Abstract
Abstract This paper debates women’s activism in two events: the Vietnam War (1954-1975) and the historical Kurdish struggle for autonomy (known as “Kurdish question”). We hypothesize that the reorganization of gender roles during the conflicts marks the meanings of wars and configures what we call a woman for the times of war, that is, a woman who transits across the spaces of public confrontation, armed conflict and domesticity. The approach outlined here is structured into three parts: the first and the second ones present aspects of both conflicts by pointing to possible convergences and differences between them; we also present the variety of networks of participation and activism of women in both cases. In the third and final part, we discuss the interfaces among the production of gender, war, and ideas, crossing a manifold of narratives, experiences, and stories that reveal different dimensions of wars and nations, and the diversity of the regimes of ideas that attached to them.
Highlights
Those who would codify the meanings of words fight a losing battle, for words, like the ideas and things they are meant to signify, have a history (Joan Scott).This paper discuss women’s activism in two contexts of war, focusing on their participation in the Vietnam War (1954-1975) based on a research carried out by Mariana M
Comparing the articulations among gender, nation, and war examined in this paper enables us to point our two distinct modes of representing and mobilizing the agency of peripheral women in war contexts that converge on a central point: women’s agency in these contexts involves tensions and negotiations over the definitions of what is “public” or “private”: within a nation
The results of our research show a collective endeavor to produce other narratives of visibility concerning the participation of women in the conflicts, shifting the role performed by them towards an effective contribution symmetrically equal to men’s
Summary
Those who would codify the meanings of words fight a losing battle, for words, like the ideas and things they are meant to signify, have a history (Joan Scott).This paper discuss women’s activism in two contexts of war, focusing on their participation in the Vietnam War (1954-1975) based on a research carried out by Mariana M. The hypothesis defended here is that the debates on gender emerge as a possibility for reorganizing the common political agenda in the 21st Century, claimed by different women’s collectives and organizations, which has enabled a new approximation between Kurdish communities that had branched out, especially from the 1970s onwards.
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