Joy compares the situation of the female Chechen suicide terrorist in contemporary Russia and Grendel in the Old Engish poem Beowulf in order to examine  the ways in which terroristic violence (whether the anthrophagy of a Grendel  or the belted bomb of a suicide terrorist) simultaneously summons and accuses  us as those who are irreplaceable. While Joy acknowledges that the correlation between the suicide bombers and Grendel is an overly tenuous one, she argues that, "while both the Chechen women and Grendel are viewed in their respective  cultures as figures of exorbitant exteriority, nevertheless, they are mainly terrifying for the ways in which they bring to vivid life (and death) the obscene  violence at the interior heart of States that mark the place of a supposedly  more ethical community.”