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When the Tiger was a Woman: Unraveling the Myth and Comprehending the Complexities of the Female Combatant in the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam
Conventional narratives concerning violent conflict portray women as more likely to choose non-violence over violence, their roles limited to victim or peacemaker. These portrayals capture a partial truth. This dissertation explicates the structural, cultural and individual factors that contribute to determining when and why the combatant is a woman. Through a study of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, it excavates around the varying myths and mystique of the female combatant, revealing the complex phenomenon of why the Tiger was a woman.
Historical and socio-cultural circumstances converged to form the female combatant, each element operating individually and collectively in the lives of Tamil Tiger women in their complexity. Several instances of structural violence shaped a metanarrative among the Tamil populace that birthed the LTTE in 1976. This was accompanied by individual occasions of ethnically motivated anti-Tamil violence, leading to parallel individual narratives. The resultant individual traumas legitimized the LTTE and their violent tactics among a segment of the Tamil public, and provided a platform for traumatized Tamil women to share their several narratives of personal horrification and to mourn their personal victimization. This platforms’ legitimizing of violence afforded a stage upon which mourning took a violent form, giving birth to the Tamil Tigress. Stated more bluntly, the Tigress, in her adoption of violence and suicide terror, committed an act of mourning. In a single act, she emancipated herself from the bonds of repression, the fetters of the trauma chosen, and the chains of horrification so personal.
Furthermore, if repositioning is defined as a change in identity, this dissertation demonstrates that women wage war as an act of agency, and as a means of repositioning themselves in a polity. Generally, when a woman voluntarily joins combat, she is exercising that agency. In the extreme, when she poisons herself or employs a suicide belt, she commits the ultimate act of agency. The former may be viewed as an act of personal emancipation, while the latter invokes a self-donation to “the cause.” Each instance was at once the fight of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and that of liberation—from the ties of individual trauma and the collective fetters of Tamil patriarchy and Sri Lankan state oppression.