Quick Overview
Kurdish Women Through History, Culture, and Resistance is a study of the lives and struggles of Kurdish women in the past while also envisioning the social, cultural, and sexual transformation of gender relations for a future that is upon us. An interdisciplinary study of, by, and with Kurdish women, this anthology offers a rejuvenated radical analysis of transnational feminism by focusing on the interrelations between social forces and structures that constitute the totality of gender relations in Kurdish society at local, regional, and global levels. Stories of daily encounters of women’s bodies and sexualities with the state, patriarchal relations, religion, borders, and refugee camps is centered in some of the analyses; others explore the voices, images, and writings of women in cinema, songs, poems, folktales, and memoirs. The collective feminist ethos of the book is directed towards overcoming the absences and omissions of Kurdish gender relations in Kurdish Studies and in the study of women and gender relations in the Middle East and North Africa.
The first anthology, Women of a Non-State Nation: The Kurds, was published twenty-five years ago. The past two decades have witnessed an increase in the knowledge production on Kurdish gender relations, a knowledge production that has been primarily produced by Kurdish women scholars and activists. The chapters in Kurdish Women Through History, Culture, and Resistance are framing this body of knowledge while prefiguring a renewed theoretical and methodological path forward.