Women in the Kurdish Movement: Mothers, Comrades, Goddesses

By Handan Çağlayan

This book offers the first historical account of Kurdish women’s politicization in Turkey, starting from the mid-1980s. Çağlayan presents a critical feminist analysis through women’s everyday experiences, incorporating women’s self-narrations with her own autoethnographic reflections. The author provides an account of the socio-political dynamics which constrained women’s politicization, of the factors and mechanisms which enabled their political activism, and of the construction of women’s political history through their own narrations. Women in the Kurdish Movement is a highly original contribution to Kurdish women’s political history. It will be key reading for students and scholars across various disciplines with an interest in gender, political participation, everyday resistance, feminist methodology, nationalism, ethnicity, secularism, social movements, post-colonial studies, and the Middle East.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Oct 21, 2019
• ISBN: 9783030247447

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© The Author(s) 2020

H. ÇağlayanWomen in the Kurdish Movement https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24744-7_1

1. Introduction

Handan Çağlayan¹  

(1)

Bamberg Otto Friedrich University, Bamberg, Germany

Handan Çağlayan

This book originates from my Ph.D. thesis (2006) on Kurdish women’s political participation and the formation of a Kurdish women’s identity. The interviews that I carried out in 2005 formed the basis for both the thesis and the Turkish version of this book, which was first published in 2007. I also included a feminist reading of the fundamental texts for understanding the ideological–political discourse of the Kurdish political movement as well as texts from pro-Kurdish political parties.¹ By the time the book was translated into English in 2019, profound developments had taken place that affected Kurds, whether as the main actors, the sufferers of hardship, or both. This process is still continuing.

The PKK (Partiye Karkarên Kurdistan, Kurdistan Worker’s Party ), which was the standard bearer of the post-1980 Kurdish political opposition, has gone through both ideological–political transformations and radical organizational changes. By embracing a radical democratic perspective, it adopted a transnational confederative structure composed of units connected to each other ideologically, with flexible ties at the organizational level. It is also no longer restricted to a Kurdish membership,² which has meant that women’s active political participation and the effects of this are no longer limited to Kurds in Turkey.³ In particular, the armed struggle against ISIL increased the visibility of women in Kurdish military units⁴ while practices toward gender equality and women’s active participation in every stage of socio-political structuration became significant in the Rojava region in Northern Syria—ruled by autonomous Kurdish governments—especially at the height of the war in Syria.⁵

The unfolding of the Kurdish political movement in Turkey and developments related to resolving the Kurdish issue,⁶ which seem to have reached a stalemate currently, are equally important. For example, progress among pro-Kurdish political parties regarding gender equality and women’s equal political representation has stimulated a new era in Turkey’s political history. Having remained at around four percent throughout Republican history,⁷ women’s parliamentary representation jumped dramatically after these political parties entered parliament.⁸ In addition, Kurdish women’s visibility as political representatives is more than a numerical change. While it does not automatically entail a feminist politics, it counters the maleist bias in political representation and political leadership in Turkey.

The gender equality perspective of the Kurdish political movement has also had implications beyond the political sphere. Women politicized within the hegemonic setup of the movement have founded hundreds of social organizations that primarily address gender equality and violence against women in the regions where Kurds live. They also extended their organizational attempts to local administrative units, forming women’s consultancy centers and women’s cooperatives affiliated to municipal administrations. Such steps extended the goals of gender equality perspective and women’s socioeconomic empowerment through society. During the years when Kurdish identity and Kurds’ demands for recognition and representation were somewhat more easily expressed and when steps toward permanent peace were taken in Turkey,⁹ these developments became more visible and effective in various spheres of life.

Women’s experiences with struggle have also affected the intellectual sphere. Kurdish women activists and/or politicians started a debate on their readings of gender equality and women’s freedom within the scope of Jineoloji.¹⁰ They organized international meetings as venues to share local knowledge and experiences among feminist activists and academics from Turkey, Europe, and the Middle East, including other Kurdish regions.¹¹ However, these positive developments for women and their advocacy of gender equality were damaged by the violence and political pressure that erupted after peace negotiations were interrupted, political tension increased, and deadly armed clashes returned, especially in 2009 and since 2015. In 2009, when the state began mass arrest operations against Kurdish politicians, women politicians constituted a third of the arrested Kurdish politicians.¹² Since 2015, dozens of women MPs and mayors, and thousands of Kurdish women activists have been arrested during a period marked by severe repression.¹³

This book begins with the 1980s, when Kurdish women started to become visible in the public sphere as political actors. I had many reasons to choose such a topic for my doctoral research. First, the Kurdish issue had been one of the key issues on Turkey’s political agenda since 1984, when the PKK launched its first armed attacks in Turkey.¹⁴ Women played significant roles in the public image of the effective Kurdish opposition during this period. As a student of social science, and especially as woman, the topic was—and still is—desirable to consider from the women’s perspective. The presence of Kurdish women as political subjects in the post-1980 period, and especially in the 2000s, was sufficient reason to pick this topic. However, it was not easy to conduct academic research on the Kurdish population in those years given that the well-known sensitivities concerning the topics could dissuade people from researching it. Such research could be perceived as being against state security and national unity. Thus, if I had not had other reasons for pursuing this topic, I would have opted for the most frequently taken path given these sensitivities and directed my scholarly interests to other topics. I did not do so, however, because this work carried more than an academic meaning for me. Focusing on Kurdish women’s road to publicness in the 1980s and 1990s from women’s perspective would enable me to investigate and understand my own history. There were quite a few readings of the social, political, and everyday representations of these women, who were the most popular figures of the Kurdish movement. However, it was not possible to hear their own voices in these readings so seeking these voices is valuable in itself. At the same time, exploring the borders of Kurdish women’s identity through critical inquiry required first comprehending the underlying history, and its components and its dynamics. I also aspired to simultaneously reach out to the voices of Kurdish women. Thus, this work represents a narration of a two-layered story that intertwines the individual and the social.

One of the distinctive features—perhaps the most important feature—of the post-1980 Kurdish movement is its successful collective mobilization of women. Another feature is its transformation from a radical demand for separatism to a stance that tailored its demands to acknowledge human and citizenship rights, and prioritize identity politics. In fact, the prioritization of identity politics is not restricted to Turkey’s Kurdish movement as the late twentieth century witnessed a global rise in social and political movements based on individual and group identity.

The history of Turkey’s Kurdish issue and the corresponding Kurdish opposition dates back to the pre-Republican era. The historical dynamics and changing historical contexts also caused changes in the form of this opposition. It is this change that allows us to consider the new features of Kurdish movement, which is in no sense brand new. One new aspect is the prioritization of cultural identity. This is related to both sociocultural change in Turkey and globalization. For some time, social science has considered these two aspects as mutually affecting each other: The rise of ethnic and sectarian identities is a defining feature of globalization while globalization has encouraged the revival of ethnic and sectarian identities, long excluded from the homogenizing national identity construction of nation-states, which were expected to wither away due to capitalist development and modernization (Touraine 1997). New ethnic movements that offer ample spaces for the cultural and symbolic components of collective identities voiced up human rights; the right to recognition and representation emerged as the new actors of social movements. These movements are marked by women’s effective participation.

Certainly, women’s participation in ethnic/nationalist movements is not new. Despite Virginia Woolf’s (n.d.: 99) remark that nationalist claims are woven by and through the patrie,¹⁵ women actively participated in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century anticolonial (nationalist) movements. Today, too, they are among the significant components of ethnic/national-based movements (West 1997). Women’s participation in the post-1980 Kurdish movement made them visible in the public sphere, when many women took part in street demonstrations and meetings, became active members of various legal political parties as Kurdish women, joined the guerilla forces, and suffered mass detentions and arrests. As I noted above, my interest in this topic grew out of my aim to explore how women experienced and construed this process. There have been different approaches and readings of women’s political and social mobilization. For example, for Kurdish political circles, it signified Kurdish women’s freedom. In both written and visual sources circulated in the public sphere, women were represented as the carriers of Kurdish culture in their colorful and bright clothes; in photos taken in front of prisons, they were represented as symbols of victimhood and rights claims; and finally, in their military uniforms, they were portrayed as symbols of liberation. Academia, however, maintained absolute silence about this. In contrast to noteworthy research on Islamist women’s identity, who drew widespread attention through their headscarf demonstrations (Göle 2004; İlyasoğlu 2000), there was no corresponding scholarly interest in Kurdish women’s political participation¹⁶—perhaps due to the political sensitivities noted above. This silence was also not limited to academia as there was a similar disinterest within the women’s movement—probably because Kurdish women’s mobilization was more to do with the Kurdish movement’s general political agenda than the women’s agenda.¹⁷ Thus, national mass media in Turkey tended to consider Kurdish women as pacified elements, mobilized by nationalist men.

As a woman who could observe the dynamism in Kurdish women’s identities in different spaces throughout the 1990s and who participated in the movement to a certain extent, I think that neither passive elements nor free women can represent the dynamic, multi-dimensional structure of the reality. While the first approach reduced women to being victims of social processes, the second represented their presence in the public sphere in terms of freedom. More important was the absence of women’s own voices and readings in the interpretations lying between the polar opposites of the victim and the free. These terms were used on behalf of Kurdish women, although the tellers were not Kurdish women themselves. That is, borrowing from Spivak (1988), Kurdish women were not heard in these tellings.¹⁸

In my research, I tried to access and understand these voices, based on the main assumption that women cannot be defined as merely victims or passive elements in any social process. Indeed, the women I met in prison were not passive victims. On the contrary, they had assumed subjecthood by taking decisions regarding their own lives. I therefore prioritized the following questions: How could women without access to educational and economic opportunities, and formal resources like time go beyond the boundaries laid down by households and traditional gender roles to become political actors in the public sphere? More importantly, what were the reasons—the internal and external factors—behind the women’s participation? Had the mechanisms that had restricted them to the private sphere and imposed strict controls been eliminated or had the restrictions merely changed their forms? What is the reason behind this change? What were the mechanisms that enabled it? How would one define, for example, the transformations in the value systems, formed in accordance with the notion of honor, in these women’s movement from the private to the public sphere? What kind of relationship exists between the construction of Kurdish identity that is at the center of the political movement and the identity of the women? What were the components of these Kurdish women’s identity , and what were their background social, political, and personal experiences? Who had the power to define the boundaries of this identity, and according to which criteria? Which symbols were used in this process? What obligations pertaining to women were derived from this identity? What were its promises? How did the women embrace this identity? More importantly, why did they embrace it? What were the implications of this identity formation process for women’s empowerment? Could the process transform the existing gender relations in Kurdish society?

To analyze the multi-dimensional phenomena and the processes suggested by these questions, I relied on a theoretical frame that includes social movements, ethnic identity, and gender relations, guided by feminist epistemology. Thus, I followed the pathways offered by feminist analysis of social movements and of the formation of ethnic and nationalist constructions.

Gendered Construction of Ethnicist and Nationalist Discourses

One common aspect of ethnic and nationalist ideologies and movements is that they rely on myths organized around a certain collective identity. Various studies from the last quarter of the twentieth century have changed our comprehension of nationalism (Anderson 1993; Hobsbawm 1992; Gellner 1998). These new readings of nationalisms and nations, which emphasized the role of intellectuals and the bureaucracy, were criticized by feminist readings.¹⁹ The latter group argued that, to eliminate theoretical deficiencies, the analysis should focus on the interaction of discourses on gender and nation, and how these construct one another (Yuval-Davis 2003: 21–23).

Including gender relations in the analysis of ethnic or national identity construction processes as a category of analysis certainly made women visible. Moreover, these analyses have shown that gender relations are among the founding components of ethnic or national identities, as well as a political project tied to these identities. Studies analyzing ethnic/national identities in terms of gender(ed) constructions suggest that men have occupied the position of representing societies whereas women are merely allowed symbolic roles. As Cynthia Enloe (1990: 45) notes, nationalism is generated from masculinized memory, masculinized humiliation, and masculinized hope. In Woman, Nation, State (1989), Yuval-Davis and Floya Anthias highlight the different duties and missions assigned to women in nationalist contexts. In nationalist fictions and projects, women are portrayed as biological and cultural reproducers of the ethnic/national community. Their identification with reproductive roles forms the grounds for the control over their bodies, sexuality, and behavior in the name of the nation. Another role assigned to women in such projects and/or fictional texts is that of the signifiers’ cultural difference. Women are also called into the role of carrying the authentic essence of the community and transmitting it to the next generations—an extension of motherhood role. That is, women are expected to behave in accordance with the requirements of ethnic and/or national fictions and projects or else marginalized within ethnic and/or national communities. However, Yuval-Davis and Anthias do not read women’s positioning merely in terms of their passive acquiescence and/or exclusion but also in terms of their active participation (Yuval-Davis and Anthias 1989: 1–14).

These analyses have guided my endeavor to understand the construction of Kurdish identity and its interaction with Kurdish women’s identity. In so doing, I have been attentive to go beyond mere cultural and symbolic processes because limiting the analysis to the cultural and symbolic planes would lock women into passivity, thereby blocking the perspectives required to analyze women’s subjecthood in ethnic and national struggles. In other words, such a perspective would risk seeing women’s roles in socio-political processes and reducing their position to passive victimhood. I therefore needed an approach that would allow me to frame women’s voluntary participation. I found the frame in Chatterjee’s (2002) work on the struggle against colonialism and national identity construction. Insisting that the monopolization of the scene by male voices does not mean the absence of other voices, Chatterjee revealed that women also actively participated in the construction of the nation, although their voices were not heard and that they were subjected to another form of patriarchal order.

Although, as a societal network, power certainly plays a significant role in women’s subordination, societal power relations are not unchangeable; neither are identities. In pursuing my analysis, I relied on the argument that identities are socially constructed (see Hall; cited in Stephen 2005: 66), which implies that women can resist processes that define their state of existence and condition their positions. Besides, through the research process, I observed that the internal contradiction of ethnic/national constructions and projects pertaining to women contributed to the possibilities for such a transformation. This contradiction originated from the simultaneous invitation for women to join the struggle within a modernist discourse of women’s rights versus the attempt to forge new patriarchal control based on symbolic roles assigned to womanhood-as-such. This perspective calls for emphasis on features and images used in the construction of the Kurdish woman. The imagination of the Kurdish woman as a mother who carries the authentic essence of Kurdishness and her construction within the scope of her domestic roles has different implications imagining her as the politician, and/or the warrior—i.e., as an actor in a visible struggle. I observed that these different categories were put at work simultaneously in the Kurdish movement.²⁰ The women’s struggle would be decisive in the process leading to the dominance of one of these categories—i.e., whether women would be defined as active social participants or, through traditional gender roles, as passive symbols.²¹

Theories on new social movements offered another layer to build my analysis of the interactive construction of women’s individual identities within a Kurdish identity.²² My interpretation of how women’s active involvement in politics led them to claim decisive agency was assisted by conceptualizations related to collective identity, collective action, collective actor, everyday life experiences, and social networks. A feminist perspective led me to trace the strategies that women develop for adaptation and empowerment. One helpful conceptualization in this respect was Kandiyoti’s (2013) patriarchal bargain. In analyzing the way women built a women’s identity, I relied on conceptualizations related to empowerment/being empowered. My feminist preferences in social science knowledge production guided me to start from the assumption that women’s identity has been built through the interplay of gendered power processes in society and the ideological framing of the Kurdish