Move over? Feminist reading of academic writing on Kurdish women

ABSTRACT

Research on Kurdish women has burgeoned during the last decade, which is a positive sign of the growing interest regarding a highly marginalized population and region. However, most of these works contain theoretical and methodological inadequacies, fallacies and contradictory messages regarding the agency, or lack of it, of Kurdish women, along with an orientalist approach. Using feminist rhetorical criticism and discourse approaches, together with a focus on intersectionality, orientalism and postcolonial feminism, I examine some existing studies on Kurdish women and attempt to uncover the construction of and implications about Kurdish women. I also examine the degrees to which these studies promote narratives that uphold assumptions on gender and implicitly contribute to traditional ideologies of patriarchy and the stigma of being westernized. By demonstrating the significance of a plural model, which examines the lived realities of women, their negotiations and struggles, I urge a fresh approach to the discursive and contextual practice of scholarship on Kurdish women.

ABSTRACT IN KURDISH KURMANJI

Lêkolînên li ser jinên Kurd di dehsalên dawîn da bi awayekî lezgîn zêde bûn, ku ev ji bo nîfus û herêmeka ku gelekî tê veqetandin, nîşaneyeka erênî ya pêşketina mereqê ye. Lêbelê, piranîya van xebatan tevî nêrîneka oryantalîst, kêmasî û şaşîyên teorîk û rêbazî û peyamên nakok di mijara kiryar yan nebûna kiryarê û jinên Kurd da dihewînin. Bi bikaranîna rexnegerîya retorîk ya femînîst û nêrînên dîskurî, tevî baldayîneka li ser rêgihanî, oryantalîzm û femînîzma postkolonyal, ez hin lêkolînên heyî yên li ser jinên Kurd dinirxînim û hewl didim ku binyad û encamên li ser jinên Kurd berçav bikim. Herweha, ez li ser astan disekinim ku ev xebat vegotinan pêşve dixin ku gumanên li ser zayenda civakî diparêzin û bi awayekî nerasterast dibin sedema bîrdozên kevneşopî yên baviksalarî û demxeya rojavayîbûnê. Bi nîşandayîna girîngîya modeleka pirhejmar, ku rastîyên jîyankirî yên jinan, muzakere û tekoşînên wan ezmûn dike, ez nêrîneka nû ji bo pratîka gotarî û pêwendî ya zanyarîya li ser jinên Kurd derpêş dikim.

ABSTRACT IN TURKISH

Son on yılda Kürt kadınlar hakkında yapılan araştırmaların hızla çoğalması son derece ötekileştirilen bir nüfusa ve bölgeye ilişkin ilginin arttığını gösteren olumlu bir işarettir. Fakat bu çalışmaların çoğu oryantalist bir yaklaşımla birlikte, faile ya da failsizliğe ve Kürt kadınlara ilişkin teorik ve metodolojik yetersizlikler, yanılgılar ve çelişkili mesajlar içermektedir. Kesişimsellik, oryantalizm ve postkolonyal feminizme odaklanan feminist retorik eleştiri ve söylem yaklaşımlarından yararlanarak Kürt kadınlarla ilgili bazı mevcut çalışmaları inceledim ve Kürt kadınların inşasını ve onlar hakkındaki çıkarımları ortaya çıkarmaya çalıştım. Bu çalışmaların toplumsal cinsiyetle ilgili varsayımları destekleyen ve dolaylı olarak patriyarkanın geleneksel ideolojilerine ve batılılaşma damgasına katkıda bulunan anlatıları ne ölçüde teşvik ettiklerini inceledim. Kadınların yaşanmış gerçekliklerini, müzakerelerini ve mücadelelerini inceleyen çoğul bir modelin önemini göstererek Kürt kadınlar hakkındaki araştırmaların söylemsel ve bağlamsal pratiğine yönelik yeni bir yaklaşım öne sürüyorum.

KEYWORDS:

• Kurdish women
• orientalism
• self-orientalism
• intersectionality
• postcolonial feminism

KEYWORDS:

• Jinên Kurd
• oryantalîzm
• xwe oryantalizm
• rêgihanî
• femînîzma postkolonyal

KEYWORDS:

• Kürt kadını
• oryantalizm
• öz oryantalizm
• kesişimsellik
• postkolonyal feminizm

Introduction

The Canadian aboriginal writer Lee Maracle, an outspoken critic of the treatment of indigenous people, who has been fighting to voice traditional narratives and reclaim indigenous culture, told non-native Canadian authors: “move over and give us space at the table” (Szklarski, 2017). Her argument was that people are trying to write histories of people about whom they know nothing. “Speaking for” underrepresented or less privileged people, thereby essentializing and (usually) misrepresenting them, is a common issue in postcolonial debates. Most scholarly research about Kurdish women has been undertaken by non-Kurdish western feminist scholars. Should they also move over to give a voice to Kurdish scholars? Further, is being Kurdish enough to claim to speak for these women? These questions cannot be answered without detailed scrutiny into what is wrong with the current scholarship on Kurdish women and what can be done to change it, something that this article aims to do.

Due to socio-political conditions in the Kurdish regions, their politics, internal dynamics and international context, have been prioritized and it is only in the last decade that Kurdish women have received some scholarly attention. As members of one of the biggest stateless nations, geographically located within a disputed Middle Eastern region, displaced and in some cases forced to migrate both internally and externally, Kurdish women have been portrayed as “doubly marginalized” (Nilsson, 2018; Yüksel, 2006). This is not only evident in the media, but also in scholarly writings. Since the early twentieth century, the Kurds have been subjected to colonial division, intense suppression and forced resettlement. The community was divided across four modern states (Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey) by the mandate of the French and British, following World War I, therefore, Kurdistan is referred to as an “international colony” (Beşikçi, 1991/2015).¹ This has led to the domination of the Kurds by different socio-political and cultural powers, resulting in their culturally, politically and linguistically fragmented identity. Hence, their situation is complex, placed as they are within different regions, belief systems and linguistic and cultural patterns. Nevertheless, most research on Kurdish women is so far characterized by narrow perceptions, which not only universalizes their experiences but also threatens to further marginalize them in terms of traditional stereotypes.²

I use methods of feminist rhetorical criticism and discourse analysis to interrogate the following texts: Diana King’s Kurdistan on the Global Stage: Kinship, Land and Community in Iraq (2014); Sheri Laizer’s Into Kurdistan: Frontiers under Fire (1991); Cihan Ahmetbeyzade’s Gendering Necropolitics (2008); Nejla Serpil Altuntek’s Bone and flesh, seed and soil: Patriliny by father’s brother’s daughter (2006); Maya Davidovic’s “Mother-Activism” (2018); Nazand Begikhani, Aisha K. Gill and Gill Hague’s Honour-based violence in Kurdish communities (2013). I ask how gender is constructed in these texts to uncover the representations of Kurdish women and the degrees to which they promote narratives that uphold hegemonic assumptions of gender and implicitly contribute to traditional ideologies of patriarchy and cultural hegemony.

Feminist rhetorical criticism seeks understanding on how communication is used to limit and/or enable women or to resist constraints and facilitate empowerment to create non-oppressive identities and ways of being. It also seeks to understand how differences among women are ideologically valued or devalued in the texts we examine (Crenshaw, 1997). While doing this, I take into account the interconnections of race, ethnicity, economic status and other identities, as these are intertwined with one another.

Here I address claims of overgeneralization or flawed assumptions, as it is important to underline these, as a Kurdish woman scholar involved with studies on the community for almost two decades. I am familiar with scholarly texts on Kurdish women, written in Turkish, Kurdish and English in different disciplines, which are mostly within western or western-oriented scholarship. On the one hand, we are introduced to images of Kurdish women as constantly oppressed and repressed by a patriarchal society, which renders them powerless. On the other, there are images of Kurdish women who resist sovereign states and their armies or militias such as the Islamic State (IS) in both diplomatic and militarized forms. Both the oppressed and strong women images exclude grey areas, thereby marginalizing them.

I do not dispute the descriptive and informative value of all scholarship on Kurdish women. For instance, studies on the significance of their oral tradition is growing (Hamelink, 2016; Schafers, 2019) and is empowering in some ways. However, in the attempt to preserve their authentic culture some narratives unfortunately are viewed to represent them as the “savior of the underdeveloped other” (Golnaraghi & Dye, 2016, p. 139). My focus in this paper is the dominant academic discourse on Kurdish women through the books and articles identified above as samples of this genre of scholarship. These go along with the ethnocentric and binary oppositions evident in their characterization as “powerless” within the feudal system or war or “powerful” with respect to political activism and armed struggle. Such features, even if unconscious, need to be reconsidered and reconstructed. The academic articles and books I examine here were selected because they clearly exemplify the analytical traps that I am concerned about. My study is focused specifically on the texts mentioned earlier and does not necessarily imply any wider criticism of the authors’ general methodological or theoretical approach, nor should it be taken to extend automatically to other works by them. In order to incorporate narratives by the different authors, I was able to include only a few examples of evidence to support my argument. In addition, although orientalism does not specifically look at gender in depth, some feminist scholars have uncovered and decoded representations of “gender” in orientalist discourses (Abu-Lughod, 2001; Spivak, 1985). So, I will also be utilizing these in my analysis to approach the narratives on Kurdish women.

Postcolonial feminism, third world woman and intersectionality: The challenge to rhetoric

We are surrounded by images and symbols of Kurdish women in the media and in scholarly works and therefore it is important to see how these images and symbols function in our lives, and what type of rhetoric they are invoked in. These create a reality, worlds, identities, and even cognitive structures regarding them, both for readers and audiences. For instance, when a Kurdish woman introduces herself in a European context, it is very possible that the stranger will position her either as a powerless woman from a backward Middle Eastern society or a refugee, migrant or militant, because current ethnocentric scholarship on Kurdish women provides these labels. Understanding how rhetoric functions allows us to make conscious choices about the kinds of worlds we want to create and the values we want those worlds to embody. Herein lies the power of language, which can contribute to stereotypical gendered ideals; regardless of feminist rhetoric that may rely on a certain traditional notion of female “victims,” without offering new solutions or alternative ways of thinking. In so doing, scholarly feminist work, largely undertaken by white women, may contribute to reconstruct rhetorical systems that rob women of agency (Meyer, 2007).

In this context, postcolonial feminism as critical discourse also functions as a critique of western feminists, who specifically target monolithic misrepresentations of Third World women and universalize the oppressions they face, while ignoring the crucial differences in how they experience gender in different socio-political, religious and cultural contexts. This is tricky, as the term “feminism” is associated with a western origin. Postcolonial feminists theorize colonial and neocolonial discourses and their material effects on the construction of eastern women, as “the emergent perspective of feminist criticism reproduces the axioms of imperialism” (Spivak, 1985, p. 243). Issues related to discursive and material dichotomies between the “East” (Orient) and “West” (Occident); the “First” and “Third” Worlds; and cultural imperialism and resistance to it are of central concern in these (Spivak, 1985; Dagenes & Piche, 1994). In this context, postcolonial feminism, in its decolonizing and decentering of Eurocentric perceptions and resisting stereotypes of the traditional Third World woman, identified by their religiosity, family orientation, illiteracy and domesticity, “offer[s] scope for engaging with a diversity of feminist subjectivities” (Pande, 2015, p. 183).

The scholarly works mentioned here acknowledge differences between “men” and “women,” while taking gendered experiences into consideration. However, in order to fulfill our theoretical and ideological commitment to equality among women, there is a need for an intersectional analytical perspective that accounts for differences among women. Intersectionality as an analytical tool, offered by critical, legal and Black feminist scholar, Kimberle Williams Crenshaw (1991, 1997), is rooted in Critical Race Theory and Black feminism. It attempts not only to deal with distinctions of gender and race, but also with other expanded categories of difference such as class, global context of origin, sexual orientation, culture/religion, and body. The latter have a significant influence on the construction of identity and requires critics to identify differences among women and not just the differences between women and men. The article “Under Western Eyes”, in which Chandra Mohanty (1988) discusses western feminists’ representation of the Third World woman is also very significant for examining the texts selected in this study. According to her (1988), Third World women are represented in western feminist texts by six main stereotypes: as victims of male violence, colonial processes, familial systems, development processes, religious ideologies and as universal dependants. Mohanty’s six points call into question stereotypes and presumptions held by many western observers about the Middle East in general and about women and feminism in the region in particular, who tend to unify Third World women by emphasizing their common experiences, leading to reductionist representations. Essentially, they ask how women and their experiences are constructed differently in relation to a “male” norm, using “gender” as the single category for analysis, while completely ignoring the intersectional aspect of any particular identity, and thereby contributing to the homogeneous stereotyping of Third World women.³

Scholarship on Kurdish women does not always confirm Mohanty’s categorizations, for instance, their politicized and combatant identities have been highlighted in scholarly works in the last decade, especially with respect to the Syrian civil war. Through these a new image of Kurdish women is being introduced to the West, as brave, independent and capable of fighting against men, thereby defying traditional Third World woman stereotypes. However, via selective representation, Kurdish women face yet another type of stereotyping: one of oppression and control is replaced by another that of armed fighter. Victimization and marginalization are juxtaposed with orientalism and stereotyping in the western representation of the East, while women’s empowerment, where there is any, is represented solely in terms of political activism and participation. The analysis in the following section deals with three categories. The first comprises ethnographic works portraying Kurdish women as lacking agency due to their strong sense of kinship, ideology, honor killings, and tribal linkages. These are mostly by Anglophone scholars aligned with traditional western white middle-class feminism, involving a range of binaries that situate the “East” in opposition to the “West,” consistent with Said’s understanding (1978).

This section emphasizes Turkish feminists, who tend to adopt nationalist and Kemalist national discourse on Kurdish women, while attributing their stereotypical portrayal of backward customs to their Muslim identity and thereby implicitly discrediting Islam. The second strand of scholarly works concerns Kurdish women’s agency and power, which is confirmed along with their political activism in diplomacy and civil society organizations and legal representation in the parliament or political organizations (Yüksel 2006; Çelik 2016). This is especially significant given the increase in the number of participants in the movement in the early 1990s who have been in prisons, civil society organizations or fighting in the mountains against Turkish military forces (Üstündağ, 2019) and in urban and rural areas of Iraq and Syria against the Islamic State (Dirik, 2015; Raşit & Kolokotranis, 2020; Jongerden & Şimşek, 2021). I argue that the generalized attribution of a politicized identity to Kurdish women is another form of marginalization in contrast with the West. In the third section, in order to interrogate whether “moving over” is the solution and how knowledge may be decolonized, I briefly discuss some Kurdish feminists or scholars who also fail to challenge western feminism and cultural hegemony and place themselves within self-orientalism by reproducing the marginalizing and stereotyping discourses of western scholars. Due to space limitations, I can only examine a few works on Kurdish women and decode the values attributed to them in these texts.

Kurdish women as victimized by patriarchy and honor-based customs: An ethnographic image

Most works on Kurdish women focus on post-traumatic stress and strategies for coping with the experiences of war, gender-based violence, honor killings, forced migration and the violence of the Anfal campaign in Northern Iraq. Most of these either contribute to the portrayal of Kurdish women through destructive marginalization and stereotyping, but do not challenge their normalized and legitimized portrayals in western discourse. Or these fail to engage with the intersectional dimension of their experiences, dismissing complex issues including background, class, education and age. In some sources one can see both aspects. Scholars from the Anglophone West have effectively placed themselves in opposition to “oriental” and “postcolonial” feminism (Mohanty, 1988; Blunt & Rose, 1994), as the western feminist approach tends to see Third World women as victims of their own cultures and colonial administrations. There are certain chapters on women and gender roles in Kurdistan, in books written by ethnographers (particularly American), which are based on arbitrary observations and dialogues in rural areas, mountainous lands and villages, wherein a passive and speechless image of the Kurdish woman appears. Spivak (1985) criticizes the essentialist portrayal of others, which ignores the speech of the subaltern or oppressed person, the effect being “to continue the imperialist project.” Within the rigid homogenization of Kurdish women’s experiences, rural women’s identity in ethnographic studies is usually conceived of as dependent, subordinated, and oppressed by men. For instance, for Diane King (2014) Kurdish society is dominated by tribal kinship; the father figure is still considered the head of the household, the tribe, and even the whole society. To verify this portrayal, in her book, Kurdistan on the Global Stage: Kinship, Land and Community in Iraq (2014), King starts her chapter entitled “Gendered Challenges” with a quote from a 1973 Iraqi government publication:

We can say that a woman has the right to be proud of her social status and prestige in Kurdish society. She is equal with men in most rights, and in fact, there are certain rights granted exclusively to women. These rights are entitled to the woman as long as she maintains her virginity and chastity. (King, 2014, p. 102)

Although she refers to the changes in Iraqi Kurdistan since 1973, the fact that she starts with this particular extract seems pointed and her entire text is set in its shadow. Kurdish women’s sexuality and subjectivity is considered to be under the control of men, positioning them as “voiceless victims of a barbaric (male) “Other” enemy” (Khalid, 2011, p. 16). Further, she says, “Kurdish society has long fit the classic sex/gender archetype of the Mediterranean and Middle East,” and that “idealised Kurdish women’s roles are relatively straightforward: a woman is charged with maintaining a home and with upholding the honour and purity of her and her husband’s patrilineages through proper behaviour” (p. 112). This approach, like that of many other western scholars visiting the Middle East, is essentialist, based on generalizations without comprehensive empirical work, usually starting with “I heard … ,” for instance, “I have heard Kurdish people speak of sexual intercourse as a process in which the man inserts “seed” into the “soil” of the woman” (p. 114). Mohanty (1991) suggests that Third World women are “native” or “traditional” in their beliefs and kin connections, in line with western anthropology. Accordingly, the general assumptions in King’s book include the observation that “many Muslim Kurdish women, like many other Muslims, believe in spirits, djinn,” (p. 121) wherein “spirituality” and “irrationality” is attributed to the “other” (Kurdish women), but its opposite, “rationality,” is allocated to the “self” (western women). This makes the distinction between First and Third World women much clearer.

Another fundamental problem with such racialized and gendered binary dualism is that it assumes the impossibility of changing such women’s conditions unless there is an outside force and insists that “there has been no shift from an unrecognized, underprivileged laborer status to that of a free and emancipated one” (Kandiyoti, 1977, p. 72). As “the representation of the “Other” is a contiguous construction of the “Self”” (Gharipour & Özlü, 2015, p. 11), King portrays an opposition between “Self” and “Other” by stereotyping Kurdish women, defining their difference from the “Self,” with “modernization” and westernization proposed as solutions. She states that “women’s observations and experiences as a part of the new globalized world invites them to exercise their freedom as a modern woman” (p. 103). So “modern” woman is idealized and to be free, you need to be “modern,” or vice versa. As Mohanty (1988) notes, successful constructions of oppressed “Other” women are created by reference to western women, who are presented “as educated, as modern, as having control over their own bodies and sexualities, and the freedom to make their own decisions” (p. 337). King refers to increasing numbers of female drivers as a sign of modernization. Hence, a substantial segment of the chapter is dedicated to the absence of women drivers in Iraqi Kurdistan. When asked if she knew how to drive, she says. “I was an American in my thirties who was from car-saturated Southern California and I had driven hundreds of thousands of miles in my lifetime” (p. 106), thereby idealizing her identity as a western white woman and the freedom offered by the enlightened and civilized USA.

Sheri Laizer (who married a Kurd) recounts her experiences of Kurdistan, also portraying a context of feudal and tribal relations along with gendered orientalism in her book titled Into Kurdistan: Frontiers under Fire (1991). She briefly depicts Kurdish women as “extremely strong-minded and philosophical in an experienced sort of way. They laugh and cry easily and feel events fully” (p. 9), thereby creating the infantilized “Other” woman and enforcing the exoticized image along with oppressed figures of victimhood and objectification. In the chapter, “Fidelity, Honour and Death: The Cross of Kurdish Women,” Laizer observes that when Arab tourists visit Istanbul during the summer, they misread the outward dress code as a sign of female laxity, and says, “village Kurds are inclined to a similar interpretation when visiting the more Westernized cities,” (p. 46) positioning Kurdish men as not respecting women’s dressing choice. She makes her arguments through selective representation, starting with a story of a Kurdish woman who was forced by her family to marry a man she did not love. These women are portrayed as powerless victims of their patriarchal society, while the men are seen to suppress women or threaten them. She says, “Whenever it was learnt that I was married to one of their countrymen I received the treatment accorded to any Kurdish woman. Behaving otherwise would lead to “war” with the family into which I had married and could involve a complicated ritual of maintaining family honour—the stuff of blood feuds which can go on indefinitely” (p. 43).

Honor killings do take place in Kurdistan, however, statements made without any relevant research about speaking of Kurdish women’s “desire of mastery and domination” need to be interrogated (Alcoff, 1991, p. 24). As Alcoff (1991, p. 24) underlines, “if one’s immediate impulse is to teach rather than listen to a less-privileged speaker, one should resist that impulse long enough to interrogate it carefully.” Laizer thinks she has the authority to speak with understanding about the Kurds’ notions of honor and dishonor, by declaring that “a family’s honor is all important and is usually seen as residing in the purity and fidelity of its women … The Kurds carry out their own rough justice away from the law courts. A woman’s infidelity to her husband—even when the marriage is an arranged and possibly loveless union—brings disgrace to both families. Even divorce confers dishonour” (1991, p. 44).

Kurdish women are thereby stigmatized by their gender in stereotypical terms, of being sexually constrained, traditional, domestic, ignorant, uneducated and victimized, in contrast with western women who have freedom of choice, and can control their own bodies and sexualities. In the same chapter Laizer narrates another couple’s story (Erika, an American woman, and Orhan, a Kurdish man) to underscore the theme of Kurdish tribal and feudal customs, which pacify women’s bodies and sexuality. So, based on two selective real stories, she draws a complete picture of Kurdistan for us, and urges readers to codify it along these lines. The story of Erika and Orhan is presented in terms of honor and fidelity, and the latter’s attitudes are attributed to all Kurdish men. She continues, “I wondered how long it would take—if ever—before men’s attitudes to women in Middle Eastern countries could encompass the sort of tolerance and freedom that women are beginning to experience in the West” (p. 49). Women’s freedom in the West is taken for granted as settled, providing a foundation on which to “subsume other women under one’s own experiences” (Mohanty, 1988, p. 85).

It is important to ask why both King and Laizer tell certain women’s stories and make judgements which rob Kurdish women of their historical and political agency by stressing victimization and stifling dissent. Their works devalue differences among Kurdish women while western women are promoted as the norm, providing a standard of comparison for evaluating all experiences of the former, thereby positioning themselves as “true subjects” and reducing Kurdish women to “object” status (Mohanty, 1988). In this context, it is important to remember Nelson’s question to ethnographers, “what are the criteria by which we have selected data to record the “true image” of society?” (Nelson, 1974, p. 562).

Some Turkish feminists also tend to adopt the segregated perspectives of the Kurds and objectify their depictions in a way that indirectly contributes to the reproduction of official, liberal and nationalist Turkish discourses such as Kemalist Nationalism (Ulusculuk) in a strong modernist-westernizing vein (Bora, 2007). This further stigmatizes and marginalizes Kurdish women who have already been portrayed as such in the Turkish media, state documents and policies. Radical exclusion and marginalization of Turkey’s Kurdish region, being identified with violence, feudality, poverty and underdevelopment, have been applied systematically, particularly following the establishment of the Turkish Republic. For instance, Cihan Ahmetbeyzade, a cultural anthropologist and feminist based in Turkey, in an article entitled “Gendering Necropolitics,” aims to examine the impact of change in the Turkish national legislation and statements on violence against women, especially honor killings. Ahmetbeyzade (2008) fails to make the ethnic distinction between Turkish and Kurdish women, using “Turkish” to refer to all women in Turkey, but only identifies honor killing with the Kurds, saying “the majority of cases are concentrated either in the Kurdish region or among internally displaced Kurdish refugee families living in urban locations” (p.190). She bases this on Töre ve Namus Cinayetleri Raporu (A Report on Customary and Honour Killings), a document released by the Turkish National Police Department of Public Order in August 2006. Even according to this report, 39% of incidents occurred in the Kurdish region (not the majority), but she does not approach this official state document critically; instead she treats the statistics as objective facts.

The Turkish judiciary can be criticized in terms of its procedures and, in pointing to honor killing as only occurring in Kurdish areas, the Supreme Court (Yargıtay) stereotypes Kurds as the perpetrators of customary killings, which is a form of “othering” (Bayır, 2013). To single out southeast Turkey (the Kurdish region) further implies that honor crimes are primarily a Kurdish phenomenon, amounting to stigmatization (Koğacıoğlu, 2004).⁴ There is also an exclusionary media discourse that attaches the phenomenon of honor killing to the Kurdish ethnic identity as an essential and innate “trait,” and refers to these provinces as a rural, traditional and fanatical backwater.⁵ Ahmetbeyzade dismisses the fact that the region has suffered and continues to suffer from a succession of marginalizing and brutal policies imposed by the Turkish state (including the imposition of a state of emergency, resulting in mass and forced migration). Additionally, she does not take local and regional variations into consideration, treating the whole region as homogeneous. Not taking the context of Turkish state policies into consideration creates a biased interpretation as well. Ignoring all other on-going dynamics, diverse practices, political and national movements in the last few decades, she says: “while the majority of Kurds are tribal, nontribal Kurds often attach themselves to various tribes for numerous reasons” (p. 191). In her article, she particularly addresses Kurdish women’s sexuality, noting that, “the body and sexuality of the Kurdish woman … is recognized as a threat to the order of the Kurdish society” (p. 189). To her, while are Kurdish women passive, obedient and ignorant, Kurdish men are rebellious and disobedient, “the existence of a civil or criminal code prohibiting these abuses [i.e., berdel and beşik kertmesi] does not stop any of them from occurring every single day in the Kurdish region” (p. 191).

Ahmetbeyzade’s patriarchal description of Kurdish men is not very different from the way Kurdish rebels were described in official and nationalistic Turkish discourse (particularly just after the establishment of the Republic), reproducing orientalism within Turkey. More importantly, Ahmetbeyzade, while portraying the dualism of West (non-Kurds: modern, secular) and East (Kurds: traditional, religious, conservative), portrays the law and the judiciary as consequences of modernization and democratization which have not developed in the region due to Kurdish disobedience vis-à-vis the Turkish state. In this perspective, the emancipation of Kurdish women depends on their obedience to the secular and modern state, along with the state feminism of the Kemalist ideology (Arat, 2000). Completely ignoring the impact of colonial and external factors, including hegemonic state patriarchy, on Kurdish society, Ahmetbeyzade tends to view Kurdish customs and identity in the framework of a tribal system as primordial and goes on to essentialize the region and culture so that all problems are seen as being produced from within, regardless of the state’s juridical power. For instance, she says: “It [Kurdish tribal system] continued to be a self-regulating, semiautonomous, juridico-political field and is able to produce its own forms of resistance to the externally imposed laws of the sovereign state […] tribal laws dictate most dimensions of life” (p. 192).

Intersectionality involves the notion that categories of identity are socially constructed, emphasizing that individual identities are fluid, but Ahmetbeyzade portrays Kurdish women as powerless victims or, in other words, as a homogeneous group of oppressed women saying, “the experience of many rural Kurdish girl-children can include molestation, incest, battered childhood, economic exploitation, no hope for education, non-civil marriages with no legal recourse, teenage girl-child marriages to men older than their fathers without their consent, and teenage pregnancy without choice” (Ahmetbeyzade, 2008, p. 193). Here, an ethnocentric and western feminist model is employed, in which the Kurdish woman is assumed as the “other” and already constituted within a homogeneous category of oppressed victims and essentially dismisses individuals’ experiences, agency and networking. However, the representation of rural woman as “powerless victims” and Kurdish society as “patriarchal and feudal,” is ethnocentric and imperialistic.

Another Turkish anthropologist, Nejla Serpil Altuntek (2006), has written various academic articles on family, marriage and kinship in Kurdish society and presents stigmatized attitudes, even for the Middle Eastern societies, such as “patrilateral parallel cousin marriages are characteristic of Middle East peoples and referred to as preferred” (2006, pp. 61-62). Thereby, she treats the entire region as homogeneous and uses this view as a starting point by arguing that “in the region of research [southeast Turkey], a man does not include his daughters when counting the number of his children.” She ascribes this to a passage in the Quran: “Like a field, a woman’s womb makes no contribution to procreation” (Altuntek, 2006, pp. 61–62). All the references in her works are from sources on Muslim communities written by western orientalist scholars. She, therefore, not only marginalizes Kurds by characterizing them as following backward customs and habits, but also views Islam via sexist references from the Quran and highlights her secular position, in contrast.

Politicized identities: Kurdish women as politically active agents and combatants

Another line of scholarship regarding Kurdish women is that they are political activists and fighters. After being perceived as “passive victims,” they are seen to have become active agents and participants of war/conflict. This new image may be read as a sign of progress, indicating their empowerment rather than victimization and has been reinforced in cartoonish forms in the media, particularly in the USA, without any consideration given to class, ethnicity, location, or even the ideology that these women identify with. Kurdish women fighters belong to the YPJ (Yekîneyên Parastina Jin or Women’s Protection Union), founded in 2013 and represent the ideology of “democratic confederalism,”⁶ which is a group that has been active in Syrian Kurdistan against the Islamic State (IS), and considerable attention has been given to it by the western media, especially after the siege of Kobane was lifted in January 2015. The femininity of the fighters was a focus for the news and media groups, which ignored the underlying ideology of these women involved in military action or political governance. Their representation constitutes what has been called a form of “tabloid geopolitics” (Jongerden & Şimşek, 2019). Further, their struggle is portrayed as depoliticized since significant ideological components are overlooked (e.g., Shahvisi, 2021), which positions them simply as heroines fighting against evil (Toivanen & Başer, 2016) and reinforces “secular subjectivity” against the “radical religious identity” of the Middle East (Kardaş & Yeşiltaş, 2017). These representations stigmatize them not so much as victims but as active participants in war and conflict. In fact, Kurdish women had been politically active within the national movement in all of the four regions much earlier.⁷

Works on the political activism and combative involvement of Kurdish women have focused on masculinity and femininity and tend to use the analytical category of “gender,” defined as the difference between “women” and “men.” They examine how militarism is gendered and how gender can be militarized through the Kurdish national movement, especially following the outbreak of war in Syria and the involvement of the Kurds in it. But these works do not theorize on how these representations of women actors and fighters intersect. Cultural and economic background, sexual orientation and religious affiliation are taken for granted and unified. Readers get the impression that all these women are heterosexual, politically active, secular and come from patriarchal familial structures. These accounts fall short because they do not trace the intersections within these differences. In this section, therefore, I challenge two aspects: first, the stereotyping of Kurdish women as politically active agents, in which traditional gender roles are normalized rather than the public/private divide being challenged (i.e., an active woman in the political arena is something unusual). Decoding must be undertaken with the lens of feminist rhetoric to enable us to discover how gendered concepts occur and function in the texts. The other aspect is that these politically active women, both in governance/administration and in war, are homogenized, without any consideration given to the intersectional facets.

Recent articles have critiqued the popular and depoliticized representation of women in Syrian Kurdistan, and it is encouraging to see that these works adopt a critical stance against such stereotyping, both in narratives and photos used by the mainstream media and newspapers. However, they can fall into a trap themselves by referencing other stereotypical images or associations with Kurdish society such as honor killings, patriarchy etc. For instance, Begikhani, Hamelink and Weiss in their introductory article, entitled Theorising Women and War in Kurdistan: A Feminist and Critical Perspective (2018), talk about Kurdish women’s agency represented by “female” combatants, thereby masculinizing militarism, although they go on to criticize the perception of war as a “male enterprise.” The mere use of the adjective “female” defines the combative position, differentiating women from the “presumed male norm” (Spitzack & Carter, 1987, p. 405), while in works on male combatants, the adjective “male” is never used. This again shows the need for the feminist rhetorical approach to tackle problems stemming from lingering patriarchal concepts and systems of communication. Through feminist rhetorical criticism, gendered ideals and behavior are questioned and redefined in practices of communication and choice of language. For instance, Maya Davidovic’s article entitled “Mother-Activism” (2018) is an example of activism being attributed to men, with the outcome that women are portrayed as domestic by nature. She discusses how Kurdish women are turned into political mothers and wives because of the disappearance of their relatives, thereby situating them as political subjects. This argument accepts the traditional concept of gender difference (especially in a Middle Eastern or Third World context) and conveys the idea that it is exceptional to see mothers and wives in the public political sphere, something which is attributed to “masculinity” by way of “patriarchal rights” (Pateman, 1988). This perspective normalizes men’s military or political activism, while marginalizing that of women. Davidovic further argues that “the absence of men also causes further hardships” (p. 137), positioning women as dependent on “men,” and weak rather than equal partners, thereby legitimizing the patriarchal rights of the latter.

Within an uncritical approach to gender roles, Kurdish women tend to be viewed as familial, whose reproductive relations and practices are central. The political activism of western women is not a research concern, as it is a given norm. Naming “women political agents” as an exception, coupled with the rhetorical emphasis on motherhood as a reason to question their political activism, provides an argument for excluding women from political activity. In a way this also presumes the cultural superiority of western experiences. Kurdish women are stigmatized and marginalized in view of their association with domestic roles in other narratives and discourse, which reveal a neo-orientalist perspective and neo-colonialist depiction, about which Davidovic (2018), as seen above, builds her argument, based on perceived differences of gender and gender roles.

Intersectional criticism must examine both the present and absent images. What is absent, unmarked and unspoken in academic circles on Kurdish women is important in order to identify the restrictive and marginalizing approach towards them. For instance, there is no research on skilled, educated, middle class, homosexual, unmarried or urban (other than politically active) women. An empirical theory, which purports to be about “women,” but is in fact only about certain women, is certainly false, probably ethnocentric, and of dubious usefulness except to those who seek to strengthen their position in the world.

Journey to Kurdistan: Self-orientalism under colonial and cultural hegemony

Maracle’s argument that indigenous people’s narratives should be narrated by indigenous people can also be problematic and would not necessarily imply decolonized narratives or representations. The association of “feminism” with First World feminists may invoke skepticism among Third World people, as their work may “inscribe [a] semiconscious imperialist attitude” (Alcoff, 1991, p. 28). Lugones and Spelman (1983, p. 577) criticize the one-sided perspective of outsiders: “Most of the time the “interpretation by an outsider” is left understood and most of the time the distance of outsideness is understood to mark objectivity in the interpretation. But why is the outsider as an outsider interpreting your behavior? Is she doing this so that you can understand how she sees you? Is she doing it so that other outsiders will understand how you are? Is she doing it so that you will understand how you are?”

Many Kurdish scholars initially read and learnt their history through the accounts of American travel writers, which in a way installed representation as the principal construct of knowledge in western culture and the discovery of the self in defining its opposing other (Gharipour & Özlü, 2015). Certain prominent western scholars who have visited Kurdish regions have drawn stereotypical portrayals, which led to the creation of universalized images (e.g., rural, tribal, backward, conservative) and so it is very likely that their western background gives their narratives greater legitimacy than non-western ones. Stereotypes about Third World women, however, are not solely created by western scholars, as Mohanty (1988) argues, but also by people from the regions themselves in the way of a “self-orientalism” as it is possible to be overwhelmed by western cultural imperialism, and thereby self-orientalized, for instance, by taking on hasty and faulty Euro-American perceptions about the Middle East (Dirlik, 1997). This may also be due to the growing number of Kurdish scholars in the West, where they have been educated and live.

So, is being a Kurd or knowing the language adequate in order to escape the “outsider” position? The answer really depends on one’s perspective and approach, and how critical one is regarding earlier writings and scholarship. For instance, Nazand Begikhani (2012), a Kurdish feminist scholar and poet based in Europe, published an article and book with her colleagues Aisha K. Gill and Gill Hague on their empirical study of honor killings in Iraqi Kurdistan. In this we see the familiar and hasty depictions and generalizations about Kurdish women, for example, “Although many Kurdish girls are “married off” at a young age, responsibility for protecting them until marriage lies with their fathers and brothers. This responsibility is seen to give male kin the right to exercise power over young women by dictating every facet of their lives and behaviour” (2012). Although they do mention the fact that honor killings should not be associated with a certain ethnic group or culture, such depictions contribute to their generalized association with Kurds. Such generalization should not undermine the value of their empirical study; however, statements such as “many Kurdish girls marry young,” without locating the region or referring to any comprehensive research to verify this conclusion, stigmatize the position of all Kurdish women. This and similar discourse on them is taken for granted, for instance, in the 1970s my mother resisted the second marriage of my aunt’s husband, prevented it, and even organized other women against polygamous marriages in Şırnak (Turkish Kurdistan). I personally know many women like her. Why are such women’s daily struggle against patriarchy not recounted? Because they do not fit the objectified picture of a passive victim with no history of struggle?. Many Kurdish women resist and fight “patriarchal rights” every day. Why are they not being researched?

Kurdish women scholars based outside Kurdistan are considered native. But can researchers who have studied and worked outside the region for years be considered “insiders” and not influenced by imperialistic or orientalist scholarship? Their research is unquestionably significant, but how correct can it be to build arguments and analysis on pre-exizting (mainly western) scholarship full of stereotypical articulations without challenging and deconstructing them? In a Foucauldian sense (1980, 1998) the production of knowledge is simultaneously the production of power and to claim academic “neutrality” and “objectivity” is to deny the self-empowering process of knowledge production in western academia. The more “orientalist” approach, even in feminist rhetoric, lacks intersectional considerations and so orientalism becomes “the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient” as “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (Said, 1979, p. 3). This still remains relevant, well beyond the colonial context, Said speaks about. So, feminist scholarship should seek “the achievement of gender justice” (Dow, 2016, p. 61). The works I have examined here undoubtedly exert power and control in various forms, while scholars rhetorically construct authority with their writings and “speak for” oppressed women.

Conclusion

Discourse can be a site of both “power” and “resistance” to evade, subvert or contest strategies of power (Gaventa, 2003). Various critiques have been presented regarding the misrepresentation or depoliticization of Kurdish women guerrillas, both verbally and visually in the mainstream media, which has the power to influence audiences. So a critical reaction has emerged against media representations, especially western ones, along with power relationships and western-centric understandings of Kurdish women fighters. However, scholarly works on Kurdish women have not been scrutinized adequately, while the belief that has been reflected is that these are authoritative and represent legitimate scientific knowledge, which is less likely to suffer from misconceptions or fallacies. Scholars, through their discursive power and practice—or what Foucault (1998) refers to as the “regime of truth”—can consistently influence further learning and knowledge about Kurds and Kurdish women via processes of stereotyping and marginalization.

Kurdish women’s status within patriarchal society is a matter of legitimate concern. However, subjugating them as victims of men’s worlds and framing gender issues solely within their own internal dynamics, leads to ignoring the colonial projects in the region and not taking account of the impact of international relations, globalization, economic policies and shifting socio-cultural and political movements. In addition, dismissing the intersectional aspects of Kurdish women’s identity also conveys the homogenizing of their experiences into certain categories (as victim, migrant, combatant, political activist). Stereotyping them in terms of binary oppositions to patriarchy and masculinity in orientalist discourses and depicting them as “victimage,” as in feminist rhetoric, leads to their further marginalization and disempowerment. In this context, the works examined in this article show that speaking for Kurdish women victimizes and further marginalizes them.

“Moving over” is then not a solution, nor is keeping silent about oppression. What is suggested here is the decolonization of knowledge production in Kurdish women’s studies, deconstructing the discourse and not legitimizing the hegemony and colonialism of western and other countries that Kurds have long suffered. We must abandon simplistic and mechanical models constructed for them and instead adopt a sense of responsibility in constructing agency through theory and scholarly writing. There is a need for resistance to all forms of subordination and provision for greater space for promoting equality among women, applying an intersectional method and an orientalist-free lens, rather than just equality between “men” and “women.” The language and production of knowledge should suggest new rhetorical paths that achieve freedom, safety, complexity, subjectivity, and equality (Nudd & Whales, 2009). To empower Third World women, rather than marginalize them, there is need for a feminist critical discourse which does not reproduce the dominant discourse in different shapes and forms. Otherwise, doing theory on women would just be a bonding ritual for academic or educationally privileged feminists and scholars.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Özlem Belçim Galip

Özlem Belçim GALIP is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Imagining Kurdistan: Identity, Culture and Society (I.B, Tauris, 2015) and Civil Society versus State: New Social Movement and Armenian Question in Turkey (Palgrave, 2020). [email protected]

Notes

1 Iraqi Kurdistan is unique among the regions of Kurdistan in having de facto autonomy, being officially governed by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) since 1991.

2 The first sources on Kurdish women are based on the observations of western travellers who exhibited a monolithic and ethnocentric view (see Mabro, Judy [Ed.] 1991). For instance, The Kurdish woman’s life: Field research in Muslim society, Iraq, written by the first female Danish ethnographer and social anthropologist, Henny Harald Hansen (1900-1993) in 1958 and translated into English in 1960. She also wrote Costume cavalcade (1956) and Investigations in a Shi’a village in Bahrain (1968).

3 The term “Third World” is frequently applied both to underdeveloped and over-exploited geopolitical entities, but it not only designates specific geographical areas, but also imaginary spaces. It goes beyond geographical locations, by covering socio-historical conjunctures as well. For further discussion and comprehensive understanding of “Third World” see Nelly P. Stromquist (1998)

4 For more on western attitudes regarding honor killings in other contexts, see Fernandez (2009)

5 For more on the Kurds being associated with honor killings and domestic violence in mainstream Turkish media (Altun et al. 2007).

6 Democratic confederalism is a system proposed by PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan to provide Kurds with self-rule based on participation through “people’s assemblies” while respecting existing borders.

7 Mainly in PKK, YPJ (Kurdish Women’s Protection Units, Syrian Kurdistan), PJAK (Kurdistan Free Life Party, Iranian Kurdistan) and Peshmerga (Iraqi Kurdistan) forces.