Thinking Militant Femininity Beyond the Battlefield: Kurdish Women’s Trajectories in and out of Armed Conflict
Kurdish women in armed combat have gained significant attention in activist, journalistic and academic knowledge production, particularly since the beginning of the Rojava Revolution in 2012, and the larger fight against DAESH since 2014. This discussion has oscillated between a neo-orientalist depiction of the one progressive women’s militia in an otherwise barbaric Middle East, and the idealisation of the women freedom fighters - both accounts brushing over a more complex history and everyday reality of violence and resistance. In this talk, Isabel Käser traces the trajectories of women in the Kurdish Freedom Movement (PKK), looking at the process of becoming a revolutionary, and unpacking the movement’s cosmology around the “free woman”. She also zooms into the lived experience of former rebels, those who left the armed struggle and live as refugees in exile. Based on ethnographic research in Turkey, Iraqi Kurdistan and Switzerland, with women politicians, martyr mothers and (former) rebels, she shows how new meanings and practices have been assigned to women in the quest for Kurdish self-determination, but argues for a more nuanced analysis of the everyday embodied epistemologies and long-term reverberations of violence.
Dr. Isabel Käser, Postdoctoral Fellow, Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Bern
Moderation: Dr. Laura Wolters, Sozialwissenschaftlerin; Forschungsgruppe Makrogewalt