BiblioVault - Books about Women, Kurdish

Honor and the Political Economy of Marriage

Violence against Women in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq

Joanne Payton

Rutgers University Press, 2020

'Honor' is used as a justification for violence perpetrated against women and girls considered to have violated social taboos related to sexual behavior. Several ‘honor’-based murders of Kurdish women, such as Fadime Sahindal, Banaz Mahmod and Du’a Khalil Aswad, and campaigns against 'honor'-based violence by Kurdish feminists have drawn international attention to this phenomenon within Kurdish communities.

Honor and the Political Economy of Marriage provides a description of ‘honor’-based violence that focuses upon the structure of the family rather than the perpetrator’s culture. The author, Joanne Payton, argues that within societies primarily organized by familial and marital connections, women’s ‘honor’ is a form of symbolic capital within a ‘political economy’ in which marriage organizes intergroup connections.
Drawing on statistical analysis of original data contextualized with historical and anthropological readings, Payton explores forms of marriage and their relationship to ‘honor’, sketching changing norms around the familial control of women from agrarian/pastoral roots to the contemporary era.

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The Purple Color of Kurdish Politics

Women Politicians Write from Prison

Gultan Kisanak

Pluto Press, 2022

Prison writings from twenty-two Kurdish women who were elected to office in Turkey and then imprisoned by the state on political grounds.

Gültan Kışanak, a Kurdish journalist and former MP, was elected co-mayor of Diyarbakır in 2014. Two years later, the Turkish state arrested and imprisoned her. Her story is remarkable, but not unique. While behind bars, she wrote about her own experiences and collected similar accounts from other Kurdish women, all co-chairs, co-mayors, and MPs in Turkey; all incarcerated on political grounds.

The Purple Colour of Kurdish Politics is a one-of-a-kind collection of prison writings from twenty-two Kurdish women politicians. Here they reflect on their personal and collective struggles against patriarchy and anti-Kurdish repression in Turkey; on the radical feminist principles and practices through which they transformed the political structures and state offices in which they operated. They discuss what worked and what didn’t, and the ways in which Turkey’s anti-capitalist and socialist movements closely informed their political stances and practices.

Demonstrating Kurdish women’s ceaseless political determination and refusal to be silenced – even when behind bars – the book ultimately hopes to inspire women living under even the most unjust conditions to engage in collective resistance.

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Sara

My Whole Life Was a Struggle

Sakine Cansiz

Pluto Press, 2018

The bitter struggle of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) against the Turkish state has endured for decades in the face of major setbacks and violence. This memoir tells that story through the experience of one person, Sakine Cansiz—codenamed “Sara”—a cofounder of the PKK who dedicated her life to its cause—until she was assassinated in 2013.
This memoir, available for the first time in English, tells the story of the first chapter of Cansiz’s life, from the founding of the PKK in 1974 through her arrest in 1979. She writes here about the excitement of entering the movement as a young woman—and discovering quickly that she would have to challenge traditional gender roles as she rose among its ranks. And she succeeded: total gender equality is now one of the central tenets of the PKK.
Today, Sara lives on, an inspiration to women fighting for liberation around the world. Her story, told in her own words, is by turns shocking, violent, and groundbreaking.

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Voices That Matter

Kurdish Women at the Limits of Representation in Contemporary Turkey

Marlene Schäfers

University of Chicago Press, 2023

A fine-grained ethnography exploring the sociopolitical power of Kurdish women’s voices in contemporary Turkey.

“Raise your voice!” and “Speak up!” are familiar refrains that assume, all too easily, that gaining voice will lead to empowerment, healing, and inclusion for marginalized subjects. Marlene Schäfers’s Voices That Matter reveals where such assumptions fall short, demonstrating that “raising one’s voice” is no straightforward path to emancipation but fraught with anxieties, dilemmas, and contradictions. In its attention to the voice as form, this book examines not only what voices say but also how they do so, focusing on Kurdish contexts where oral genres have a long, rich legacy. Examining the social labor that voices carry out as they sound, speak, and resonate, Schäfers shows that where new vocal practices arise, they produce new selves and practices of social relations. In Turkey, recent decades have seen Kurdish voices gain increasing moral and political value as metaphors of representation and resistance. Women’s voices, in particular, are understood as potent means to withstand patriarchal restrictions and political oppression. By ethnographically tracing the transformations in how Kurdish women relate to and employ their voices as a result of these shifts, Schäfers illustrates how contemporary politics foster not only new hopes and desires but also create novel vulnerabilities as they valorize, elicit, and discipline voice in the name of empowerment and liberation.

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