•Inclusive female anti-poaching (IFAP) is increasingly gaining attention.•IFAP environmental spectacles in southern Africa showcase heroic female rangers.•The spectacles contain ambiguities regarding gender, race and green militarization.•Spectacularisation attracts funding, but neglects significant context.•IFAP spectacles are based on invisible (i.e. symbolic and systemic) violence. Staged ‘spectacles’ are increasingly becoming important in communicating potential solutions for environmental challenges such as poaching. In this paper, we explore the spectacle of ‘inclusive female anti-poaching’ (IFAP) through an analysis of the Akashinga and Black Mamba projects in Zimbabwe and South Africa respectively. Both IFAP initiatives emphasize the inclusion of local women in anti-poaching. Such projects gain increasing public attention but have thus far hardly been studied academically. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and critical discourse analysis, we unpack the IFAP spectacle’s three core pillars: first, their claim to break gender stereotypes and the intersection with race; second, the portrayal of female rangers as heroines in relation to their socio-economic status and their political-economic and historical contexts; and third, the projects’ responses to increasing green militarization and their often ambiguous relation with ‘demilitarization’. We argue that the staged IFAP spectacle is for a large part based on invisible or objective (i.e. symbolic and systemic) violence and its claims to break gender barriers and support demilitarization are ambiguous and not fully convincing. It seems as if an important driver of these claims is to render IFAP more attractive for funding.