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International Affairs 96: 3 (2020) 573–591; doi: 10.1093/ia/iiaa047 © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Royal Institute of International Affairs. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] Over the past decade, terrorist organizations and other violent groups have increasingly turned to aesthetic media1—videos and images—to disseminate their world-views and attempt to persuade potential recruits to join their ranks.2 The so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is no exception. Once the caliphate was proclaimed in June 2014, the organization initiated an extensive programme of video production that instantly caught global attention owing to a sinister batch of videos showing prisoners being beheaded.3 Although ISIS was associated with extreme barbarism and ultra-violence, a closer scrutiny of its video production reveals a more variegated picture, including footage of everyday scenery and peaceful statebuilding activities.4 A study of the group’s video production from 2014 to 2018, however, reveals another striking feature: the quasi-absence of female bodies. It is an overarching characteristic of ISIS videos that they convey a masculine world from which women are by and large absent or at least blurred and veiled. The very large majority of bodies that materialize in the videos are men’s bodies. This holds true not only of those depicting executions and warfare, but also of those showing more mundane scenes of street life and marketplaces in the ‘Islamic State’. In contrast to male bodies, which are ostentatiously and carnally exhibited, female bodies are aesthetically ‘policed’ and kept in the ‘right place’: under a veil, in the background, blurred, out of focus, on an advertising board or addressed in a male voiceover.5 Hence ISIS videos produce a specific, gendered ‘partition of the sensible’ in which women are, with few exceptions, silenced and excluded from the public political sphere.6