Militiarizing Bodies: Transcending the Female Psyche in Niromi de Soyza's Tamil Tigress

Abstract

 Women are often marked as the most vulnerable group in any population, simply because discourses on women center around victimhood and economic responsibility. They are branded as a peace-loving population who naturally abhor violence and are often the victims of violation and sexual assault. The intake of female participants as combatants in the LTTE for their fight against the government was a reassurance for women to gain empowerment and break the clutches of patriarchal domination that wrung around them. LTTE was known for its notoriety and the women tigers in its forces. Many female combatants in the rebel paramilitary force were either abducted or forced to join it. The paper is an examination into the role played by female combatants in the LTTE through the memoir of Niromi De Soyza's Tamil Tigress: My Story as a Child Soldier in Sri Lanka's Bloody Civil War (2011). The book is an autobiographical first hand narration of a guerilla woman soldier who tries to understand her position as an empowered woman- a sacred virgin for the plight of the nation and later redemption. The paper tries to understand how the acceptance into the group of militant combatants affected the gendered crisis associated to a woman. It is an unravelling of the psyche of a woman soldier in the traumatic throes of a nation burdened by three decade long civil strife.