Kurdish Women’s Resistance and Recognition: Gender, Power, and Visibility across a Divided Kurdistan

Abstract (English)

Kurdish women experience the consequences of multiple violent systems. Because Kurdistan is occupied by four nation states, Kurdish women face various reproductions of patriarchy, state-violence, displacement, assimilation, and imprisonment, depending on which borders they fall under (Dirik 2022). Their resistance to violence becomes gendered because of the pervading ideology that land, nation, and power are masculine struggles. This paper uses transnational feminism, an approach that examines how global power structures, colonial histories, and local contexts shape women’s lives (Mohanty 2003; Grewal & Kaplan 1994) to analyze Kurdish women’s resistance across Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. It critiques the orientalist gaze that fixates on militarized resistance in Rojava (Syrian Kurdistan) and Bakur (Turkish Kurdistan) while overlooking everyday feminist activism in Bashur (Iraqi Kurdistan) and Rojhelat (Iranian Kurdistan). We argue this critique is necessary because knowledge produced about Kurdistan and Kurdish women’s struggles becomes further skewed and intensely gendered. An example of this takes place in 2015, across the Global North, media coverage of the YPJ’s fight against ISIS in Rojava fixated mostly on freedom-fighter Asia Ramazan Antar being the “Angelina Jolie of Kurdistan” rather than her ideologies for fighting at such a young age. Activism and resistance against systems of violence are produced by Kurdish women in Bashur and Rojhelat who are often not in military uniforms. This paper explores Kurdish women’s resistance to state violence, displacement and patriarchal nationalism across Rojava, Bakur, Bashur and Rojhelat. It highlights themes of gendered resistance, uneven recognition, the orientalist gaze, and the politics of visibility and knowledge production. We anticipate our results will highlight productions of knowledge that already exist from women across Kurdistan but have been overlooked in pursuit of exoticism. Kurdish women, through layers of geographical and cultural contexts, practice diverse forms of resistance for what Sakine calls the “glorious struggle” of liberation.