North/South Feminist Solidarity

Abstract

Abstract This article draws attention to the relationship between transnational feminist solidarity and translation. It proposes mobilizing De Lima Costa’s understanding of equivocation to address the North/South feminist alliance between the Kurdish Women’s Movement (KWM) and feminist queer activists in Europe. This encounter is analysed as an ongoing equivocal translation process between the understanding of “woman” put forward by Jineolojî—the KWM epistemology—and a transfeminist/queer perspective. Drawing on the author’s militant ethnography, the research analyses the mistranslations as well as the practices of communal life, sharing experiences, herstories, and epistemologies that enabled activists to challenge the supposed incompatibility between a “Western” queer vision on gender and a “Kurdish” one, initially criticised for being essentialist and binary. Because they shift attention from identity categories to the political scope of such categories, the article contends, embodied practices of equivocal translation are crucial for generating coalitions and dismantling West/Rest colonial divides.