Feminevil: The Chechen Black Widows’ Symbolic Terrorism

This paper examines the Chechen Black Widows and how they carry symbolic terrorist attacks against Russian targets – the authors’ newly created concept of feminevil. By and large, feminevil is a growing phenomenon of girl-militancy in human violence. The theory used in this paper is Symbolic Convergence Theory (SCT). Developed by Bormann (1972), SCT posits that a group can unite to form a collective culture so as to achieve ambitious objectives. Whether it is a word, phrase, narrative, or physical symbol, each tenet – (a) fantasy theme, (b) symbolic cue, (c) fantasy type, and (d) saga – merges with all the others to recognize anything that helps generate, increase, and sustain a rhetorical society’s awareness.