Where are the women? This is the question that Cynthia Enloe urges everyone to ponder when analyzing any field, problem, or project. Enloe's latest lecture discussed if ISIS is a development issue, which creates two sub-questions, one: where are the women in ISIS? and two: Where are the women in development? While there are other questions to examine in relation to ISIS, I believe her overarching argument during this lecture was to question how ISIS as it grows into a larger more stable 'state' affects the lives and development of women and their societies. One way she illustrated the influence that ISIS has on women is through the role women play in the different militarized factions. Of the many different armed forces that have a role to …show more content…
While they are not warriors they do have a role to play, which is increasingly the role of wives. As we read in the New York Times the appeal to become a wife of an ISIS fighter isn't limited to the Middle East, it is reaching into the west and calling women to a specific type of 'destiny'. This is the flip side to the question of the men's role in ISIS, this is the answer to where the women are. The three Muslim girls from London went to Syria to join ISIS because it felt like a place where they were going to be fulfilled as women. Women always have a role to play in war, be it fighters or home front moral supporters; there is never a war effort that succeeds without the support of women. However, it is particularly interesting that women are being so proactive in the ISIS fight in very traditional ways. The three girls from London possessed extreme agency to travel to Syria alone, which illustrates the influence of women's empowerment on these girls, they knew they could do it alone. However in contrast to this empowered action, they are going to a place where the society they left behind will see them as traditionally disempowered due to being housewives. Personally, I believe that being a housewife can be as empowering as working outside the home, we just need to change the rhetoric around what it means to do