The Syrian civil war has been, without doubt, the war most widely covered by
international media in this millennium. Having engaged in an armed combat
against the Islamic State (IS), Kurdish military troops,
especially the female battalion, have received considerable international media
attention. This study examines the gender dimension of national media
representations of female Kurdish combatants belonging to the Protection Units
(YPJ) in Syria. How have the female combatants been framed in
British and French media? To what extent are these representations gendered? The
overall data consists of news articles from national media outlets in France and
in the United Kingdom between 2014 and 2015, and is analyzed with frame
analysis. The results show that the juxtaposition of female combatants with
IS fighters allows the depiction of the participation of the
former as exceptional and heroic and as one that deconstructs the masculinity of
its adversary. The role of female combatants in the ongoing conflict is
represented in the British and French media through the construction of
sexualized and modern-day heroine figures that are largely glorified.