Abstract
This paper looks at the Kurdish women’s struggles for gender justice at the intersection of two diverse social movements in Turkey: the Kurdish national movement, on the one hand, and the Turkish feminist movement, on the other. It argues that the Kurdish Women’s Movement (KWM) has functioned as a powerful process of learning for both men and women in the Kurdish community and in the larger society. It has destabilized and transformed the feudal–patriarchal relations and norms in the Kurdish community, the lingering sexism in the Kurdish movement, and the majoritarian constraints in the Turkish feminist movement.
Highlights
This paper looks at the Kurdish women’s struggles for gender justice at the intersection of two diverse social movements in Turkey: the Kurdish national movement, on the one hand, and the Turkish feminist movement, on the other
The Kurdish question in Turkey is related to the second-class economic, social and cultural status of the Kurds, who make up some 18% of the population in this country
Kurdish female guerrillas formed the core of the Kurdish Women’s Movement (KWM) because of several interrelated structural factors: firstly, the militarized and masculinized Turkish state nationalism; secondly, the largely reactive to the Turkish nationalism militarized Kurdish nationalism, and, last but not least, the Kurdish patriarchal gender order, which relegates women to secondary roles and focuses on their child-bearing, nurturing, and serving roles
Summary
Among Turkey’s Kurds, as in many other places around the world, women’s activism emerged and developed in the context of nation-building and the struggle for national self-determination since the early 20th century. Muslim-Ottoman groups was an important part of the Kurdish nationalists’ attempts to denounce and reject arguments and policies that claimed otherwise and to prove to the world that the Kurds deserved official recognition of their special status as a separate nation” [1] Through its magazine Jin (Kurdish for “woman”), it functioned as a major platform for the development and circulation of ideas about the special role of women in the “national awakening” until its closure by the newly-established Turkish republic in the context of a severe crackdown on all nationalist activities after the 1925 Kurdish revolt [2]
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