Politics & Power Quote by Katherine Dunn

The sentence lands like a cold inventory of institutions: the state drags its feet, while its enemies opportunistically recruit. Dunn’s intent isn’t to celebrate women’s “scope” in violent movements; it’s to puncture the complacent story that exclusion is protective or principled. When national militaries “resist” women’s participation, they don’t keep women out of violence. They just outsource women’s military agency to places with fewer rules, more desperation, and often more ideological theater.

The subtext is a critique of gatekeeping disguised as tradition. “Historically” does a lot of work: it invokes a long bureaucratic memory of gendered caution, then pivots to the blunt reality that talent and ambition don’t evaporate when barred from official channels. The phrasing “female talent” is intentionally clinical, almost HR-speak, which makes the punchline sharper: organizations we label “terrorist” can be more pragmatic about women’s capabilities than governments that claim modernity.

Contextually, Dunn is writing in the late-20th/early-21st century moment when women’s combat roles were still contested in many national forces, even as news cycles documented women as bombers, couriers, propagandists, and commanders in insurgencies from Northern Ireland to Sri Lanka to the Middle East. The line also needles a media habit: treating violent women as anomalies, monsters, or dupes. Dunn suggests something more unnerving and more useful: participation follows opportunity. If legitimacy denies it, illegitimacy supplies it.