. So here I'm thinking of things like the persistent threat of being shot, being blown up, sudden death, the persistent threat of arrest, the rapid rushing pace of undertaking a violent action, or alternatively, the monotonous repetitive and dragging quality of everyday life underground. Secondly, time matters with reference to my particular case study of West German leftist terrorism, not least as a phenomenon that grew out of the student movement or as it's often known, the anti-authoritarian movement. And one of the most exhilarating things for activists in West Germany and quite possibly elsewhere was a sense of living through a time of major epochal or historical change, and crucially too, though I think that this idea needs gendering, a sense of being a protagonist in or an agent of that historical change. So this is a context where revolution was widely believed to be round the corner, to be imminent. It was also believed that it was something that could be compelled through force of will. Activist Manfred Neuforder spoke retrospectively of the feeling of a generation that believed it was capable of radically changing the historical conditions within a short period of time with appropriate effort. More recently, historian Stephanie Pitzweiger has conceptualised the Zukunft's optimism in the future of what she understands as the masculine coded West German 68er movement. Meanwhile, historian Timothy Scott Brown has argued that West German new left activists had a particular awareness of the historical past and of their own historical agency, not least on account of Germany's national socialist past. The movement, he argues, was marked in a way that no other radical movement in history had been or has been since by the attempt to historicise and theorise itself in real time. Thinking now specifically of those who joined West German leftist terrorist groups, the revolutionary politics may nearly always have a forward orientation. The revolutionaries work for, they look forward to the revolution to come. West German terrorists arguably look forward in particular ways. And this was bound up with the theoretical underpinnings of these groups and their appropriation of Latin American guerrilla strategies. In particular, Che Guevara and Brigitte Gros' focus theory, which posited that an armed avant-garde should create the conditions for and thereby jump start or bring on the revolution through acts of guerrilla violence rather than the kind of classic Marxist idea that revolutionaries need to wait for the right objective conditions to be met. Finally, and this is what I'm focusing on today, time matters for thinking about gendered and class subjectivity, a key focus of my project more broadly. Building on classical phenomenological approaches to temporality and subjective experience, Simon de Beauvoir demonstrated in the second sets that temporality and gender are deeply entangled and that in the words of Megan Burke, how one lives time is constitutive of the kind of gender person one becomes. She elaborates, gender subjectivity and gender oppression are not merely phenomena in time, but temporalized and thus are lived as and through particular experiences of time. The notion of terrorist time, which I'm building this chapter around, is inspired by Julia Crestava's influential essay, Women's Time of 1979, but also by queer feminist approaches to temporality and to what has been called queer time. So Julia Crestava differentiated between the linear time of progress found up with the masculine and the repetitive cyclical time that she turns women's time and which is bound up with the feminine. Meanwhile, queer feminist theorists such as Judith Jack Halberstam have conceptualized how queer lives and queer temporalities, particularly those of the global north, have tended to resist the heteronormative life course with its paradigmatic markers of life experience, namely birth, marriage, reproduction and death and with its emphasis on longevity as the most desirable future. Terrorist time, I argue, came with its own paradigmatic markers of life experience, as is often captured in the chapter titles to these texts. And in my book, I struck to this chapter chronologically around four of these markers, namely politicization, joining or recruitment to an armed organization, life underground and leaving armed activism. I explore the construction of each of these stages in the terrorist life course, paying particular attention to how the categories of gender and class mark these authors' subjectivities and of course to the representation of time, temporality and not least the time of revolution. Now, given it's neither possible nor desirable for me to walk you through an entire chapter tonight, I want to focus in on a particular strand that has emerged with reference to the two women's texts. Drawing on a feminist phenomenology of temporality, I'm going to be arguing that joining a terrorist organization and at least in Inga Feet's case doing terrorism was attractive as it functioned as a means to escape what Burke has turned the passive present, a way to become what she turns temporal subjects whose experience of time is dynamic, open and potentially queer. This is just one strand of my chapter's broader argument which is that the attraction of joining and remaining in these terrorist organizations was bound up with the experience of time, with the experience of temporality and I'm very happy in the Q&A to pick up other strands to that argument. Now in making this argument with reference to women terrorists in particular, it's important to point out that my approach is not a means of undermining the political motivations of women terrorists by drawing attention to what could be considered more personal motivations, a strategy that we see for example in print media representations of women terrorists in the 1970s. Rather it's to take seriously the feminist mantra that the personal is political and it's to reject binaries such as personal and political. It's worth highlighting here I think that these same binaries tend to be reproduced in scholarship on violence and not least feminist scholarship on violence. So-called political violence and so-called personal violence tend to be held apart with distinct fields of scholarship devoted to their study which are rarely brought together. Apart from my broader interest in thinking about violence from a feminist perspective is to bring the field of what we could call feminist perpetrator studies into conversation with the body of scholarship on violence against women. So before I start just a bit of background on these two women so this is Inger Feet born in 1944 to an impoverished single mother. Feet was placed in foster care age six, raised in poverty and subjected to years of emotional and physical abuse. She moved to West Berlin's Kreuzberg district in her mid 20s where her politics became increasingly radical as she immersed herself in Berlin's leftist militancy. Feet joined the movement second of June in 1972 soon after its formation functioning as a core member of that group throughout the 1970s involved in two abductions among other violent actions. Arrested in 1972 and 1975, Feet escaped from prison on two occasions. After shooting and seriously injuring a police officer in Paris in 1981, Feet fled to the GDR along with several other RAF members as part of the so-called RAF-Stasi connection that she had helped to set up. She was arrested in Magdeburg in 1990 shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall and sentenced to 13 years in prison in 1992 before her eventual early release in 1997. Margaret Chiller was born in 1948 in a largely middle-class family. She attended university in Bonn and Heidelberg where she became involved in the radical socialist patients collective, many of whose members would go on to join the RAF. While in Heidelberg, Chiller agreed to let full RAF members stay in her flat in 1971 and her politics were deeply influenced by the conversations she had with those core members during this time. Soon after deciding to join the RAF in 1971, Chiller was arrested during a shootout with police and then she was imprisoned. Released in 1973, she swiftly rejoined the RAF but was arrested again in 1974 rather. Unlike Feet, Chiller's participation in armed operations was minimal and after requesting to be integrated with regular prisoners, though without renouncing the armed struggle or her past, she was released from prison in 1979. Okay, so first thinking about this passage or this moment in the terrorist life course of politicization. So with regard to the process of politicization, a trope that we see in Feet's and Chiller's texts is that of searching, suggesting that discovering or identifying one's revolutionary political agency and imagining a non-normative future for oneself was a particularly complex process for the female subject, regardless of class. So both women narrate a process of existential, non-directive searching. Chiller comments, my life as a student was not enough for me but I didn't yet know what I was looking for. At any rate, I was looking for some sort of meaning for my life. I became more and more aware of what I didn't want, nothing that was similar to my parental home, school, the Bonne new builder state or my work in the hospital, not this control, not this fear of others, not this barely hidden violence, not this order. I went in search. But Chiller is only able to imagine or at least narrate what she might want for her life. So the negative example of what she doesn't want and it's evident here she uses nothing not or in the German niche six times is telling. It points to the lack of life scripts available to women at that time and to the attendant difficulty of imagining a meaningful political existence, identity and future outside of the conventional. The quality of Chiller's non-directive searching, contrast strikingly with the concrete, directed and future oriented nature, a fellow male RAF member, Delvo searching in the prologue to his text. So he says it was with my participation in political action in Stockholm that I came to the RAF. I'd wanted to get there for years. I'd turned 23 a few days before and since 1971 I've been searching for political context that stood in unequivocal opposition to social relations. V2 narrates a strong sense of existential non-directive searching. Offer early 20 she explains, I attempted to find out what I was good at, what I wanted to do and what the meaning of everything was. I searched but I was searching like a blind woman who searches in the dark for cat that she's not convinced is even there. As well as indicating the lack of alternative life scripts for here the working class white woman at the time features explicit attention to the difficulty of imagining a future outside of the conventional. I don't even know what I'm searching for, she comments a few paragraphs earlier. I feel as though I'm being propelled towards emptiness on an invisible chain. So here a future that is not one of heterosexual futurity can only be visualized as emptiness. Both Schiller and Feet create a strong sense in their texts of the oppressive, gendered and classed life scripts that lay ahead of them and that they would ultimately reject. In Schiller's case emphasis is placed squarely on the heteronormativity of those scripts. Now where did I want to live or become like my parents? She asserts again in negative terms. Not that the teacher is always right, not the traditional two person relationship with its compulsory collective the nuclear family in which alternative opinions and feelings only counter this threat. Notably she juxtaposes making her decision to go underground with an explicit rejection of the heteronormative life course. A university friend whom I really liked surprisingly one day was a marriage proposal which he says let's get married, finish our degrees together and then have children. That was precisely not what I wanted and when he declared a three wishes it was as clear as ever to me. The other my new path was already close to me. I didn't know where it would lead me. It may well end in imprisonment or death but for the first time I had the feeling that I was living the right way. So here the attraction of life underground and of what I'm calling terrorist time for in this case the middle class female subject can usefully be understood alongside theoretical approaches to queer time. That Shilla was in a lesbian relationship at this point having made the decision to distance herself from men in the context of her growing feminist critique of patriarchal relationships and structures makes this reading all the more apposite. As Halba Stammer asserts what has made queerness compelling has to do with the way it has the potential to open up new life narratives and alternative relations to time and space. Queer time they continue is also about the potentiality of a life unscripted by the conventions of family, inheritance and child rearing. Shilla does not know where this alternative queer queering path will lead her but it has potential not least because it allows her to reject heteronormativity and reproductive futurity. But Shilla's path may result in prison or death here is irrelevant to her. Longevity as the most desirable future in Halba Stammer's words is rejected. Instead Shilla chooses existential meaningfulness and a sense of living authentically whatever that might mean and here we see the huge influence of existentialist philosophy on new left actors, political actors in the West German context. Consciously or otherwise she picks up the narrative technique of Russian anarchist Vera Fickner in her memoirs of a revolutionist first published in 1927. As Dominique Rousal has argued of that text joining an illegal organization is presented as a radical break from the old traditional life of marriage, family and other intergenerational ties. This points towards a longer history and a potentially developing paradigm of the revolutionary woman who here queers heteronormative temporality in choosing to join the armed struggle. In the first chapter of Feet's text devoted to her childhood and adolescence she emphasizes the oppressive nature of the working class gendered life scripts that lay before her. Directly after a lengthy account of a local farmer, Feddison's attempted rape of her and this is something that happened routinely she tells us in passing, Feet recalls how she resumed her paper and delivering newspapers to a nearby farm. Sweating and with a red face she says I entered the large kitchen with its enormous stove and its equally enormous ladles dishes and sauce pans. The thought that in a few years I was to stand here or elsewhere scouring, lifting, stirring and washing these monsters horrified me. I stood there unhappily with a dark future ahead of me in the context of a horrendous present. The horrifying prospect of a life of domestic labour for young Feet is experiences of dark future here revealing substantial class differences in the two women's experiences and imaginable futures. A trope in Feet's text that underscores the misery and violence of particularly working class but also queer women's lives is that of life as prison and I think that the fact that Feet routes whilst in prison first is an example of prison literature is also no doubt substantially influencing the choice of this metaphor although it's one that Schiller mobilises on occasion as well. After recounting the incident of attempted rape, Feet reflects, I thought of Fedeson and those like him, of the woman of work tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, every day. I yearned to be away from here but I didn't know where nor what I was yearning for. I didn't know anything else. My existence was a prison. I was jailed and I began to square scramble walls for an exit. The Feet obviously longs to be away from her horrifying present which experiences as a form of imprisonment that stretches out ahead of her. Yet again she's unable to imagine what an alternative future might look like and that this failure of imagination is associated with her rape here may be no coincidence. As feminist trauma theorists have discussed, sexual violence can profoundly affect women's lived experience of time and of what possible futures might be available to them. In her powerful philosophical reflection on her experience of a violent sexual assault and its aftermath, Susan J Bryson refers to her sense of a foreshortened future as one of several PTSD symptoms. Meanwhile feminist trauma psychiatrist Bonnie Burstow has commented that survivors of rape tend to become frozen in time. With Beauvoir who writes in the context of late 1940s France, the idea of having a foreshortened future on account of rape or otherwise or of having difficulty in imagining one's future can be extended to women more broadly though in her case likely white middle class women and to what we might call normative femininity. So according to Beauvoir normative feminine socialization leads to women becoming violently cut off from both past and future as a result of three key life events, girlhood, heterosexual initiation and marriage which in the words of Megan Burke annex a woman into the universe of men to the world that is for men such that she comes to exist as their plaything and crucially which severs the girl's claim to freedom. These heteronormative life events lead to women becoming confined to what Burke has termed the passive present. To become a woman in the misogynist style that is to assume a feminine existence says Burke is to take up a particular relation to time through relentless imposition and existential burden. It is to assume or embody a passive present a temporal mode of waiting such that a woman's redundant experience of the present becomes her she is the present. Taking Beauvoir's ideas as a starting point Burke has theorized the temporality of feminine existence in latently or manifestly violent patriarchal society as the passive present. In particular she emphasizes how what she terms the spectres of violence that is the embodied threat and fear of sexual violence leads girls and women to experience the world as unsafe to live a heightened vulnerability to worry to be apprehensive and ultimately live in fear and this she argues keeps them bound to the present. She also draws attention somewhat appropriately to what she terms the carceral logic at the heart of the temporality of feminine existence. The application of the metaphor of life of prison to all women's lives later in the text evokes this passive present narrating her first prison break she comments women's seldom break out they're used to suffering waiting and hoping sometimes they attempt to stretch strength their role perhaps managing to explode it if they have the strength sometimes they break out of their life as prison escaping it with difficulty but this prison made of steel keys and concrete this absolute power overpowers women with a hope for sense of finality which allows for no further thoughts about the coming the feet emphasizes here the passivity and confinement to the present of women's lives she also highlights the sense of inescapable finality the stubbornness of this position rather than any movement forward which allows for no thoughts of an imaginable future so feet may be discussing all women in general here one woman the designation woman seems not to apply to is feet herself and know how she uses the pronoun they rather than we feet by this point has managed to break out both literally from jail and metaphorically through dramatically even violently exploding her gendered life script in becoming a member of a militant organization when it comes to the representation of joining or in feet's case being recruited to a terrorist organization it's striking how in the text written by male post terrorist authors the precise moment of going underground functions as a sort of narrative non-event suggesting that taking this step was a self-evident organic development for the white working class male subject or at least suggesting the desire to portray it that way by contrast in shillers of beats texts joining the wrath and movement second of june respectively is accorded a great deal of narrative emphasis indicating that this process was a significant development for them and perhaps also indicating that they along with their editors are anticipating an appetite on the part of their readership for exciting sensational detail with regard to the process of a woman going underground now shillers account of allowing core wrath members on week and mine half and pay a spider etc to stay in her heidelberg flat sees her vomiting a bodily response that she explains with reference to her gendered and class upbringing and a dramatic rupture with that upbringing she says I was in the process of breaking the essential norms and values that I've been brought up with it been drilled into me that criminality and violence in and of themselves are evil that you don't support law breakers you hand them over to the police the chapter encountering the wrath ends with the memorable image of shiller together with ex-girlfriend gabby burning away purging even her old identity as she joyfully and fearlessly imagines a new path in the armed struggle fear I had none at all she says rather I felt an unknown strength gabby and I burnt away all my photos keepsakes and letters in the loo gabby was sad but I wasn't I knew where my path was now leading me from existential and ultimately directionless searching articulated primarily in negative terms shiller now narrates a sense of direction a positive path forward and an albeit as yet unknown open future for herself as she cuts herself off from her past and her past self meanwhile in feats account of being recruited into movement second of june when two male members of that group visit her in her flat and raise this possibility with her feet slows down the narration fleshing out the scene with detail and using the present tense for emphasis what's noteworthy particularly given the degree to which she was already involved in militant activism by this point is her surprise at being asked to join the group she recalls her response to the question of whether she'd ever considered working more closely with movement second of june as follows now I have them legal work activism and situational militancy completely occupied me until now I support the armed struggle of course and don't question its legitimacy or necessity in any way but my word me myself as part of the armed struggle I'd not yet hate this conclusion myself but feet seems to have reached this point in her militant politics without imagining a future in which she might join an armed group arguably attests to the lack of discursive space for women to imagine themselves as radical and armed political actors at that time interpreted through the lens of both war and burq the passage can be read as further indication of feats confinement to the passive present certainly feats surprise at being invited to join movement second of june contrasts with how delvo and mire represent themselves as making the decision themselves to go underground and then waiting impatiently for their opportunity it contrasts to with how certain male authoritarian anti-authoritarian activists were experiencing the future as open to them in the late 60s as piltzweger details in her study 68 is Hans Joachim Hermeister and Peter Schneider saw the revolution of sorry had no trouble imagining their post-revolution futures in the most concrete of ways she says in the late 60s they saw the revolution approaching and were therefore already discussing which of them would take a what political office in the future in their fantasy distribution of government offices the position of culture minister was highly attractive to the protesters interesting too in feats account of her recruitment is how she reflects on the example of her flat raid flatmate even and comrade Verena Becker she says Verena barely involves herself in the discussion and i realized that she's known for a long time what she wants suddenly behind the mischievous face of a girl i discover a resolute young woman now it's possible that as with reference to herself it's simply not been thinkable for feats that becker might have joined an armed group even though there are plenty of examples of women revolutionaries operating in west germany at this time feat narrates the process of becker joining the armed struggle here as a sort of gendered coming of age providing an interesting variant on the prussian construction of the military as Birn-Schule den-Azul so school of the nation where conscription according to historian Utolf Levert was imagined as part of a young man's coming of age echo in shiller who clearly juxtaposed her decision to join the wrath with a more conventional life course that was scripted for her feat constructs what could be seen as a queer query temporality for the revolutionary woman here but the passage could equally be read as the woman revolutionary entering christaven linear patriarchal time and therefore is not very queer at all while constructions such as this contribute further to what's emerging as a paradigm of the revolutionary woman it's notable that feat applies this coming of age narrative to her friend rather than to herself perhaps suggesting an inability or at least a reluctance to fully identify with such paradigm so as i've been demonstrating part of what made joining a terrorist organization attractive for feats and shiller at least as they retrospectively construct it in their autobiographies of course is that it allowed them to escape their passive normative life course their passive present the carceral logic at the heart of the temporality of feminine existence it allowed them to imagine an open possibly queer queer in future to imagine themselves as temporal subjects with a dynamic experience of time while life underground certainly lived up to expectations for feats it clearly did not for shiller now she's the only one of my five posterity authors to emphasize the monotonous dragging and repetitive temporality of life underground which is represented as a sort of christaven women's time and it contrasts very strikingly with the excitement and urgency of lived time underground as represented in particular in feats and maya's texts life underground for shiller for the most part then entailed returning to this passive present and she only really is able to escape it when she leaves the raft whilst in jail and becomes integrated among regular prisoners by contrast for feats operating underground as part of the um um struggle came with existential meaningfulness a sense of connection to past present and future and with a sense of freedom as least that she at least as she narrates it as part of a lengthy reflection on life underground around 1973 she recalls and it's a long quote um she recalls i enjoyed my new life in the underground i had a proud strong feeling of complete devotion to something that the best of humanity had been devoted their power and lives to centuries to the liberation of humanity to a society without classes this girl was like a hazy distant sun yet it was a powerful magnetic future the revolution was not yet really conceivable but the revolution you struggle for this girl was now possible i was out there i was simply new something distinctive never in my life as i'm more certain or fearless as during this time underground the space that emitted a new way of being outside of the ugly world never was i more free never was i more bound to my own sense of responsibility as in this condition of complete separation from state authority and from social requirements with its notion with its emphasis on notions of authenticity freedom and responsibility the passage again demonstrates the influence of existentialist philosophy read through a gendered lens reference to something new to something distinctive but also feats use of the term abalom which makes literally the cutting of the bill of accord gesture towards the time space of the underground as facilitating a form of rebirth for the woman revolutionary freedom as opposed to life as prison in ways that recall Schiller's dramatic purging of identity when taking the decision to go underground. Chamber Byron may have written of the rebirth of the male guerrilla fighter in socialism and the new man but it is only in the women's texts that joining the armed struggle is formulated in such drastic terms as a form of rebirth or is becoming a new kind of woman and later on in in a feats text and with reference to quite tongue in cheek comments made by male comrades from that group with regards to the supposed dominance of women and supposed dominance of working class comrades in movements second of june feet alludes to how joining the armed struggle and how doing terrorism enabled a woman to in a sense become a new kind of woman and she talks about for instance the film and unfolding of our autonomy as women the encompassing development of abilities that men were not accustomed to in women. So as I said at the start of this presentation what I've been discussing is just one strand of a bigger chapter whose broader argument is that the attraction of joining a terrorist organization and doing terrorism was bound up with the experience of time, the experience of temporality and just to give you an example of other stuff that I'm covering in that chapter which glad that people in the Q&A and another argument I'm making is that joining the armed struggle was among other things a way to ward off the temple crisis that came with the collapse of the 68er movement and that came with the shattering realization that revolution is no longer around the corner. Thank you very much.