Nuclear Terrorists: Patricia Hearst and the (Feminist) Terrorist Family

Abstract

So far in this book, I have described the ways that radical feminism— which, within the late 1960s and early 1970s North American cultural milieu, stands in for feminism more generally—resonated as a terrorist threat to dominant order. This chapter examines how this threat was mapped onto the figure of the female terrorist by analyzing the high-profile kidnapping and “conversion” of Patricia Campbell Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) in 1974. In what follows, I suggest that the threat of both feminism and (feminist) terrorism are perceived to problematize— indeed, terrorize—the institution of the family, and that the family thus becomes an important site for the recuperation of the (feminist) terrorist threat and the reassertion of dominant order.

This is the Age of the Terrorist. There is, and will continue to be, more than one Tania. The intensity with which the world was gripped by the Patty Hearst story is not hard to understand. Almost every family today has its Patty, girl or boy, lost, stolen, or strayed, dropped out, kicked out, left out, or flipped out.

David Boulton¹