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 The Kurdish Women’s Freedom Movement

Amidst ongoing wars and insecurities, female fighters, politicians and

activists of the Kurdish Freedom Movement are building a new political
system that centres gender equality. Since the Rojava Revolution, the
international focus has been especially on female fighters, a gaze that has
often been essentialising and objectifying, brushing over a much more
complex history of violence and resistance. Going beyond Orientalist
tropes of the female freedom fighter, and the movement’s own narrative
of the ‘free woman’, Isabel Käser looks at personal trajectories and
everyday processes of becoming a militant in this movement. Based on
in depth ethnographic research in Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan, with
women politicians, martyr mothers and female fighters, she looks at
how norms around gender and sexuality have been rewritten and how
new meanings and practices have been assigned to women in the quest
for Kurdish self determination. Her book complicates prevailing notions
of gender and war and creates a more nuanced understanding of the
everyday embodied epistemologies of violence, conflict and resistance.

Isabel Käser is a Visiting Fellow at the LSE Middle East Centre and
Research Associate at the University of Bern. She gained her PhD at
SOAS University of London and has previously worked in journalism
and diplomacy, most recently leading the research project ‘Art in Peace
Mediation’ for the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs. She has
lectured at the University of Bern and the University of Kurdistan
Hewlêr (UKH), and is currently the Principal Investigator of a collabora
tive project between the LSE and the UKH titled ‘The Kurdistan Region
of Iraq Post ISIS: Youth, Art and Gender’.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Published online by Cambridge University Press
 The Kurdish Women’s
Freedom Movement
Gender, Body Politics and Militant Femininities

Isabel Käser
London School of Economics and Political Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press

 University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom
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www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781316519745
DOI: 10.1017/9781009022194
© Isabel Käser 2021
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2021
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Names: Käser, Isabel, author.
Title: The Kurdish women’s freedom movement : gender, body politics and
militant feminities / Isabel Käser.
Description: Cambridge ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2021. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021008901 (print) | LCCN 2021008902 (ebook) | ISBN
9781316519745 (hardback) | ISBN 9781009022194 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê. | Women, Kurdish Political
activity Turkey. | Women, Kurdish Turkey Social conditions. | Women and
war Turkey. | Nationalism and feminism Turkey. | Militia movements
Turkey. | Government, Resistance to Turkey. | BISAC: POLITICAL
SCIENCE / World / Middle Eastern | POLITICAL SCIENCE / World /
Middle Eastern
Classification: LCC HQ1726.7 .K38 2021 (print) | LCC HQ1726.7 (ebook) |
DDC 305.409561 dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021008901
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021008902
ISBN 978 1 316 51974 5 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of
URLs for external or third party internet websites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.

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 To my father Peter Käser (1955 2019)

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Published online by Cambridge University Press
 Contents

List of Figures page viii

List of Maps ix
List of Tables x
Acknowledgements xi
Note on the Text xiii
List of Abbreviations xiv

Introduction 1
1 The PKK – A Woman’s Party?
A History of the Kurdish Women’s Freedom Movement
1978–2020 42
2 Diyarbakir under Fire: Women at the Barricades 66
3 The Mountain Life: On Learning to Become Free 97
4 Mothers and Martyrs: The Struggle for Life and the
Commemoration of Death in Maxmûr Camp 130
5 Unmaking and Remaking Sexuality: Body Politics
and the PKK 162
Conclusion 196

Appendix 208
References 211
Index 235

vii

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 Figures

2.1 Feleknas Uca during a demonstration in protest of Gültan

Kışanak’s arrest, Diyarbakir, October 2016 page 79
2.2 Stencil graffiti of Abdullah Öcalan in Sur: For freedom
of the leadership and freedom of Kurdistan, to the guerrilla
ranks 81
2.3 Barricades and sheets in Cizre, September 2015 83
2.4 In Sur, Diyarbakir, December 2015 83
2.5 During the minute of silence at the cemetery, Diyarbakir 93
3.1 The commanders during dinner 104
3.2 Two trainee guerrillas at Akademiya Şehîd Şirîn Elemholî 106
3.3 Balloon backdrop 117
3.4 ‘Long live the leader!’, they shouted as they set his name
on fire 118
3.5 Photo of small laminated card of Şehîd Zîlan, given to me
by Zemyan before my departure 120
3.6 Two commanders letting their hair down 123
4.1 Maxmûr residents lingering at the martyr house (mala şehîdan)
after the weekly ceremony 140
4.2 View of Maxmûr 151
4.3 Maxmûr residents in front of an Öcalan collage 152

viii

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 Map

1.1 Map indicating some of the political and military factions in the
four parts of Kurdistan in 2016, at the time of fieldwork. page xvii

ix

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 Tables

I.1 Organisational structure – Kurdish Freedom Movement page 209

I.2 Organisational structure –Kurdish Women’s Freedom
Movement 210

Published online by Cambridge University Press

 Acknowledgements

I initially had the idea for this project in 2012, when the first images of the
Rojava Revolution started circulating. At the forefront of the colourful
protests were women: waving flags from the back of pickup trucks,
marching in Qamişlo and standing guard to demarcate the boundaries
of the new Kurdish cantons in Syria’s northeast. Since then, some parts of
Kurdistan have undergone profound transformations and at the heart of
this process were and are women. Over the course of the past seven years,
I have managed to witness and put into writing some of these dynamics,
a process that would not have been possible without the help of many
wonderful friends, colleagues and family members.
At the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), my intellectual
home during the project, I want to thank Nadje Al-Ali who was not only
an indispensable mentor but also became a great friend along this tumul-
tuous journey. Her unfaltering support played a huge part in the success-
ful completion of this project. Charles Tripp, Gina Heathcote Cynthia
Enloe and Hamit Bozarslan influenced this project with their critical
questions and encouraging nudges. Doctoral fellowships granted by the
Janggen-Pöhn Foundation and the Swiss National Science Foundation
are also gratefully acknowledged.
A research project like this one depends on people making introduc-
tions and opening doors. I am indebted to Estella Schmid, Kerim Yildiz,
Özlem Yasak, Murat Bayram, Nazmi Gür, Evin Kışanak and Meral Çiçek
for their time and trust. I would also like to thank the many people who
hosted me so generously during fieldwork – between Diyarbakir,
Istanbul, Erbil, Maxmûr and Sulaymaniyah – particularly Melis and
Magnus Bischofberger for providing a home in Istanbul (and then again
in London), Siham Mamand for organising my stay in Erbil, Neslihan
Yaklav and Choman Hardi for hosting me in Sulaymaniyah, and Şehrivan
Durmaz who opened her home in Maxmûr Camp. Most of this book was
written at 83 Bartholomew Road, the late Cynthia Cockburn’s house in
London, a place that was home to generations of feminist academics and
activists.
xi

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 xii Acknowledgements

I am grateful to my friends and colleagues, the brilliant Paniz Musawi

Natanzi, Sabiha Allouche, Haje Keli, Serhat Keser and Arzu Yılmaz who
have read earlier drafts of this manuscript and with their criticality have
made this work better. I would also like to express my gratitude to my
Kurmancî teachers – Maldin Heidar, Murat Bayram, Zozan Yaşar and
Aladdin Sinayic – for teaching me the ways of their beautiful language.
Lukman Ahmad generously agreed to let me use one of his paintings for
the book cover, the Face of Crystal, to me, touchingly captures many of the
dynamics that I describe in this book.
A lot of life happened alongside this project over the course of the past
seven years and I owe much to my family in Switzerland for their support
along the way: my late father Peter Käser, for believing in me and for
always encouraging my curious mind, and to my mother Myrta Grob who
taught me everything, but in particular her very own brand of feminism.
My aunt Monika Grob provided a home full of warmth and compassion
whenever I needed time to write or recuperate. Without her love, gener-
osity and that fireplace, I would not be where I am today. I am thankful to
my family and friends, Eva and David Käser, Anne Hasselmann,
Micheline Maire, Christine Baumgartner, Teresa Mitchell, Daniel
Marwecki, Ayşe Tekagac, Corinna Drossel, Myriam Gaitsch, Bejan
Matur, Pınar Balıkcı, Houzan Mahmoud, Suna Parlak, Asmin Beri and
Lilly Ladjevardi, who were there with me as I went from excited nerd, to
restless militant, to traumatised researcher, before eventually finding
a way to write this book. This work is dedicated to all the struggling
women and men who shared their time and experiences with me. I am
indebted to your generosity and hope this work does justice to your life
stories. And lastly, this is to Ares and our journey together – and to a love
that has persevered against all odds.

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 Note on the Text

Because of the sensitive nature of this topic and the ongoing repression of
politicians and activists linked to the wider Kurdish Freedom Movement,
I have used pseudonyms for some of my informants, and have anonym-
ised them fully if requested. I have mentioned the names of certain key
public figures if they have been quoted on similar issues elsewhere.

xiii

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 Abbreviations

AKP Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, Justice and Development Party

DBP Demokratik Bölgeler Partisi, Democratic Regions Party
DFLP Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine
DÖKH Demokratik Özgür Kadın Hareketi, Democratic Free
Women’s Movement
DTK Demokratik Toplum Kongresi, Democratic Society’s
Congress
DTP Demokratik Toplum Partisi, Democratic Society Party
DTSO Diyarbakır Ticaret ve Sanayi Odası, Diyarbakir Chamber
of Commerce and Industry
EPLF Eritrean People’s Liberation Front
HEP Halkın Emek Partisi, People’s Labour Party
HDK Halkların Demokratik Kongresi, People’s Democratic
Congress
HDP Halkların Demokratik Partisi, Peoples’ Democratic Party
HPG Hêzên Parastina Gel, People’s Defence Forces
HPJ Hêzên Parastina Jin, Women’s Defence Forces
Hüda-Par Hür Dava Partisi, Free Cause Party
KCK Koma Civakên Kurdistanê, Kurdistan Communities
Union
KDP Partiya Demokrat a Kurdistanê, Kurdistan Democratic
Party
KDPI Hizbî Dêmokratî Kurdistanî Êran, Kurdish Democratic
Party of Iran
KJA Kongreya Jinên Azad, Congress of Free Women
KJK Koma Jinên Kurdistanê, Kurdistan Women’s Union
KNK Kongreya Neteweyî ya Kurdistanê, Kurdistan National
Congress
KJAR Komalgeya Jinên Azad ên Rojhilatê Kurdistanê, Eastern
Kurdistan Free Women’s Society
KODAR Komalgeya Demokratîk û Azad a Rojhilatê Kurdistanê,
Eastern Kurdistan Free and Democratic Society
xiv

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 List of Abbreviations xv

Komala Komalay Şoreşgerî Zahmetkêşanî Kurdistanî Îran, the

Society of Revolutionary Toilers of Iranian Kurdistan
LTTE Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam
PAJK Partiya Azadiya Jin a Kurdistanê, Free Women’s Party of
Kurdistan
PÇDK Partiya Çareseriya Demokratîk a Kurdistanê, Kurdistan
Democratic Solution Party
PFWAC Palestinian Federation of Women’s Action Committees
PJA Partiya Jina Azad, Free Women’s Party
PJAK Partiya Jiyana Azad a Kurdistanê, Kurdistan Free Life
Party
PJKK Partiya Jinên Karkerên Kurdistanê, Kurdistan Women’s
Worker’s Party
PKK Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê, Kurdistan Workers’ Party
PUK/YNK Yekîtiya Nîştimaniya Kurdistan, the Patriotic Union of
Kurdistan
PYD Partiya Yekîtiya Demokrat, Democratic Union Party
RJAK Rêxistina Jinên Azad ên Kurdistanê, Kurdistan Free
Women’s Organisation
SDF Hêzên Sûriya Demokratîk, Syrian Democratic Forces
THKO Türkiye Halk Kurtuluş Ordusu, People’s Liberation Army
of Turkey
THKP-C Türkiye Halk Kurtuluş Partisi-Cephesi, People’s Liberation
Party-Front of Turkey
TJA Tevgera Jinên Azad, the Free Women’s Movement
YAJK Yekîneyên Azadiya Jinên Kurdistanê, Free Women’s
Union of Kurdistan
YDG-H Yurtsever Devrimci Gençlik Hareketi, Patriotic Revolutionary
Youth Movement
YJA-STAR Yekîneyên Jinên Azad-Star, Free Women’s Units STAR
YJWK Yekîneyên Jinên Welatparêz ên Kurdistanê, Unit of
Patriotic Women in Kurdistan
YPG Yekîneyên Parastina Gel, People’s Protection Units
YPJ Yekîneyên Parastina Jin, Women’s Protection Units
YPS Yekîneyên Parastina Sivîl, Civil Protection Unit
YPS-Jin Yekîneyên Parastina Sivîl a Jin, Women’s Civil Protection
Unit
YRK Yekîneyên Parastina Rojhilatê Kurdistanê, Eastern Kurdistan
Defence Units

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 Map

xvi

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Published online by Cambridge University Press
Map 1.1 Map indicating some of the political and military factions in the four parts of Kurdistan in 2016, at the time of fieldwork.
Source: Emmanuel Pène in the Maghreb and Orient Courier
Published online by Cambridge University Press
 Introduction

‘When I struggle for my freedom with women, I feel free and I feel equal.
Maybe if we weren’t organised, I wouldn’t feel like that. But freedom is so
far away, that I know, we need hundreds of years’ (Ayşe Gökkan,
14 November 2015). We were sitting in the office of KJA, the Congress
of Free Women (Kongreya Jinên Azad) in Diyarbakir, the largest Kurdish
city in Turkey, when Ayşe Gökkan told me what equality and freedom
meant to her. Our interview was often interrupted by the war planes
roaring overhead and rattling the windows,1 Ayşe’s phone ringing and
people walking into her office for a quick consultation. Ayşe seemed
unfazed by all the commotion, the recent collapse of the peace process
between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK,
Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê), and the ensuing outbreak of the urban
wars in Turkey’s southeast in the summer of 2015. She had been active
in the Kurdish Women’s Freedom Movement2 for thirty years – as
a journalist, politician and member of KJA – and had seen it all: the
early years of the PKK, the prison resistance in the 1980s, the emergence
of the Kurdish political parties in the 1990s, the establishment of
women’s structures and the implementation of the women’s quota in
the 2000s, and the hope that came with the Rojava Revolution in 2012.
From 2009 to 2014 she served as the mayor of Nusaybin, a Kurdish city
bordering Syria. When we met, she was responsible for the diplomacy of
KJA, which meant building peace initiatives with Turkish feminists,
creating international networks, welcoming foreign delegations, and
speaking to researchers like me. KJA served as an umbrella structure to

1
These planes took off in Diyarbakir to bomb positions in the Medya Defence Zone, the
PKK controlled area on the Iraqi/Turkish/Iranian border. According to my respondents,
the planes deliberately flew low over the city in order to demonstrate Turkish state power
and intimidate the population.
2
Kurd. Tevgera Azadiya Jinên Kurdistanê, engl. Kurdistan Women’s Freedom Movement.
The name of the whole movement (Kurd. Tevgera Azadiya Kurdistanê) translates to
Kurdistan Freedom Movement. I use shorter versions for the women (Kurdish
Women’s Freedom Movement or Kurdish women’s movement) and the whole movement
(Kurdish Freedom Movement or just Freedom Movement).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009022194.001 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 2 Introduction

unify and streamline ‘women’s work’ in Turkish Kurdistan/Bakur3 and

implement the ideas around women’s liberation according to the writings
of the Kurdish Freedom Movement’s imprisoned de facto leader
Abdullah Öcalan. During our interview Ayşe told me her personal story
but also highlighted some of the cornerstones of the women’s liberation
ideology: the importance of devoting yourself to a unified struggle led by
and for women, against a ‘capitalist system’ and a ‘patriarchal society’.4
She also explained the difference between ‘being free’ and a ‘free life’;
being free is achieved by participation in an everyday struggle, a process of
liberation that is geared towards a vision of freedom situated in a future
utopia. In order to achieve that ‘free life’ women have to liberate them-
selves from the shackles of a racist, misogynist and capitalist society,
a process in which they will not only free themselves but the fragmented
and oppressed Kurdish nation as whole.
This centrality of women in the struggle of the Kurdish Freedom
Movement is represented by ‘Women, Life, Freedom!’ (Jin, Jiyan,
Azadî!), one of the main slogans5 of the women’s movement that was not
only present on banners and posters in the KJA office but was chanted at
demonstrations, after speeches and reiterated during my interviews across
the fieldwork sites in different parts of Kurdistan.6 This slogan is also

3
I refer to the Kurdish geography as ‘four parts of Kurdistan’; Turkish Kurdistan or Bakur,
Iranian Kurdistan or Rojhelat, Iraqi Kurdistan or Başûr and Syrian Kurdistan or Rojava.
In Kurdish language Bakur, Rojhelat, Başûr and Rojava refer to north, east, south and
west, respectively, and are usually used as e.g. Bakurê Kurdistanê (North Kurdistan).
4
‘Patriarchy’ is a broad term that describes ‘a political social system that insists that males
are inherently dominating, superior to everything and everyone deemed weak, especially
females, and endowed with the right to dominate and rule over the weak and to maintain
that dominance through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence [. . .].
Women can be as wedded to patriarchal thinking and action as men’ (hooks n.d.).
Cynthia Enloe further conceptualizes patriarchy as ‘a system a dynamic web of
particular ideas and relationships [. . .]. Patriarchy can be updated and modernized. It is
stunningly adaptable’ and might invite a few select women into the boardroom but only on
the condition that they internalise masculinised ways of thinking and act in a way that does
not threaten masculinised privilege (Enloe 2017, 16). The Kurdish women’s movement
uses the term ‘patriarchy’ (baviksalarî) or ‘male mentality’ (zîhniyeta zilam) to describe
that adaptable web of power relations, linking the forms of everyday domination and
violence it creates to capitalism and the nation state.
5
I borrow ‘slogans’ from my interviewees, who would refer to reoccurring expressions that
the PKK uses at public events, on banners and in party publications as ‘slogans’. They also
use the Kurdish word şiyar for slogan, which translates to ‘warning’ or ‘promise’.
6
Kurdistan is divided between four states Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran and is not exclusively
Kurdish but is also home to Yezidis, Armenians, Arabs, Turkmen, Assyrians, Chaldeans,
Chircassians, Laz, among others ethnic groups. No exact figures exist but estimates suggest
that the number of Kurds in the Middle East and diaspora is close to 30 million;
12 15 million Kurds live in Turkey, more than 8 million in Iran, 5 million in Iraq, and
approximately 1 million in Syria, and almost 2 million in other Middle Eastern countries, the
former Soviet Union (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Russia) and Europe (Bozarslan 2008, 334).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009022194.001 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 Introduction 3

a central aspect in Democratic Confederalism,7 the political paradigm

penned by Abdullah Öcalan, which links the liberation of women to national
liberation and foresees a non-state nation based on gender equality, radical
democracy, ecology and self-defence (Öcalan 2011). Running with this
ideology, women in the political branch of the movement were able to
push through a 40 per cent women’s quota and the co-presidency system
in the mid-2000s and have since been elected in great numbers into local
and national political party structures in Turkey. Even more prominently,
women who have been fighting in the armed branches of the movement have
gained significant visibility since the PKK’s sister party, the Democratic
Union Party (PYD, Partiya Yekîtiya Demokrat) and its armed wings, the
People’s Protection Units (YPG, Yekîneyên Parastina Gel) and the Women’s
Protection Unit (YPJ, Yekîneyên Parastina Jin) took control of Rojava, the
Kurdish northeast of Syria in 2012. The role armed women played in the
defence of Kobanî (Rojava) and Şengal (Iraq) against the onslaught of the
so-called Islamic State (colloquially known as daesh) in 2014 led to much
media and scholarly attention on the female fighters. Often depicting smiling
and attractive young women with Kalashnikovs, the female fighters of the
YPJ became the antithesis to the barbaric other: daesh, the many jihadi
groups fighting in Syria, the Syrian regime and the Turkish army. This
representation of the female fighters has been criticised as essentialist and
orientalist, as it objectifies and sexualises the women, brushing over what
they stand and fight for (Dirik 2014; Shahvisi 2018). The party’s own
propaganda and the activist literature published in the wake of the ‘Rojava
Revolution’, while providing important insights into the Rojava project,
mostly idealise and glorify the struggle and its revolutionaries, without
much space given to the critical voices or reflections on the true cost of war
for those who fight it (Demir 2017; Flach et al. 2016; Lower Class Magazine
and Unrast e. V 2017; Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness 2015; Tax 2016).
Rather than assessing the representation of the female revolutionary,
I want to introduce the female revolutionary through women’s embodied
experience of becoming and being a militant of the Kurdish Freedom
7
Democratic Confederalism, Democratic Autonomy and Democratic Nation are three inter
related political concepts coined by Abdullah Öcalan. Democratic Confederalism is the
council political form, based on radical democracy, sustainable ecological, gender equality
and self defence. It foresees a collaboration between different regional assembly and self
governance structures, the smallest entity being the commune. Democratic Autonomy is the
political principle of self determination. It refers to the practices in which people produce the
necessary conditions for collaboration with one another. Democratic Nation (instead of
states) can accommodate ethnic, religious and linguistic differences. Ideally, Democratic
Nations organised along the parameters of Democratic Autonomy would form Democratic
Confederations, surpassing ethnic, religious, linguistic and state boundaries. In practice these
concepts are still new and are often conflated or used interchangeably (Ayboğ a 2018;
Guneser 2018; Jongerden & Akayya 2013, 171; Öcalan 2016, 2017).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009022194.001 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 4 Introduction

Movement, as politicians, activists and fighters. I discuss the specific

ways in which this particular transnational women’s movement has
fought for, created and used emerging spaces since 1978, when the
PKK was founded. In order to think beyond the sensationalist and
sexualised representation of women at the political and military front
lines, I examine how women filled the political, activist and militar-
ised spaces with particular organisational practices and ideological
claim making: how they operate on a continuum of violence and
resistance in the everyday, and what kind of hegemonic femininity
has been formed and is being practised in the different spaces between
the mountains and the cities I had access to during my fieldwork: the
legal Kurdish parties in the cities (Bakur), the women’s guerrilla
training camps (Başûr) and the martyr mothers in Maxmûr Camp
(Başûr).
Ayşe and most of the other women I interviewed are part of the
Kurdish Women’s Freedom Movement, a transnational secular
women’s movement that is active in Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, as
well as Europe and, to a lesser extent, Latin America and Russia. The
women’s movement is part of the larger Kurdish Freedom Movement
and both are officially organised under the umbrella structure of the
Kurdistan Communities Union (KCK, Koma Civakên Kurdistanê).
Parallel to the KCK structure runs the female-only Kurdistan
Women’s Union (KJK, Koma Jinên Kurdistanê). Within the KCK/
KJK, there are three main spheres of work: the social and political
sphere, the ideological sphere and the armed sphere. This complex
and ever-changing party structure is visualised in the tables in the
Appendix and will come into sharper relief in the following chapters;
however, it is important to note that the Kurdish Freedom Movement is
more commonly referred to as the PKK. The PKK, initially a Marxist-
Leninist national liberation party, was founded in eastern Turkey in
1978 and has since 1984 been engaged in a guerrilla war against the
Turkish state, fighting for an independent Kurdistan. In 1999, the party
leader Abdullah Öcalan was arrested and, while in prison, has rewritten
the liberation ideology from fighting for an independent Kurdistan,
towards establishing Democratic Confederalism. He also demanded
the party’s organisational restructuring from PKK to KCK, so that
today the PKK is only an ideological party within the greater KCK
construct. Despite party restructuring from PKK to KCK, members of
the movement themselves still refer to it as ‘the party’, ‘the PKK’ or ‘the
movement’, and I use them interchangeably.

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 Introduction 5

The historical transformations of the Kurdish Freedom Movement

are intimately interwoven with the history of the Kurdish women’s
movement. The latter, however, has its very own historical and ideo-
logical references that need further attention, as I map out the trajector-
ies of the women, as well as their complex challenges within the
organisation. One of the movement’s own ideological claims is that of
sustainability and difference, emphasising that their movement is aware
of the shortcomings of previous national liberation wars, in which
women actively participated but were pushed back into the domestic
sphere following the conflict, when peace- and policy-making were left
up to men. When making this argument, my interviewees often referred
to the Russian Revolution or the Algerian War of Independence to
illustrate how women were unable to hold on to their wartime gains
post-conflict because their institutions were not organised independ-
ently from men. This resonates with the ideological canon in which
Öcalan points out that
the struggle for women’s freedom must be waged through the establishment of
their own political parties, attaining a popular women’s movement, building
their own non governmental organisations and structures of democratic polit
ics. All these must be handled together, simultaneously. The better women are
able to escape the grip of male domination and society, the better they will be
able to act and live according to their independence initiative. The more women
empower themselves, the more they regain their free personality and identity.
[. . .] I have full confidence in that women, irrespective of their different cultures
and ethnicities, all those who have been excluded from the system, will succeed.
The twenty first century shall be the century of women’s liberation. (Öcalan
2013a, 60)

Members of the women’s movement argue that because their struggle is

deeply rooted in a forty-year history and ideology of resistance in the
armed, political and personal spheres, and because women’s liberation
and the building of autonomous women-led structures are at the core of
the movement’s political identity and strategic efforts, their women’s
movement will endure. Moreover, the implementation of these new struc-
tures requires women’s self-defence and will allow them to work and live as
active members in their community and participate in political decision-
making processes and conflict resolution during and after armed conflict,
so the women of the movement argue. Öcalan links this claim of difference
to the Neolithic matriarchal society (approx. 10,200–8,800 BC), a time
when women of Upper Mesopotamia were strong and independent. He
evokes the symbol of Îştar the goddess, an important Mesopotamian deity
of female love, beauty, fertility, war and political power, saying that today’s

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 6 Introduction

female freedom fighters all need to become like Îştar – fearless, dedicated
and independent of men (Çağ layan 2012; Duzel 2018). The claim of
sustainability and need for self-defence, as well as the relationship
between official party discourse and practice raise further questions
about how historical references are used, how the party’s female identity
of the ‘free woman’ is constructed, how that identity is translated into
everyday practise, and how this challenges or reinforces existing hier-
archies of power. This ideology and practice of women’s liberation is
two-sided as the journey towards liberation goes hand in hand with the
renunciation of particular freedoms. For instance, women and men who
join the armed branch of the party pledge to abstain from romantic or
sexual relations. The trainee guerrillas learn to become desexualised
freedom fighters, an endeavour that requires a strict ideological educa-
tion but also much coercive power and discipline under the watchful eye
of the party.
According to existing post-colonial and transnational feminist literature
there is ample evidence that militarisation of societies not only leads to
greater gender-based violence, but also shows how women’s wartime gains
are often marginalised and that women are pushed back into the private
sphere in post-conflict settings and nation-building efforts. Subsequently,
patriarchal structures that predated independence struggles are often fur-
ther entrenched by militarism and war (Al-Ali 2007, 2009; Al-Ali & Pratt
2009, 2011; Bayard de Volo 2001; Bernal 2000; Cockburn 2004; Enloe
1988, 2014; Hale 2001; Kampwirth 2002; Mojab 2004; Viterna 2006;
White 2007). This study, following the women’s own claim of difference
and sustainability, revisits the linkages between gender, war and militarism
(Cohn 2013; Enloe 2000; Parashar 2009; Parashar & Shah 2016; Sylvester
2001, 2011; Sjoberg & Via 2010; Tickner 1992, 2011; Wibben 2010,
2016), asking in what ways the study of female revolutionaries who are
fighting for gender-based liberation and justice through an armed and
political struggle complicates existing Feminist International Relation
(IR) literature on gender and war? Secondly, what does a critical
analysis of this movement, which follows a male ideologue but has
women at the forefront of all of its military and political struggles,
contribute to transnational, post-colonial and geopolitical feminist
literature on nationalism and feminism and militarism and body
politics?
Aside from a case study on the Kurdish women’s movement and
gender and war, this research also contributes to broader debates about
sexuality and war, speaking to an emerging boy of theory that attempts to
decolonize the discourse of sexuality in the Middle East (Najmabadi

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 Introduction 7

2005; Sehlikoglu 2016; Zengin & Sehlikoglu 2016; Sayyegh 2017). This
means that I go beyond the usual tropes of militarized masculinities,
armed women as agents in patriarchal structures, or women as victims
of gender- and sex-based violence. Instead, I deconstruct and reassem-
ble gender, sexuality and conflict and embed it within the meanings and
signs that my interlocutors have shared with me, theorizing how the
desexualized militant body becomes a vehicle to cultivate comradery,
community, solidarity and resistance. This offers new insights into the
myriad ways in which my interlocutors live and embody war, revolution
and freedom.
In order to do that, the ethnographic insights trace women’s armed
and political presence in the Kurdish Freedom Movement, as well as
the different trajectories to and within the movement. I map out not
just women’s place in the political and military structures and social
and economic relations (Enloe 1990), but also the embodied dimen-
sions of their journey, asking where and who the women are but also
‘what keeps them here?’. How did women gain leading roles in the
activist, political and armed spheres of the Kurdish Freedom
Movement? What tools and mechanisms have the women developed
to manoeuvre their movement on the continuum of violence and
resistance and to make their hard-won gains last beyond the battle-
field or the immediate political challenges? To what extent has this
movement challenged prevailing gender norms and relations in the
territories it controls, and which forms of (patriarchal) control remain
uncontested?
Feminist analyses of IR aim to understand gender relations, meaning
the configuration of masculinities and femininities within a certain con-
text, and how they intersect with sovereignty, power, security and conflict
(True 2010). What specific femininities and masculinities are needed to
support the militarisation process of a society? What powers go into
maintaining these structures? How do women navigate their way through
conflict and war? (Enloe 1988, 1990). All the struggles that the Kurdish
Freedom Movement is leading at the political and armed fronts in differ-
ent parts of Kurdistan are to a large extent led by women. Spending a year
with these women and asking questions about their trajectories, I was
confronted with complex stories of how women got to play such central
roles within the PKK, but also noticed a particular femininity that women
obtained once they joined the party. Despite the fluid boundaries between
armed and political, illegal and legal, the mountains and the cities,
I started to see patterns: patterns of mobilisation, participation and,
most importantly, subject formation. In order to put this particular kind
of femininity into conversation with theories on gender and war and the

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 8 Introduction

everyday struggle of the women, I propose the concept of militant femin-

inities. Militant femininities consist of the term ‘militant’, which has
a specific meaning in the PKK: how one has to become and perform to
be a successful militant (militan) is a prescribed process. And it consists of
femininities, meaning that women operate within a set framework of
liberation, living and implementing a neatly constructed idea and ideal
of what it means to be a female revolutionary in the armed, political and
activist branches of this movement. While acknowledging the boundaries
of liberation as set out by the party, I will refrain from setting this study in
a false juxtaposition of freedom and oppression, of agency versus coercion
(Alison 2003; Parashar 2009; Schäfers 2020; Weiss 2010); clearly the
socio-political reality is much more complex than that. Instead
I discuss women’s activism and their configuration of liberation in
the movement’s particular framework of reference. Also, I raise cer-
tain tensions along the way that result from the contradictions
between theory and practice, which I can merely discuss but not
resolve: the promise of freedom in exchange for the strict control
over body and mind, the aspiration to a ‘truth’ held by the leader-
ship, and the essentialised and binary gender norms and relations
that are upheld by the movement.

Militant Femininities, Interrogating the Concept

of the ‘Free Woman’
Analysing the party ideology is key to understanding the subject forma-
tion or the process of ‘becoming’ a militant of people who join the PKK
and fight at the armed or political fronts. In the PKK party program and
charter, published in light of the fifth party congress in 1995, the party
member was described as follows:
A party member accepts the party program and is responsible for implementing
it, based on the will of the party and by gradually internalising this will,
participating in party life and tactical practice all day in a party organ. A party
member analyses himself/herself and changes himself/herself according to party
style, party speed and party language for the main party purpose. A party
member is a person who works with no self interest and with deep enthusiasm
and endless sacrifice and who dedicates his/her life to the party struggle. (PKK
1995, my translation)8
A person who joins the party and lives based on these rules is considered
a militant (militan). The gender-neutral concept of a militant is a signifier

8
The charter has been adapted since then; after 1999, the struggle for the liberation of
Öcalan, and after 2005, the struggle for gender equality and ecology were added.

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 Militant Femininities, Interrogating the Concept of the ‘Free Woman’ 9

for those who follow the party leader Abdullah Öcalan and his ideology
and, through the internalising of his teachings, become ‘PKK’cised’
(PKK’leşme). In party literature militants are further described with adjec-
tives such as honest, dedicated, steadfast, principled, abstinent, commu-
nal, sincere, self-critical, loyal, committed, and prepared to dedicate their
lives and deaths to the struggle, freedom, humanity, people and the
leadership. A successful militant is she or he who accepts this leadership;
follows its path and obtains îrade, the will to resist; and sacrifices them-
selves for the cause. A bad, or ‘fallen’ (düşkün), militant is he or she who
questions the leadership, doubts the liberation ideology and still shows
traits of individualism. All meaning is given by the leadership and all
struggles are carried out for the leadership (Öcalan) and thereafter for
the freedom of people and all of humanity (Öcalan n.d., Serxwebûn
2015).
Upon joining the movement, women all become revolutionaries (as do
the men), who are fighting for a specific vision of a free and gender-
egalitarian society, no matter if they work in a political party or at the
military front line. Everyone becomes a militant, but this means some-
thing very specific to different women, who bring their personal embodied
experience and ideas of what it means to be ‘a woman’ to the party. The
hegemonic femininity produced over the years by the militarised culture
in the party does not exist in a vacuum but in relationship with
a hegemonic masculinity (Connell 1987; Schippers 2007; Segal 2007,
2008) and is influenced and inspired by other revolutionary, leftist,
national liberation movements that emerged in the second half of the
twentieth century. Here, the universalised and genderless soldier body is
tasked to dedicate his or her life to an all-embracing ideology and through
repetitive performances sustain unity, loyalty, comradeship and sacrifice.
The ideal (male) revolutionary, Lorraine Bayard de Volo found in her
work on revolutionary war in Nicaragua and Cuba, expresses both deep
love for the people and his comrades and fierce hatred for the enemy, and
he is at the same time capable of immense tenderness, while committing
fearless actions of revolutionary violence (Bayard de Volo 2012, 422).
Each revolutionary movement rewrites gender norms and creates new
femininities and masculinities, ‘new men’ and ‘new women’ that are
reinforced by military hierarchies, revolutionary violence and a bespoke
liberation ideology. In the case of the PKK, women have to unlearn false
notions of femininity and become fearless goddesses of war and strength
(Îştar), following in the footsteps of the many female revolutionaries who
came before them and died a heroic death as martyrs, as I will discuss
further in the next chapter. Subordinate masculinities (effeminate, weak)
and femininities (vulnerable, seductive, dependent on men) are critiqued

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 10 Introduction

and marginalised in party education and practice. Crucially, different

from other conceptualisations of masculinity and femininity (Connell
1987, Connell & Messerschmidt 2005), in the PKK, the relationship
between men and women is not defined by desire for the ‘other’, but by
the absence of desire; the new gender norms and relations are based on
seeing the ‘other’ as a comrade on equal footing. While these desexualised
revolutionary gender norms seek to shape masculinities and femininities
to allow for comradely communal life, and subjects that can be mobilised
for the purpose of war (Dietrich Ortega 2012), they are also in place so
that hegemonic forms of masculinity can be challenged and thus make
room for women’s ascendance.
To grasp the performance of ideology through practice in the empirical
context discussed here and do justice to the myriad of stories and experi-
ences of women in the party, I introduce the concept of militant feminin-
ities. I conceptualise militant femininities as the dominant femininities
desired by the party leadership and ideology, a set of norms and practices
that allows women to challenge patriarchal, statist and capitalist norms in
all its guises. Feminist scholars, particularly within IR, critical military
studies and critical masculinities studies, have cautioned against simpli-
fied notions of hegemonic militarised masculinities (militarism, state-
craft) or hegemonic femininities (victims of male violence, agents in
patriarchal structures) (Connell 2005, Gentry & Sjoberg 2015, Parashar
2009), and have argued for the inclusion of disruptions, silences, the ‘in-
between’ moments (Chisholm & Tidy 2017; Henry 2017). Similarly, I do
not seek to simplify and create new labels of hegemony with my concept of
militant femininities, but to create a framework that illustrates how gen-
der, war, militarism and revolutions intersect (Enloe 1993, 2000) and
create specific subjectivities between the political, activist and armed
sphere of the Kurdish women’s movement. In order to do that, I ask
what are the characteristics and practices valued when educating new
militants? What character traits and habits do they have to unlearn
because they are considered disruptive or contaminating? What are the
shared characteristics and practices that both men and women learn?
How do women position themselves vis-à-vis men or other women’s
movements? How do conceptions of militant femininities shift between
the armed and the political struggle? And to what extent can these norms
be contested? Militant femininities according to my conceptualisation
here consist of the process of joining the party and becoming a subject
by means of education and discipline; the performativity and policing of
militant femininities through ideology (knowledge production), direct
military action (self-defence), and communal living (criticism and self-
criticism); organisational separation in semi-autonomous women’s

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 Militant Femininities, Interrogating the Concept of the ‘Free Woman’ 11

structures; and a history and everydayness of violence and resistance. As

such, the cornerstones of militant femininities and reoccurring themes in
the following chapters are perseverance, dedication, self-control (oto-
kontrol), the will to resist (îrade), ownership over the body, self-sacrifice,
desexualisation and communal love. My ethnographic analyses, which
are the basis of the following chapters, allow for a grassroots perspective
on how people learn, live, embody, implement and sometimes disregard
these principles.
This concept of militant femininities is situated at the intersections of
post-colonial, transnational and geopolitical feminist literature on gender
and war, violence and resistance, feminism, nationalism, as well as mili-
tarism, body politics and sexuality. I put this research in a tradition of
feminist ethnographers who try to move away from static tropes of ‘what
happens to women in war time’ and thus challenge both the notions of
women as ‘victims’ or ‘pawns in male a male game’, and the ‘exceptional-
ism’ of women as participants in armed resistance and perpetrators of
violence (Al-Ali 2007; Al-Ali & Pratt 2009, 2011; Alison 2003, 2009;
Bayard de Volo 2001, 2012, 2018; Cohn 2013; Enloe 1988, 2000, 2014,
2017; Giles & Hyndman 2004; Hale 2001; Jacobs, Jacobsen &
Marchbank 2000; Kampwirth 2002; Lanzona 2009; Kaufmann &
Williams 2010; Lorentzen & Turpin 1998; MacKenzie 2012; Moser
& Clark 2001; Riley, Mohanty & Pratt 2008; Sjoberg & Via 2010;
Sylvester 2011, 2013; Viterna 2013). This research also speaks to femin-
ist IR literature that pays attention to how ordinary people are involved in
wars and particularly women who engage in politically motivated violent
acts (O’Keefe 2013; Parashar 2009, 2014; Gentry & Sjoberg 2015). This
burgeoning literature, however, does not mean that the conundrum
between militarism, masculinity and women’s participation in liberation
wars has been resolved. Swati Parashar argues that ‘there is a tension that
exists for feminists: to understand and engage with “militarised mascu-
linity” while simultaneously accepting women’s multiple roles and par-
ticipation in militarised projects’ (Parashar 2014, 8). Furthermore,
women’s participation in revolutionary liberation movements continues
to puzzle feminist researchers who look at the inherent contradictions in
‘revolutionary war’: revolution promises to uproot the status quo, while
war relies on militarised structures, loyalty, compliance and hierarchical
commands, as opposed to democratic values such as free expression,
consensus, and transparency in decision-making processes. Moreover,
wars usually favour militarised masculinities, which enhance long-term
gender inequality, instead of challenging gender norms and relations, as
promised in many post-colonial national liberation movements (Bayard
de Volo 2012, Enloe 1988, 2000, 2007; Kampwirth 2002; White 2007).

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 12 Introduction

The Kurdish women’s movement argues to be different from previous

national liberation struggles that saw women pick up arms, not only
because it claims sustainability but also because women do not fight in
a men’s war. Instead, they have created their own epistemology, and
autonomous and semi-autonomous ranks in the armed and political
spheres, while building a new gender-equal system in those societies it
seeks to revolutionise. By focusing on particular empirical contexts,
I reflect on the everydayness of these claims and their practices.
Throughout, I examine to what extent the study of this women’s move-
ments ideology and practice allows us to rethink certain elements of
‘gender and war’ and where the movement operates along the same
lines previously sketched out by post-colonial, transnational and geopol-
itical feminist research. In order to do that, I frequently zoom into the
human body as an emotional and thinking entity that can touch and is
touched by war and violence (Butler 2004; Sylvester 2011, 1).
In the following section I will provide a historical and transnational
comparison of previous national liberation movements, in which women
played key roles. Then, I sketch out the building blocks of militant
femininities and situate this study methodologically and reflect on the
challenges of doing a feminist ethnography in a war zone.

To Some Women Non-Violence Is Not an Option

We argue that violent women are violent people, who, like all people,
violent or not, live in a gendered world. Women have always been, and
continue to be, among the people engaged in violence in the global
political arena. Whether they are organizing attacks, leading insurgent
groups, perpetrating martyrdom, engaging in sexual violence, commit
ting war crimes, hijacking airplanes, or abusing prisoners, women can be
found among the ranks of insurgent, rebel, terrorist and illicit economic
groups across the world.
(Gentry & Sjoberg 2015, 2)

Women are at the heart of conflicts and millions of women are partaking
in wars across the globe. Due to their specific positioning within a region
shaped by post-colonial border-drawing, ongoing wars, occupations,
sanctions and embargos, non-violence was and is not an option for
many of my interviewees. Taking this quote mentioned earlier as
a departure point, I contend that women have always been warring, and
armed women are nothing out of the ordinary. Yet the particular case of
the Kurdish women’s movement and its unique liberation ideology with
its distinct focus on gender equality does call for a transnational and
historical comparison. This is important, among other things, because

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 To Some Women Non Violence Is Not an Option 13

the movement sets itself apart from previous national liberation wars,
saying it has learned from the women who have struggled before them, for
instance in Algeria, El-Salvador and Palestine, but that they are going
further than anyone before them in their quest for liberation, by organis-
ing autonomously and establishing mechanisms of self-defence in the
political, activist and armed spheres.
The Kurdish Women’s Freedom Movement is not the first revolution-
ary movement in the Middle East to have women in its ranks. There is
a rich tradition of women’s involvement in political and armed struggles
in different parts of Kurdistan; both Kurdish parties in Iraqi Kurdistan,
the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP, Partiya Demokrat a Kurdistanê)
and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK, Yekîtiya Nîştimaniya
Kurdistan) have had women in their military forces (peşmerga) since the
1970s. Komala in Western Iran or Rojhelat has had women fighting in its
ranks since the late 1960s. However, in both cases women were mostly
kept in supportive roles such as underground activities, nursing and
logistics, rather than active combat or decision-making positions
(Begikhani et al. 2018, 11; Fischer-Tahir 2012). Furthermore, these
wars of national liberation were set in a strictly patriarchal system; that
is they were driven by male-led political, economic and social relations,
and especially since the 1980s, set in a region very much tied to the local
history of consecutive wars, genocides, sanctions, and since 2003 an
invasion and occupation (Al-Ali 2009, 53; Al-Ali & Pratt 2011; Mojab
2000, 2004). As seen in so many other post-liberation settings, ‘patri-
archy’ endured, and women’s equality was postponed in favour of the
greater goal of national unity and the liberation of Iraqi Kurdistan (Al-Ali
2009, 45; Fischer-Tahir 2009).
The emergence of the Palestinian women’s movement before the first
Intifada in 1987 offers a valuable comparative perspective into women’s
mobilisation, as women played an active role in the political and armed
resistance (Hasso 1998, 2005). An analysis of the ideologies and mobil-
isation strategies of the leftist-national Democratic Front of the
Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) and the Palestinian Federation of
Women’s Action Committees (PFWAC) in the ten years predating the
first Intifada shows that these organisations were successful because they
opened new spaces for women to participate politically on a grassroots
level. Women’s presence was encouraged by the (male) leaders’ assump-
tion that the international community would perceive an active women’s
participation as proof of ‘modernity’ and would support Palestinian self-
determination (Abu-Lughod 1998). Frances Hasso lists women’s roles as
‘actors, symbols, and authors – using, being used by, and constructing
nationalism on their own terms’ (Hasso 1998, 454). Similar to my study,

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 14 Introduction

this quote shows that women not only used emerging spaces for their own
ends but were also markers of ‘the other’, in this case a modern Palestine
(Hasso 1998, 2005, 92–97; Sharoni 2001). The Syrian-backed DFLP,
among others, trained the first fighters of the PKK from 1980 in different
DFLP camps in Lebanon, including in the Syrian-controlled Beqaa Valley.9
Here the PKK learned from the Palestinians about the need of having the
backing of organised civilians, such as ‘civil militias’, committees for youth
and women, and martyr ceremonies, in order to expand (logistical) support
and control among the population the PKK depends on (Marcus 2007, 58).
Other Marxist-Leninist movements such as the Communist Party of
India (Maoist) have a long history of women’s participation. Particularly
during the Naxalbari Uprising, a peasant revolt (1967–1972), women were
active as recruiters, supporters, activists and fighters. This still holds true
for the contemporary Maoist insurgency (Naxalites), which has an increas-
ing number of women combatants in its ranks (Shah 2018). The growing
popularity and legitimacy of the movement, but also a genuine hope for
a better life, paired with the economic marginalisation of the Indian coun-
tryside, which results in an exodus of men in search for labour elsewhere,
provide strong motivations for women to join the insurgency. Moreover,
the movement’s ideological focus on women’s emancipation and the active
participation of women in combat provides coping mechanisms and alter-
natives for predominantly marginalized rural women (Parashar & Shah
2016, 449). Similar to the Kurdish Women’s Freedom Movement, the
Maoist movement uses occasions such as the International Women’s Day
to commemorate its martyrs, using slogans such as ‘no revolution without
women’, in order to recruit more women for the cause and publicise the
Maoist agenda of gender equality. Yet Parashar and Shah found that
despite women’s inclusion in the CPI (Maoist) as women combatants
and a progressive approach towards ‘the women’s question’, the movement
operates along the norms of militarised masculinities; women remain
absent in the upper echelons of power and are subject to gender-based
violence within the movement’s ranks (Parashar & Shah 2016, 452).
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a militant movement
that fought for a separate Tamil homeland in Sri Lanka (1976–2009),
encouraged women to take up arms against their oppressors, namely the
Sri Lankan state and the Sinhalese people. The LTTE has actively
recruited women since the mid-1980s, also through its ideological
canon, which included women’s liberation as a necessary parallel struggle

9
The DFLP was one of the largest Palestinian groups within the umbrella of the PLO. This
collaboration was nothing out of the ordinary; the DFLP had at other times trained Greek
communists, Iranian leftists and Nicaraguan Sandinistas (Marcus 2007, 54 56).

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 To Some Women Non Violence Is Not an Option 15

towards political and economic freedom. Before its defeat in 2009,

25 per cent of LTTE’s force consisted of women, some of which engaged
in deadly suicide bombings and armed attacks. Similarly, to the Maoist
struggle in India, women were indispensable to the struggle; however,
their inclusion into the military ranks did not necessarily result in
‘empowerment’; forced conscription was widespread, patriarchal struc-
tures prevailed, and women remained absent from decision-making posi-
tions within the LTTE (Parashar 2009, 240–41). However, feminist
scholarship has shown that the binary of victimhood and agency is not
analytically fruitful when trying to understand women’s motivations to
join or to assess their roles within an armed struggle. Instead, they
describe an ‘ambivalent empowerment’ an ‘in-between’ (Rajasingham-
Senanayake 2001, quoted in Alison 2003, 52). Similarly, Parashar found
that ‘[t]he same woman who was forced to join, and had no choice when
she left, was often able to realise her potential during training, gain a sense
of identity and feel empowered due to her association with the LTTE’
(Parashar 2009, 244). This ‘ambivalent empowerment’ influenced my
own analytical framework put forward in the following chapters, which
shows how a unified struggle also opens spaces for women to organise,
politicise, theorise and fight.
Liberation struggles in Central America in the second half of the
twentieth century provide further insights into female mobilisation and
participation in armed conflicts. Karen Kampwirth (2002), Jocely
Viterna (2006, 2013) and Margret Gonzales-Peres (2006) have asked
‘how did women get here?’, unpacking the interplay between structural,
ideological, political and personal factors that lead women into guerrilla
movements in Nicaragua, El Salvador or Mexico. Viterna identifies three
different mobilisation paths – the politicised, reluctant and recruited
guerrillas – and argues that these arose from the patterned intersections
of individual biographies, networks such as families, and situational con-
texts like living under heavy state repression (Viterna 2006, 2013, 38).
Margaret Gonzales-Perez argues that the traction of guerrilla movements
depends mostly on its ideology: if an ideology is based on domestic
grievances and promises to challenge power structures, women are
more likely to take up arms and will achieve higher leadership roles
(Gonzales-Perez 2006).
While some of these studies suggest that women’s motivations to join
an armed movement are specific to their gender, others have argued that
women participate in armed groups for similar reasons as men: nationalist
desires, economic and political suffering and injustice, and a wish for
revenge (Flach 2007; Mazurana 2013, 148). Dara Kay Cohen shows that
women not only join armed groups for similar reasons as men, but also

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 16 Introduction

have similar experiences during the conflict and commit the same violent
acts as men. She refutes the notion of the peace-loving woman and the
fighting man, showing that women are just as capable of committing
spectacular acts of violence during times of conflict as her case study of
rape during the civil war in Sierra or during the Rwanda genocide illus-
trates. She highlights the tensions this causes, as female perpetrators are
often pushed back into the private sphere post-conflict and are not held
accountable for their wartime crimes (Cohen 2013, 388; Steflja & Darden
2020).
I have observed that women join the PKK or its sister parties across the
region for a multitude of reasons, some similar to men and some for
reasons unique to women. Similar reasons include nationalist fervour,
an adherence to Öcalan’s liberation ideology, the need to defend and
protect their land and family, and wanting to avenge (state) violence
inflicted on their community. Women-specific reasons are fear and
anger about sexual or state violence and repression against women, the
struggle for the emancipation of women via equal opportunities and
rights, access to education, or escaping the sphere of paternal or male
control over their life choices (Alison 2003, 2009; Enloe 1988; Flach
2007; Mazurana 2013). Pinar Tank argues that women’s reasons to join
the PKK or its regional branches can be divided into roughly five categor-
ies: social (urban migration, poverty), personal (forced marriage), ideal-
istic (national liberation, women’s emancipation), key event (experience
of state violence, racism) and revenge (Tank 2017, 418). Clearly, the
reality of Kurdish women and their reasons to join an armed struggle are
more complex than these five categories indicate. My findings, as dis-
cussed in the following chapters, suggest that it is rarely just one of these
factors that push a woman to join the party, but rather a culmination
thereof. I argue that while an intersectional analysis of mobilisation
patterns is important, it is more analytically fruitful to pay attention to
what happens to women once they join; what they do in the party struc-
tures in the everyday; and what keeps them engaged in the many armed,
socio-political and intellectual struggles the party is fighting.
‘Militant’ has also been the marker of many feminist movements, in the
European context most notably so the Militant Suffragettes (Collette
2013; Pankhurst 2015). However, the women of the Kurdish Freedom
Movement set themselves apart from European and US traditions of
feminism. Most of my interlocutors would acknowledge the important
work their feminist foresisters in the United States, Europe and the
Middle East did, before explaining why their approach is different from
previous feminist struggles for women’s liberation. During my interview
with Commander Leyla Agirî, at that time the head of the Eastern

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 Gender, Violence and Militarism 17

Kurdistan Free Women’s Society (KJAR, Komalgeya Jinên Azad ên

Rojhilatê Kurdistanê), she told me: ‘We have had many discussions with
feminists who have visited us in the mountains. We are probably closest to
Ecofeminism’, referring to the struggle of Ecofeminists to simultaneously
end the exploitation of women and the domination of nature (Daly 1978;
Tong 1998). What makes this women’s liberation ideology more radical
than most feminisms is that they are en route to challenging the whole
system of Capitalist Modernity, by dedicating their lives to the struggle for
Democratic Modernity, a system of bottom-up self-government built on
gender equality and ecology. Contrary to other utopic feminist theories
(Bahng 2018; Hester 2018), this utopic society demands of its militants
complete dedication and total self-sacrifice, as activists, politicians and
fighters, in order to dismantle the patriarchal and oppressive division of
labour and build an egalitarian political system in unison with the
environment.

Gender, Violence and Militarism

But Black women and our children know the fabric of our lives is
stitched with violence and with hatred, that there is no rest. We do not
deal with it only on the picket lines, or in dark midnight alleys, or in the
places where we dare to verbalize our resistance. For us, increasingly,
violence weaves through the daily tissues of our living in the supermar
ket, in the classroom, in the elevator, in the clinic and the schoolyard,
from the plumber, the baker, the saleswoman, the bus driver, the bank
teller, the waitress who does not serve us.
(Lorde 2007, 119)

What Audre Lorde describes so poignantly here is the interconnectedness

of race with other power structures such as gender and class, showing
that, due to her being seen as black, violence is not contained in certain
spaces or limited to times when she foregrounds her gender in her struggle
for emancipation. Black feminist thought has shown that violence takes
structural, political, symbolic and everyday forms (Collins 1996, 2000;
hooks 1984), which for Kurdish women means everything from economic
marginalisation, and institutional racism, to domestic violence and the
urban wars that broke out between PKK-affiliated youth and the Turkish
army in mid-2015 in cities across the Kurdish southeast of Turkey.10 In
10
I am aware of the problems and limitations that arise from comparing two very different
political geographies, not least because it distracts from the consistent violence black
women still live with and die of in the political, legal and economics system in the United
States (Nash 2014, 2019). However, the challenges Kurdish women face are partly
a result of the same transnational capitalist patriarchal system and the conceptualisation
thereof is analytically useful in other contexts as well.

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 18 Introduction

a context of war and conflict, infrastructures of power and violence on the

micro and macro levels become most visible when analysed through
a gendered lens: both the journey to and the performance of power or
violence are intimately shaped by the body politics in which subjects find
themselves. In the context under investigation, the encounter of subjects
with power and violence informs their subsequent systematic transform-
ation into militants, as violence in the context here shapes militants who
leave their civilian life, or ‘system life’11 as many of my interviewees called
it, behind and in turn perpetuate violence on their own quest to liberation.
The late Cynthia Cockburn conceptualised this omnipresence of violence
with the ‘continuum of violence’ (2004), demonstrating that the con-
tinuum spans from economic distress, to militarisation and arming, ideo-
logical shifts, to mobilisation, and ‘post-conflict’ processes of peace and
trauma, always paying attention to the gendered dimensions of body
politics on everyday lives. She argues:
First, gender links violence at different points on a scale reaching from the
personal to the international, from the home and the back street to the maneuvers
of the tank column and the sortie of the stealth bomber: battering and marital
rape, confinement, ‘dowry’ burning, honour killings, and genital mutilation in
peacetime; military rape, sequestration, prostitution, and sexualised torture in
war. (Cockburn 2004, 43)
Thus, according to Cockburn, it is the omnipresent continuum that con-
nects different locations and forms of violence, and it makes little sense to
make distinctions between pre- and post-war, or war and peace.
Furthermore, this continuum runs through the political, personal, eco-
nomic and social relations, aggravated by global processes of economic
marginalisation, political disempowerment and social inequality (ibid.).
This concept helps to think of violence as entrenching every aspect of the
social, economic and political life of individuals as the driving force leading
marginalised and oppressed women and men to the PKK. Cockburn’s
work allows to consider the domestic and intimate relations as we try to
understand the workings of violence as opposed to power. The Kurdish
Freedom Movement is not governing over territory recognised as a state;
however, violence, or ‘self-defence’ as the movement calls it, is one of its
major tools in the pursuit for governmental power. It informs the party
ideology, its organisational structures, and the everyday practices of politi-
cising and organising. As such, self-defence is used as a ‘strategic’ tool to
reach the ‘future utopia’, free of violence.

11
System life (Kurd. jiyana pergalê) refers to the capitalist life guerrillas have left behind, the
civilian life they wish to revolutionise.

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 Gender, Violence and Militarism 19

Broader than violence and war, militarism is being made up of a system

of cultures, practices, institutions and values that extends into social and
political life. War, conflict and consequent militarisation become part of
the normal (Sjoberg & Via 2010, 7), and people live their life in anticipa-
tion of violence (Bayat 2013; Hermez 2017). Importantly, the rhetoric of
national security, often accompanied by censorship laws, and limitations
of freedom of expression go hand in hand with the privileging of a certain
kind of militarised masculinities (Al-Ali & Taş 2017, 357; Enloe 1988,
2014). Militarism is reflected in the identity of people and their everyday
interactions such as loyalties, jargon, cultural production and mourning
practices. Women and gender relations are at the heart of militarisation
processes, not only to demarcate boundaries of ‘us’ versus ‘them’, but
also because women are needed to maintain any militarised system.
Women’s bodies also become battlefields for nationalist policies and are
directly affected by changing educational policies, marital law or repro-
ductive rights (Al-Ali 2007, 168). As such, Kurdish women’s bodies
constitute a site of struggle for competing discourses of belonging and
ideas around womanhood, freedom and agency.
In the case discussed here, militarisation does not only affect civilians or
create militarised masculinities but also creates a specific kind of militar-
ised femininity. Both men and women, mothers and students are
expected to struggle against the enemy and repeatedly enact their mili-
tancy and loyalty, more so in times of heightened conflict. In the Kurdish
Freedom Movement, women are equal in fighting and dying for the
cause, in inflicting violence and being violated, as long as they do not
deviate from the guiding revolutionary principle.
Cockburn clearly posits herself against female empowerment in mili-
tarized male structures. She argues that women do not achieve equality
through participation in war and that neither the hierarchies of armed
forces nor the culture of militaries becomes more feminine because of
women’s presence, concluding that ‘[i]f they did, they would no longer
fulfil their current functions’ (Cockburn 2004, 34–35). Women have
both accommodated national movements and have been used by militar-
ised states or national liberation movements; however, many feminist
scholars have demonstrated that militarised societies are necessarily
undemocratic (ibid., 31) and sketched out the ways in which wars
reinforce gender inequality (Bayard de Volo 2012, 414; White 2007).
Yet the context in which this study is situated is one shaped by decades of
war and displacement, where the armed movement is perceived as the
‘liberator’ and the only force that stands between the communities and
barbarism (e.g. in the form of daesh). This allows me to rethink the binary
between the civil and the military, as the boundaries between the two

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 20 Introduction

spheres are fluid at best, as the examples of the women’s personal trajec-
tories, life in Maxmûr, the martyr funerals and the norms around the
militant femininities demonstrate (Pugliese 2016). To do so, I pay atten-
tion to the ‘becoming’ of the women and their ideology: how they used the
liberation ideology to change the party from within and how they deal
with the militarisation of their everyday lives? This includes the rituals of
mourning the dead, as a location where a sense of belonging, sacrifice but
also a vision and hope for a future nation to be liberated are negotiated
(Khalili 2007).
Caron E. Gentry and Laura Sjoberg acknowledge that feminist IR has
asked where the women are, but that women are still largely absent in
theories of people’s violence or included with reference to masculine
standards of people’s conduct. The authors advocate for a ‘relational
autonomy’ framework, instead of a separation of men’s and women’s
violence – the recognition that freedom of action is defined and limited
by social relationships such as gender, race and class, as well as religious
and political contexts. In relational autonomy, identities of the self and
other are mutually dependent, and choices are often gendered and never
entirely free or constrained. ‘Gendered lenses’ recognition of human
interdependence and relational autonomy shows that all decisions are
contextual and contingent, not only women’s and all decisions are made,
not only men’s’ (Gentry & Sjoberg 2015, 46). Warring women are still
seen as exceptional because they threaten a system that is based on stable
masculinities and femininities, where men go to war and women mourn at
home and make peace. I argue that paying attention to context and
relationality, but most importantly women’s own narratives, allows for
a more nuanced feminist IR theory on women and war, that does not ask
why women commit political violence, but how on a daily basis they
operate within spaces of violence and resistance, paying attention to
how revolution and freedom are embodied, lived and fought for.

Space, Body Politics and Sexuality

The body and the experiences of embodiment in war have been put
forward by feminists across disciplines. Judith Butler argues that the
‘body implies mortality, vulnerability and agency: the skin and the flesh
expose us to the gaze of others, but also to touch and to violence, and
bodies put us at risk of becoming the agency and instrument of all these as
well’ (Butler 2004, 26). Due to the centrality of the body as a subject of
wars, conflicts and militarisation, the body becomes a carrier of what
Jennifer Hyndman has described as ‘embodied epistemologies’ of vio-
lence and invites us to ‘undo’ through ethnography ‘embedded identities

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 Space, Body Politics and Sexuality 21

and strategic ways of seeing conflict and its consequences’ (Hyndman

2004, 314). A ‘strategic’ reading is a reading aware of essentialist notions
but refers to them in order to take apart the authoritative voice from
within, as the extensive work of post-colonial feminist scholar Gayatri
C. Spivak shows (1988, 1990, 2009). As I approach the body and its
environments through ethnographic research, I dissect the scale of vio-
lence and agency that builds and sustains militant femininities among
generations of female revolutionaries.
My work also draws on a growing body of literature on body, space and
politics, which since the so-called Arab Uprisings and the coup attempt in
Turkey in summer 2016 has examined the important links between
protest, public space and gendered politics (Gökarıksel 2017, Hasso &
Salime 2016, El Said, Maeri & Pratt 2015). This body of literature
acknowledges the fact that ‘[p]olitical power is never gender-neutral but
works through gendered and sexual production of bodies that belong and
that do not, that need protection and that are threats, and through the
gendered and sexual construction of borders and territory’ (Gökarıksel
2017). Banu Gökarıksel emphasises that a feminist critique can provide
new insights ‘into the production of an environment of increasing con-
solidation of masculinist power, rhetoric of national unity, violence, and
militarism’ (ibid.). To this I must add that the women’s movement under
analysis here has been engaging in a critique of the masculine and militar-
ised nation state since the early 1990s and in that process has developed
its own form of organising and knowledge production, such as Jineolojî12,
the movement’s ‘women’s science’, which I will return to in the next
chapter. This process was invisible or inaudible to many (not just
Turkish feminists), due to state repression, racism and the fraught rela-
tions between the Turkish and Kurdish feminist movements (Çaha 2011;
Gökalp 2010; Ömer 2011; Sahin-Mencutek 2016; Yüksel 2006).
However, this way of linking body, politics and space helps me to connect
questions of power, gender and sexuality, because revolutions or upris-
ings are deeply bodily and affective affairs. They are moments of rupture;
gender and sexual orders are publicly disputed, while a range of forces
actively work on reasserting orderly gender norms and relations (Hasso &
Salime 2016; El Said et al. 2015). The body becomes a political medium:
especially, but not only, women’s bodies in the ‘Arab Uprisings’ have
been ‘sites of dissent and revolution’, even as they ‘are disciplined and
regulated through discourses of patriarchy, Islamism and secular modern
masculinity’ (Hasso & Salime 2016, 12).

12
The term Jineolojî has its roots in the Kurdish word jin (woman), which is connected to jîn
(life) and logos, Greek for ‘reason’ or ‘word’ (Jineolojî Committee Europe 2018).

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 22 Introduction

An important part of militant femininities and the liberation ideology as

a whole is the aspect of desexualisation and abstinence. Upon entering the
party, each member learns to refrain from sexual or romantic relations,
based on the argument that all energy and focus must be directed towards
the struggle. Before unpacking this seeming conundrum between the
fight for freedom and this ‘abstinence contract’, it is important to stress
that most members join this party voluntarily13 and that there is
a difference between the rules for cadres – those trained in the mountains
and then sent to fight or organise in all four parts of Kurdistan or the
European diaspora – and the politicians in the pro-Kurdish parties. Many
politicians and activists in both Bakur and Rojava have husbands, wives
and children. However, paying attention to the ‘abstinence contract’ raises
crucial questions about the ways bodies are controlled and disciplined in
the party and how this control is justified towards the party subjects. In
party ideology, sexuality is not for militants, because it would keep women
in a ‘slave position’, when instead they need to be fighting for a new society
that brings freedom, equality and a communal life. Furthermore, being
driven by sexual desires would hinder the focus of revolutionary duties
(Öcalan 2010, 478–80). Critically analysing the notions of sexuality (or its
absence) engenders questions about what forms of control remain or are
reinvented when people join the party. Foucault argues that ‘[sexuality]
appears rather as an especially dense transfer point for relations of power
[. . .]. Sexuality is not the most intractable element in power relations, but
rather one of those endowed with the greatest instrumentality: useful for
the greatest number of manoeuvres and capable of serving as a point in
support, as a linchpin, for the most varied strategies’ (Foucault 1990, 103).
By controlling sexuality, the party holds tremendous power over its mem-
bers, as it controls the ‘means’, here the human body as the source of
reproduction (Butler 1999; Connell 1987; Foucault 1990; Snitow et al.
1983), which is especially important in times of revolutionary change or
political upheaval (Hasso et al. 2016; El Said et al. 2015).
Sex-positive feminists, since the 1960s and 1970s (de Beauvoir 1997;
Friedan 1965; Irigaray 2011), have tried to reclaim women’s sexuality by
situating the body as a crucial site of political struggle, centring sexuality
as a source of power, freedom and pleasure (Fahs 2010, 446). I argue here
that sexuality is such a dense transfer point not merely because of

13
‘Voluntarily’ here needs to be problematized, as many women join because they do not
see any alternative due to poverty, confinement to the domestic sphere (Darici 2011,
468), experiences of gender based violence, existential threats, such as the onslaught of
daesh or the continuous repression of the Turkish/Iranian/Iraqi/Syrian state. Hence, in
some cases the party becomes the only viable alternative that promises a life free from
sexism, racism and capitalist exploitation.

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 Space, Body Politics and Sexuality 23

reproduction or because of the body as a site of competing political

narratives, but also because of the subversive power and knowledge of
sexuality. According to Audre Lorde, sexuality and the erotic bear the
capacity for joy and potential for self-connection; it is a provocative force
which enables the most intimate form of communication (Lorde 1993).
Controlling or banning sexuality can then perhaps also be read as an
ideological and tactical tool to withhold from people that intimate
space. I am conscious of the fact that this argument does not consider
all the socio-political and economic conditions that hinder people from
experiencing romantic or sexual relations as equals, not just in the Middle
East but across political geographies, yet the core of this argument
remains relevant for my analysis: sexuality can be an anarchic place of
subversion and freedom, and people who experience it are maybe less
suitable for political functionalisation. Nevertheless, I will be asking how
controlling one’s sexual desire, according to PKK ideology, not only
gives the party power over its members, but to what extent this process
of desexualisation also gives power to women over their own bodies
and their relations to men? One crucial aspect is that many of the
recruits are from rural and conservative Muslim areas in the
(Kurdish) Middle East, where ideas around shame and honour, albeit
challenged by Öcalan and the PKK, prevail. Within the movement, the
navigation of conservative gender and sex norms for the sake of equal-
ity and freedom is not an easy feat, and one that demands complete
dedication from its militants.
To come to terms with this unique configuration of powers that play
out on the body of both male and female revolutionaries, I propose that it
helps to consider the processes that unfold within the party, such as
refraining from sexual relations, as ‘party bargains’. A party bargain
describes the ongoing negotiation between the superstructure that is the
KCK/KJK and its individual members, who join and learn to adhere to its
rules. These rules set out a clear framework of dos and don’ts, and here
I argue that sexuality is a key location of renegotiation. This concept of
party bargain is inspired by Deniz Kandiyoti’s patriarchal bargain
(Kandiyoti 1988). An important aspect of Kandiyoti’s concept is that
women play an active role in manoeuvring their specific roles, within and
beyond the household, and are not merely victims in a patriarchal system
but are actively involved in perpetuating it. When Kandiyoti rethought
‘bargaining with patriarchy’ ten years later, she critiqued that her earlier
institutional analysis was based on simplified assumptions of how certain
rules define how gendered subjectivities are formed and develop strat-
egies of collusion and resistance (Kandiyoti 1998). When it comes to the
party bargain that I propose here, it is essentially an ‘abstinence contract’

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 24 Introduction

that allows women to participate in a much bigger struggle for a future

vision of society. The terms of negation or the framework of this bargain
has distinct parameters. In that sense, Kandiyoti’s earlier framework
resonates with the context analysed here. Women henceforward do not
bargain within the networks of patriarchal connectivity (Joseph 1993) but
with a military patriarchy which has gender equality at its core. And by
entering this bargain, the negotiation is not over; obtaining and maintain-
ing militant femininities require constant vigilance on the path of women
not only liberating themselves but the whole non-state nation as foreseen
by Democratic Confederalism.

Democratic Confederalism: Beyond Nationalism

and Feminism?
Much has been written about the multitudinous relations between fem-
inism and nationalism and how the two ‘isms’ enable or hinder each
other. Nira Yuval-Davis was one of the first feminist scholars to draw
attention to the fact that nations are always gendered, in their repertoire,
in their performativity and in the assigned gender norms. Men are typic-
ally depicted as the builders of the nation, while women represent the soil,
the earth and home of the nation. Because women bear the new members
of the nation, women’s bodies serve as markers of national boundaries
(Yuval-Davis & Anthias 1989; Yuval-Davis 1997). For Enloe, ‘national-
ism typically has sprung from masculinized memory, masculinized
humiliation and masculinized hope’ (Enloe 2014, 93). Studies that ana-
lyse ethnic/national identities with a gender perspective call attention to
the fact that men speak and act on behalf of the community and that
women have symbolic roles, their voices often remaining silent in the
nation-building project. The discussion initiated by Yuval-Davis engaged
many scholars who asked if nationalism categorically stands in the way of
feminism (Abu-Lughod 1993; Cockburn 1998, 2007; Dirik 2018;
Kandiyoti 1991; Jayawardena 1986; McClintock 1991 inter alia). Nadje
Al-Ali and Nicola Pratt made an important contribution to this debate by
showing that nationalism and feminism are not mutually exclusive per se,
but that nationalist movements have often opened spaces for women (Al-
Ali & Pratt 2011). To understand the make-up and potential of these
spaces, it is crucial to ask what kind of feminism and what kind of
nationalism are being practised and analysed and to examine the tempor-
ality of them: at what point does a nationalist struggle open spaces for
women? What kind of spaces open for women? For which women? How
do they use these spaces? At what point do these spaces become narrower
again?

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 Democratic Confederalism: Beyond Nationalism and Feminism? 25

In her work on women’s involvement in the Northern Ireland conflict

(1968–1998), Theresa O’Keefe further challenges the notion that nation-
alist movements are, in themselves, unconstructive for women. Instead,
she argues that feminist identities developed within nationalist move-
ments have the capacity to transform those movements and affect change
during and post-conflict: ‘Nationalist movements are strong catalysts for
feminist engagement and feminist activism. Politicised women struggling
against interlocking, structural oppression are well-positioned to engage
in feminist resistance that is directed both within the movement and
external to it’ (O’Keefe 2013, 14). This is not to say that women are not
discriminated against or oppressed in national liberation movements and
used as markers of ‘us versus them’ or their reproductive capacities.
However, it would be wrong to suggest that women participate in these
movements on male terms only. ‘To construct women primarily as vic-
tims or men’s pawns not only denies their agency but also masks the ways
in which women are oppressed through their ethno-national identity.
This is one of the crucial factors why women chose to engage in armed
combat: ethnicity and oppression’ (ibid., 7–8). O’Keefe notes that treat-
ing women as pawns in male games is unconducive because it glosses over
specific motivations, roles and experiences of female combatants (ibid.,
4–5). My findings of the women’s struggle within the PKK resonate with
that of O’Keefe’s, who argues that feminist nationalism in Northern
Ireland developed precisely because of the attempts to marginalise and
silence women. It partly gained strength because of nationalism’s patri-
archal tendencies, and the attempts to suppress women encouraged them
further (ibid., 186). My work is situated in this contradictory and com-
plex field of women being active in a liberation movement, that was not
initially based on gender-based equality and justice but became
a powerful vehicle for women’s emancipation as a result of the everyday
struggle of women themselves, who changed the movement from within
(Al-Ali & Taş 2018c, 20).
Different from previous national liberation struggles, the specific nation-
alism analysed here is a nationalism that is tied to statelessness and occu-
pation, among dominant Arab, Turkish and Persian nationalisms. Kurds
are nationalists without a state and Democratic Confederalism is a non-
state liberation project, centring around women’s liberation, self-defence,
ecology and communal economy in order to realise the liberation of the
nation. This is a discursive tool used over and over again by the movement
itself but proven true, insofar as it is the women who are at the front and
who do the political, social and military work and as such rearrange the
division of labour. Different from previous nationalisms in the region,
women no longer represent the home, or the honour that needs protection

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 26 Introduction

from man, and neither are they expected to stay at home to reproduce the
nation (Yuval-Davis & Anthias 1989). Women are expected to get out of
the house and actively participate in defending the honour of the home-
land, either through a political or armed struggle. Their love is directed
towards the struggle and the land; other physical or personal desires are
curbed. Furthermore, women’s voices are heard; they are not merely
spoken about in the nationalist discourse (Chatterjee & Jeganathan 2000).
Moreover, women are not only using spaces provided by a patriarchal
order, but they are to a certain extent further rewriting and reorganising
that order into separate women’s structures. Jineolojî, for example, is an
important location where this dialectic relationship between Öcalan,
women and an evolving body of knowledge production can be observed,
as I will discuss further subsequently.
As always, the messiness of social reality exceeds the explanatory power
of our conceptual frameworks (Kandiyoti 1998, 150). Knowing these
limitations, I argue that militant femininities, as introduced here, can
serve as a conceptual lens to discuss the complexity that emerges from
simultaneous processes of subjectivation, performance, docility and
agency in war and armed conflict. It can be used to critically analyse the
PKK’s party ideology, women’s roles in the different spheres of activism,
as well as the creation of a distinct body politics. The following section
will highlight how I situate this study methodologically and how I dealt
with the messiness of social realities during fieldwork.

Methodology: Mapping Out Different Matrixes

of Domination
There is a consistent duality reinforcing the persistence of contradictions
when making sense of ‘who the women are’. In the Kurdish Freedom
Movement, women are not just bodies to be formed and deployed, but
the formation of the militant is meant to give rise to a woman comrade
who will serve the greater good of the Kurdish nation and give women
a social place and labour in the struggle. This duality allows to conceptu-
ally discuss the potentiality of obedience and agency intrinsic to militant
femininities. The disciplining and formation of obedient bodies have
been extensively read through Michel Foucault’s chapter on ‘Docile
Bodies’ in his study of Prussian soldiers in the late seventeenth century
(Foucault 1991). In the late 1980s and increasingly in the 1990s, post-
modern and post-structuralist feminists have criticised Foucault’s under-
standing of the formation of universalized male soldier bodies by locating
bodies across political geographies. Spivak in her criticism of Foucault
and other post-structuralist and post-modern thinkers emphasizes that

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 Methodology: Mapping Out Different Matrixes of Domination 27

‘these philosophers’ fail due to their positionality to see the implications of

body politics, difference and place on one’s access to fair labour in the
international division of labour (Spivak 1988, 274). To consider, meth-
odologically, the power of bodies and the power of governance through
the use of violence, this ethnography is situated within transnational
feminism, which recognises that intersecting power structures operate at
different levels and impact the relationships between genders, ethnicities
and classes (Al-Ali & Pratt 2009; Alexander & Mohanty 2010; Collins
2000; Grewal and Kaplan 1994; Mohanty 1988, 2013; Mohanty et al.
1991). These power structures not only define the essentialised discourse
about the Kurdish women’s movement, which often leaves out the eco-
nomic, cultural, social and political complexity of this particular context,
but also shapes the women’s own everyday realities (Al-Ali & Pratt 2016,
90). Transnational feminists, rather than limiting the analytical field to
the boundaries of the nation state, trace the circulation of gendered power
across different scales, thereby going beyond binary analytics such as war/
peace, power/resistance, victim/perpetrator, national/international and
male/female. Bringing together questions of representation and political
economy, a transnational feminist lens pays attention to the intersection-
ality and transnational circulation of power relations against the backdrop
of imperial geopolitics (Grewal & Kaplan 1994). Transnational feminism
is rooted in the intellectual and political legacies of Black feminisms, in
particular in regard to the ‘intersectionality’ of power relations (Crenshaw
1991) or the ‘matrix of domination’ (Collins 2000). Since the 1960s,
black feminist thought has articulated and reconceptualised the relation-
ship between domination and activism, or violence and resistance, using
a critical intersectional framework. Intersectionality as an analytic tool is
neither a new phenomenon, nor is it confined to struggles of North
America and Europe. Globally, movements have used intersectionality
analyses, some before 1991 when Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term for
the academy. Without naming it as intersectionality, the women of the
Kurdish Freedom Movement know that axis of social division such as
gender, class and ethnicity operate not as exclusive entities but work
together (Collins & Bilge 2016, 3–4; Alinia 2015). The Kurdish women’s
movement calls it the ‘triple oppression’ of patriarchy, capitalism and
nation states. Taking the movement’s own intersectional framing as
a departure point and linking it to existing transnational feminist litera-
ture and black feminist thought, I build on what Patricia Hill Collins calls
the ‘matrix of domination’, which she defines as the overall organization
of hierarchical power relations for any society. Any specific matrix of
domination has (1) a particular arrangement of intersecting systems of
oppression, for example, race, social class, gender, sexuality, citizenship

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 28 Introduction

status, ethnicity and age; and (2) a particular organization of its domains
of power, for example, structural, disciplinary, hegemonic and interper-
sonal (Collins 2000, 299). Only by analysing how different matrices of
domination overlap, mutually constitute each other and intersect with
imperialism, authoritarianism and neoliberalism, and how all of them
intersect with gender, can one start to make sense of the messy and
contested grounds the women of the movement operate in, both on the
local and national levels (Al-Ali & Pratt 2016, 92).
Intersectionality as an analytical lens has been criticised for treating
black women’s bodies as anachronisms (Nash 2014, 61) and for either
having become too preoccupied with particularity, or being hinged on
fictive fixity, treating gender, class and race as separable rather than
intimately linked (Puar 2007). This allegedly fosters identity politics,
which is seen as detrimental to struggles. However, and here I concur
with Collins and Bilge, for marginalised groups, or movements operating
in a context of ongoing war and conflict, a collective identity is not only
a necessity but also an important part of their emancipatory power. For
example, a collective identity shaped by shared social locations that is
formulated as a project of political empowerment and achieved through
consciousness-raising is key in the fight against the manifold oppressions
faced by Kurdish women (Collins & Bilge 2016, 129). When analysing
strategically essentialised identities (ibid.), intersectionality also helps to
show that identities are always constructed, never static, and that despite
a clearly fleshed-out framework, such as militant femininities that
I propose here, the social location and the temporality of inquiry decide
which aspect of the powers that shape an identity are being foregrounded.
Sometimes that might be gender, sometimes ethnicity, depending on the
political situation or the networks of solidarity needing to be forged.
Having said this, the ideas around womanhood and manhood fostered
by the party do have essentialist elements that go beyond movements
organising around social justice projects in other parts of the world
(Spivak 1996). There is a clear idea of who the ‘free’ women and men
are, what a good revolutionary is, and the rules of what the individual has
to contribute to the collective struggle are fixed. This creates tensions
between the promise of liberation and its strict and policed processes,
a complexity that I try to capture through militant femininities.
A critical analysis of overlapping matrices of domination and their inter-
secting power relations also means paying attention to the knowledge that is
being produced by the Kurdish women’s movement. For example, what is
the epistemological significance of Jineolojî, the women’s science? Proposed
by Öcalan in 2008, and since developed in women’s centres across different
parts of Kurdistan and Europe, Jineolojî and its advocates have put into

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 Methods and Fieldwork in a Divided Kurdistan 29

writing their collective experiences and knowledge, which emerged out of

four decades of political and armed struggle, finding a new vocabulary for
understanding the intersecting oppressions they are fighting, while also
connecting their knowledges to other feminist movements across the globe
(Al-Ali & Käser 2020; Herausgeberinnenkollektiv 2012, 103–108).

Methods and Fieldwork in a Divided Kurdistan

Initially, in 2014, when I started this project, I had planned to undertake
fieldwork primarily in Rojava, at that stage made up of three Kurdish
cantons (Qamişlo, Kobanî, Afrîn) under the control of the PKK/PYD
and its armed wings the YPG and YPJ. Due to the attacks of daesh on
Kobanî, Şengal, and the wider region in 2014, and the intensification of
the Syrian civil war as a whole, I decided to shift my focus to other
geographies where the Kurdish women’s movement has been active for
many decades, namely Bakur (mainly Diyarbakir), Maxmûr Camp14 in
Iraqi Kurdistan and the guerrilla camps in the mountains on the Iraqi/
Iranian border. What linked these different fieldwork sites was not only
the challenges of doing fieldwork in a divided Kurdistan and my own
intellectual journey, but more importantly the ways in which the move-
ment operates transnationally across borders, how knowledge travels, and
how the liberation ideology is performed and lived in each of these places.
Due to four decades of war between the PKK and the Turkish state,
Eastern Turkey, and Diyarbakir, where I spent the first five months of my
fieldwork, is highly politicised and polarised. I arrived at the tail end of the
peace process between the Turkish state and the PKK (2013–2015), or
what activists in Diyarbakir referred to as the ‘golden years’. During that
short time of relative peace, the pro-Kurdish political movement, which
was in charge of most of the municipalities in Turkey’s southeast, managed
to get off the ground many political, culture and language initiatives,
according to the structures set out by Democratic Confederalism.
However, not everyone was organised behind ‘party lines’. In Bakur
many political parties were fighting for power: from the pro-Kurdish
parties, such as the Democratic Regions Party (DBP, Demokratik Bölgeler
Partisi), or the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP, Halkların Demokratik
Partisi), to Tayyib Erdoğ an’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), Adalet
ve Kalkınma Partisi), the Gülen Movement (pre-2016)15, to different

14
The Kurmancî Kurdish letter X is pronounced at the back of the throat like the Scottish
CH (as in loch).
15
Turkey’s government accuses the Gülen Movement of being the mastermind behind the
attempted coup on 15 July 2016. As a result, the whole movement has been wiped out; its
members have either been arrested or had to flee abroad; its institutions, such as schools,

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 30 Introduction

Islamist parties, such as the Free Cause Party (Hüda-Par, Hür Dava
Partisi), and the Kurdish Hizbullah (Kurt 2017). These political splits
manifested themselves in every city, neighbourhood and sometimes fam-
ilies. Throughout my time in Diyarbakir, I built a broad network of con-
tacts, not with the AKP or the Islamists but with academics, journalists,
students and lawyers, from across the political spectrum. Within this
fractured and contested urban space, my mobility became increasingly
constrained by the deteriorating security situation. This meant that
I could only very occasionally visit KJA or do interviews with its members
from mid-December onwards, when the siege of Diyarbakir’s old city (Sur)
started. The women were either too busy managing their operations during
the conflict and making sure their members were still out and protesting, or
it was simply no longer safe to meet. Instead, I did interviews with members
of civil society organisations, went to press conferences, taught English at
a Kurdish Kindergarten, and generally stayed close to my experienced
journalist friends, who knew how to navigate the territory subjected to
numerous security threats (Pottier et al. 2011).
In October 2015, I went to Rojava for a week-long trip with an inter-
national delegation to participate in the ‘New World Summit Rojava’.16
Together with activists, academics, artists and journalists, I visited the
new women’s academies, cultural and media centres, women’s coopera-
tives and historical sites. I am not using any of the data from this trip for
this book as we were mainly shuttled around from one party institution to
the other, and the trip was not long enough to conduct ethnographic
research. I could have stayed longer but was so overwhelmed with revo-
lutionary dogma and exhausted by the intensity of it all that I decided to
leave with the group and return later in the year. In retrospect that was
perhaps a miscalculation, given that the border between Iraqi Kurdistan
and Rojava later became increasingly difficult to cross. Furthermore,
towards the end of my fieldwork I no longer had the energy to build yet
another research network that could transcend what I call ‘party slogans’,
the official party ideology that was so often narrated to me during inter-
views, a narrative that took time, effort and trust to break through. I have,
however, been following the developments in Rojava closely for the past
ten years and have interviewed many party members who had previously

have been closed down and its assets have been taken over or frozen (Angey 2018;
Jongerden 2018).
16
The New World Summit is an artistic and political organization led by artist Jonas Staal
that develops parliaments with and for stateless states, autonomist groups and blacklisted
political organizations. In 2015, he and his team, together with the new autonomous
administration in Rojava, built the ‘People’s Parliament of Rojava’, the inauguration of
which our delegation attended (In der Maur, Staal & Dirik 2015).

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 Methods and Fieldwork in a Divided Kurdistan 31

worked there. Rojava will thus feature as a comparative perspective in this

transnational analysis.
Due to the urban wars, I had to leave Diyarbakir in February 2016 and
spent two months in Istanbul, where I continued my interviews with both
male and female activists and politicians of the legal parties, the People’s
Democratic Congress (HDK, Halkların Demokratik Kongresi), the DBP
and HDP. From a research perspective this was not a productive time, as
I found it challenging to continue my work with the same passion in a city
that felt indifferent to the war in the east of the country. Thereafter,
I relocated to Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan, where I was hoping to rekindle
my enthusiasm. The most challenging aspect of doing a multi-sited
ethnography is the building of numerous and new networks (Coleman
& von Hellermann 2013). I found it needs great perseverance and a daily
motivational kick to continually make those phone calls and visits, not
least because due to ongoing wars and conflicts, I often felt like an
imposition to the women and their more pressing tasks. Friends and
interlocutors from the movement in Diyarbakir facilitated this process
by handing me over to their comrades south of the border. After
I contacted the two main party cadres in Erbil and Sulaymaniyah, they
arranged my first trip to the Maxmûr Camp. There I improved my
language skills and learned how the political ideology of Democratic
Confederalism is being put into practice. Maxmûr is a refugee camp for
displaced Kurds from Bakur, who had to flee the war between the PKK
and the Turkish state in the early 1990s (Yılmaz 2016). In total I stayed in
Maxmûr for over a month, conducting semi-structured interviews and
participant observation with fighters and party cadres who were in
Maxmûr to organise the socio-political life or to defend the camp. As
a woman I had access to women’s domestic spheres where I did most of
my ethnographic research by simply living, working, cleaning, cooking,
eating and relaxing with them (Abu-Lughod 1993). In Maxmûr, the
boundaries between military and civil life are non-existent, something
I only got used to during my second visit: the simultaneity of mundane
housework and revolutionary organising, the ideological speech of
women’s liberation coexisting alongside conservative gender norms, the
high PKK commanders spontaneously walking into the living room to
join us for tea. In Maxmûr, the party ideology is lived in the everyday, the
project of changing people and society as a whole by unlearning ‘patri-
archy’, while organising and farming independently from the constrains
of Capitalist Modernity. This is not an easy feat, given Iraqi Kurdistan’s
rampant capitalist development, its financial crisis due to the ongoing
budget dispute with Baghdad, and continuous wars at its borders. Daily
life at the camp was structured around party work and remembering the

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 32 Introduction

martyrs, and it was here that I understood how the party ideology gives
people hope in the everyday, in this seemingly never-ending costly fight
for Kurdish self-determination.
For the last four months of my fieldwork I lived in Sulaymaniyah. From
there, I went on shorter research trips to Erbil, Maxmûr and the guerrilla
training camps on the Iraqi-Iranian border. In Sulaymaniyah I spent my
days at the meetings, conferences and protests of the local Kurdistan Free
Women’s Organisation (RJAK, Rêxistina Jinên Azad ên Kurdistanê), inter-
viewed their female members or those cadres passing through from
Qandil to Şengal or Rojava, and worked in a local NGO to secure my
visa. Sulaymaniyah is ruled by the PUK, and the Talabani family, chal-
lenged by the PUK splinter party, the Gorran Movement. Contrary to the
KDP, which is run by the Barzani family, both the PUK and Gorran have
a more amicable relationship with the PKK and its regional sub-groups;
they give them the right of passage, grant them their mountainous terrain
and issue IDs for those who need to go from the mountains to the cities.
However, in the city itself the Kurdish women’s movement was able to do
little apart from providing education courses and building political alli-
ances. Many civilians I spoke to had a lot of respect for the PKK and were
tied to the party emotionally, especially if members of their family have
joined, but they did not see them as capable of becoming a governing
power. Instead they perceive them as admirable fighters and successful
warriors on the battlefield. Some teenagers go for ‘education’ to the
mountains and will march on the relevant days with Öcalan flags, and
a small number of people joins the military ranks from Iraqi Kurdistan.
Overall, Sulaymaniyah, from the perspective of the movement, seemed
more like a hub city on the way from Qandil to Maxmûr, Kirkuk, Şengal
or Rojava than a real focus for political change. This party’s paradigm has
historically placed most of its ideological and tactical focus on Turkish
Kurdistan/Bakur, and more recently Syrian Kurdistan/Rojava, but only in
the last few years has it started to tailor its knowledge production (linguis-
tically, organisationally, or reading material) to the specific context of
Iraqi Kurdistan/Başûr and Iranian Kurdistan/Rojhelat. Its revolutionary
language and claims, as well as its attempts to recruit the youth from
Başûr, sit uncomfortably with many. I was told repeatedly: ‘Our revolu-
tion days are over, people here don’t want war or instability again.’ Some
also clearly see the PKK as a foreign power with no business in Başûr, an
external meddler standing in the way of Kurdish independence. Yet
I believe the power of new imaginaries that the movement creates, espe-
cially when it comes to giving young women different role models – such

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009022194.001 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Random documents with unrelated
content Scribd suggests to you:
The paramour having come, leaving the twenty, eats the thirty, and
goes away. Afterwards the woman having come [there], eats the
twenty, and goes back.

In that very manner, the woman every day having given cakes to
that paramour, the woman also eats. That man was unable to find
out the roguery.

North-western Province.

In Cinq Cents Contes et Apologues (Chavannes), vol. iii, p. 118, a man who wished
to have meat to eat, induced his sons to kill a sheep and offer the flesh to the
deity of a tree which stood in their field, telling them that their prosperity was due
to this god.

1 A leaf cup, a reversed cone, would be set point downwards in each cleft, and
the cakes be heaped upon it. ↑
No. 124
 The Manner in which a Woman prepared a Flour Figure
In a certain country there are a woman and a man, it is said; the
woman is associated with a paramour. The woman has been brought
from another country.

One day (dawasakdā) the woman said, “In our country there is a
custom. Having constructed a flour figure, and having made it sit
upon a chair near the hearth, we must cook cakes and offer them
[before it].” After that, the man having sought for the articles for
cooking cakes gave her them.

After that, the woman, having pounded flour and made [enough] for
two cooking pots, having increased the syrup for one pot, and
diminished the syrup for one, and having been there until the time
when the man goes somewhere or other (kohedō), told the
paramour to come. After having put and smeared flour over the
whole body1 of the man, having brought a chair near the hearth and
made him sit upon the chair, the woman sitting down near the
hearth cooks the cakes.

That man having come home, when he looked there is the flour
figure. While the man in silence is looking on in the raised veranda,
having seen that the woman puts the well-cooked cakes separately
into a pot and the badly cooked cakes into another pot, and getting
to know about the flour figure paramour, to make the woman get up
of necessity,—a calf had been brought from the woman’s village—
the calf had been tied up,—the man having gone very quietly
(himimma) unfastened the calf. Very quietly having come again to
the veranda he said, “Ōn̥ (there)! The calf that was brought from
your village is loose; tie it and come back.”
The woman says, “I am unable to go;2 you go and tie it, and come.”
The man said, “I will not.”

Afterwards the woman having arisen went to tie the calf. [Then] this
man, having arisen from the veranda, struck the oil cooking-pot that
was on the hearth on the top of the head (ismun̆ dunē) of the flour
figure paramour. The flour figure, crying out, is wriggling about.

That woman having tied up the calf and come, says, “I had prepared
the flour figure. Having thrown it away that one will have come and
sat there [in its place]. What shall I do? [When] he escaped from
you even so much [time], am I indeed going to eat that one’s liver?3
Why didn’t you split that one’s head?” Having said [this] she caused
the man to be deceived.

Finished.

North-western Province.

The woman’s remark regarding the liver is an instance of the survival of a very old
expression, perhaps connected with magical practices. In the translations from the
Chinese Tripiṭaka published by M. Chavannes in Cinq Cents Contes et Apologues,
vol. i, p. 120, a girl cried, “May I become a demoniacal and maleficent being to
devour the liver of the elder brother.” In Folk-lore of the Santal Parganas (Rev. Dr.
Bodding), p. 419, it is stated that witches are believed to cause people’s deaths by
eating their livers. The Sinhalese text is, “Um̆ bawaen occarawat bēruwa mama nan̥
ōkage kaewtu kanawā nāe?” The final word is merely a colloquial expletive which
adds emphasis to the question. It occurs also in No. 197, vol. iii, footnote No. 1,
and elsewhere. Perhaps this is the original form of the curious syllable sometimes
heard at the end of questions put to acquaintances by Burghers of the lower class
in Ceylon, as in the query, “I say, man, what are you doing, nŏ?”

1 Æn̆ ga purāma. ↑
2 Maṭa yanḍa nāe, lit., “There is not [an opportunity] for me to go.” ↑
3 The meaning is, “If you did not notice and punish him for so long, was it likely
that I should?” ↑
No. 125
 How a Woman became a Lapwing1
At a certain village there were an elder sister and a younger brother,
it is said. He gave the elder sister2 in dīga [marriage] to a [man of
another] country. For the younger brother they brought a wife to the
house.

When no long time had gone after the elder sister was given in dīga,
the elder sister’s husband died; and being without [anything] to eat
or drink, the elder sister came to the younger brother’s house in
order to beg for something.

At that time, the man said, “Aḍē! Give our elder sister amply to eat
and drink, and having tied up and given a bag of paddy amounting
to a load, send her on her journey;” and in order to look at his wife’s
trustworthiness or untrustworthiness he stayed in a tree behind the
house, looking out, near the path on which the elder sister goes.

Thereupon, the man’s wife, having given the man’s elder sister a
piece of stale cake to eat, put in a [mat] box a little worthless paddy
chaff that had been blown away when she fanned paddy, and gave
her it.

After that, when this elder sister, being grieved, was going on the
path, she went saying and saying, “Anē! If my younger brother were
there she would not do thus. Sister-in-law gave me only paddy chaff
and a few stale cakes; but [even] should my sister-in-law do magic
against me, may a shower of flowers rain at my younger brother’s
doorway.” Then, weeping and weeping she came home.

Then the younger brother who stayed in the tree having been
hearing that word, came home, and asked his wife, “Aḍē! Didst thou
give my elder sister amply to eat and drink?”
The woman said, “Andōma! When she had eaten I tied up a bag of
paddy equal to a load, and gave it. What else will you tell me to
give?”

Thereupon the man having said, “It is good,” and having been
keeping it in his mind, after two or three days had gone, said, “Aḍē!
Thy mother is ill. Prepare something and give me it [as a present for
her, to enable me] to look at her and return,” he said. The man said
it falsely.

The woman saying, “Perhaps it is true,” cooked a packet of rice, and

taking thirty ridīs,3 put them at the bottom of the packet of cooked
rice, and tied and gave him it, for him to go to her parents’ house
and return. Unknown to the man4 she did this dishonesty (i.e., put
his money in the bag).

Thereupon the man, taking the packet of cooked rice, went to the
house of the man’s elder sister. That day he remained there without
coming back.

That elder sister having unfastened the bag, when she looked [saw
that] at the bottom of the rice there were thirty ridīs. Afterwards the
elder sister called the younger brother and asked, “Younger brother,
whence are these thirty ridīs at the bottom of the rice in this bag?”

The younger brother said, “I told her of our house (apē gedara ēkī5)
to cook and give me a packet of rice, in order to go to her village.
She will have put in the thirty ridīs.”

At that time a washerwoman who stayed in that village brought

clothes to the younger brother’s house. Thereupon this woman (his
wife) asked at the hand of the washerwoman (radawī atin),
“Washerwoman-aunt, our house man went to go to [my] village and
return. Didn’t you meet him on the way?”
The washerwoman said, “Anē! Madam (mahattinē), on the road
indeed I did not meet with him; he is staying at the gentleman’s
(rāhamillē) elder sister’s house. Except that it seemed that he is6 at
the house itself, he did not [otherwise] go to your quarter.”

Thereupon, at that instant7 a disturbance (internal) having come to

her, while this woman was saying, “Is it true, washerwoman? Is it
true, washerwoman? Saw you him, washerwoman? Saw you him,
washerwoman? Gave he them, washerwoman? Got she them,
washerwoman? There are thirty ridīs, there are thirty, there are
thirty,”8 except that she got her breath upwards, she did not hold it
down. Having gone in that very manner, when she said there were
thirty ridīs she became a female Red-wattled Lapwing,9 and flew
away. Now also the Red-wattled Lapwings say, “Hoṭāe ṭikiri, hoṭāe
ṭikiri.”10 From that time, indeed, the Red-wattled Lapwings
increased.

Then the man having come back, not contracting another marriage
he remained providing subsistence for his elder sister.

Well then, we came here.11

North-western Province.

1 Another title is, “The Story of Thirty Ridīs.” ↑

2 In a variant she is his younger sister. ↑
3 Lit., “silvers.” In the Arabian Nights (Lady Burton’s ed., vol. i, p. 234) there is
a similar expression denoting silver coins: “I gave the servant a few silvers.” The
ridī or larin is the silver wire “hook-money,” at first imported from the Persian Gulf,
where it was coined in Lāristān, but afterwards made in Ceylon. Captain Robert
Knox says of it, “There is another sort, which all People by the King’s Permission
may and do make. The shape is like a fish-hook, they stamp what mark or
impression on it they please” (Hist. Relation of Ceylon, 1681, p. 97). Baldaeus
remarked, “The most current coin here are the silver Laryns each whereof is worth
about tenpence … as well in Ceylon as Malabar two golden Fanams, at five-pence
a piece, make a Laryn” (A Description of ye East India Coasts, etc., translation,
1672, p. 727). As a later value I was informed that three ridīs were equal to one
rupee. Further information regarding this money will be found in the Additional
Notes at the end of vol. iii. ↑
4 Ē minihāṭa himin. Himin, hemin, or semin commonly means slowly, gently;
hence in village talk, secretly, unperceived, unknown to. ↑
5 See footnote on the first page of No. 201, vol. iii. ↑
6 Innawā pewuni. ↑
7 Ē pārama, lit., at the very stroke. ↑
8 The words are an imitation of the rapidly-uttered alarm notes of the common
Lapwing of Ceylon:—Haebāeda ridiyē, haebāeda ridiyē, daekkāda ridiyē, duṭuwāda
ridiyē, dunnāda ridiyē, gattāda ridiyē, ridī tihayi, tihayi, tihayi. ↑
9 Kiralī (Lobivanellus indicus). ↑
10 Perhaps this means, “[Our] bills are small.” ↑
11 The narrator is supposed to have been a spectator. ↑
No. 126
 The Story of the Seven Wicked Women1
In a certain country, when seven elder sisters and younger sisters,
fastening on bangles (at-wael) are going along, a woman having
been near the well asked, “Where are they2 going?”

Then the seven elder sisters and younger sisters said, “We are going
to seek for ourselves seven elder brothers and younger brothers.”

Then this woman said, “There are seven elder brothers and younger
brothers of mine.” Having said, “Let us go, if so, to our house,” and
having gone calling the seven persons and sent them to seven
houses (rooms), she lowered [from the corn store] seven [mat]
boxes of paddy, and gave them.

The seven persons having boiled the paddy, and said, “Sister-in-law,
look after this,”3 and spread it out to dry, the seven went for
firewood. Having gone there they spoke, “Let us find a means4 of
killing sister-in-law.”

There was a Brown Monkey (rilawā); catching the monkey they

brought it home.

This younger sister having gone to sleep and a great rain having
rained, all the paddy was washed away.5 When those seven persons
having come looked, all the paddy had been washed away.

After that, the seven persons again having lowered paddy [from the
corn-store], when they were pounding the paddy raw (lit., hard) that
younger sister awoke. Having awoke thus, she asked at the hand of
those seven, “Sister-in-law, is there cooked rice?”
Then the women said, “Is there cooked rice in our hand? It is in the
cooking pot, isn’t it?” The women having previously (lit., betimes)
broken up bits of potsherds, and put them in the drinking kettle, and
put it away, are pounding paddy.

Afterwards that sister-in-law having gone and eaten the cooked rice,
and said, “Sister-in-law, give me water,” these women said, “Is it in
our hand? It is in the house, in the drinking kettle; take it and drink.”

Afterwards the sister-in-law having taken the drinking kettle, when

she was drinking the water the pieces of potsherds stuck in her
throat.

These seven persons spoke, “Should that one’s elder brothers come,
indeed, we shall be unable to kill her. Before they come let us kill
her.” Having spoken thus, and having put the sister-in-law and that
monkey into a bag and tied it, they hung it at the ridge pole. Having
hung it, after the seven persons were pounding paddy the seven
strike seven blows with the rice pestles at the bag. At the number
they are striking, that monkey, jumping and jumping, scratches that
woman who is in the bag. He having scratched her, afterwards blood
descends from the bag. Then the seven persons having said, “Now
then, it is bad [for her] to be [thus]; having released her let us put
her down,” having unfastened the bag, put down the sister-in-law at
the veranda.

Then the sister-in-law’s elder brothers came home. Having come

there the eldest brother asked, “Where is our younger sister?”

Then these seven women said, “We don’t know. Having gone behind
Roḍiyās, and her caste having [thus] fallen, there! she is weeping
and weeping in the direction of the veranda.”

Afterwards the eldest elder brother having gone, “What, younger

sister, happened to you?” he asked at the hand of the younger sister.
The younger sister cannot speak, because a sharp piece of potsherd
has stuck in her throat. The whole seven elder brothers having gone,
spoke [to her]. Because she did not speak, the eldest elder brother
said, “Who can cut [and kill] this younger sister?” The whole five
other elder brothers said they could not; the young elder brother
said, “I indeed can.”

Having said it, causing them to cook a bundle of rice, calling the
younger sister also, and taking the sword, and taking the bundle of
cooked rice, he went [with her] to a forest jungle (himālēkaṭa).
Having gone there he said to the younger sister, “Younger sister, [for
me] to look for lice on your head lie down.” Afterwards the younger
sister lay down; well then, the elder brother began to smash the lice.
Then sleep went to the younger sister.

Afterwards the elder brother having placed the younger sister’s head
very softly on the ground, and having cut a Rat-snake on the path
he was coming on, [after] smearing the blood on the sword he
showed the sword to the people who were at home.

Afterwards that younger sister having awoke, when she looked her
elder brother was not [there], in the midst of the forest. Well then,
weeping and weeping, taking also the bundle of cooked rice, having
bounded to a path she began to go.

Having gone thus,—there is a city called “The City the Rākshasa

eats”; there is an alms-hall at that city,—having gone, she arrived
there. There, having eaten that bundle of cooked rice, and having
joined herself to the people who are giving alms, she began to give
alms.

The eyes of the whole of these seven elder brothers and seven
women became blind. After that, news reached those persons that
there is an alms-hall of the city the Rākshasa eats. After that, they
very fourteen persons went near the alms-hall.
That sister-in-law also having gone in a dīga [marriage], has borne a
child also. She having given food to this party, when that sister-in-
law and the sister-in-law’s child were preparing (lit., making) to
sleep, the child said to the sister-in-law, “Mother, for me to hear it
tell me a story.”

Then the sister-in-law [said], “Son, what do I know? I will tell you
the things indeed that happened to me.” So the son said, “It is good,
tell them.”

Afterwards she told him all the matters that occurred to this sister-
in-law. Those seven elder brothers having heard the things she says,
and having said, “Anē! Our younger sister to-day is relating our
grandeur!” as soon as they gave the salutation “Sādhu!” the eyes of
the whole seven elder brothers became clear.

The eyes of the seven women did not become clear. The seven elder
brothers also stayed at the very city at which is the younger sister.
The seven women having been in much hunger they went and died.

Finished.

North-western Province.

1 The text is given at the end of vol. iii, as an illustration of the usual
conversational style in the villages. ↑
2 Third person for second, in an honorific sense; she was speaking to the
women. ↑
3 Lit., “these,” the word for paddy being plural, like that for rice. ↑
4 Upaharana in the text, apparently intended for upakaraṇa. ↑
5 Agārē giyā; agāraya is a drainage area. The meaning is that the flow of the
flood water over the ground carried away the paddy, which would be spread on
mats laid on the ground. ↑
No. 127
 The Story of the Old Man1
In a certain country an old man ground gunpowder. Having ground it
until the time when it became night, he dried it in the sun. In the
evening, at the time when he was preparing (lit., making) to put it in
the powder-horn, the old gentleman’s2 grandson having come said,
“Grandmother, let us burn (pussamu) gunpowder, to look at it.”

Then, having scolded the child she said, “Bring a fire-brand.” Having
brought it, “Grandmother, give me a little powder,” he said. After
that, she put gunpowder into a potsherd. Having put it in she told
him to burn it. When he was placing the fire-brand [to it] the little
powder that was in the potsherd all burnt.

Because the old gentleman was near the potsherd the old
gentleman’s beard and body were burnt. On account of the difficulty
of his body he said to his wife, “Warm and give me a little water,” he
said.

The woman having warmed the water called him to bathe; at that
time the old gentleman came there. After that, while the woman for
the purpose of cooling the water went to bring cold water, the man,
taking a piece of coconut shell, poured [the hot water] over his
body. Because there was too much heat in the water his body began
to burn.

While he was crying out on his body’s burning, a man having come
said for that burning, “Cowdung (ela-goma) indeed is good.”3

Afterwards the man having gone running, bringing excrement

deposited by a child called Goma, from the place where they tie the
cattle, smeared it on the burning places. The [old] man perceiving
the stench, at the time when he said to his wife, “What is this
stench? Is this cowdung or what? Look,” the woman brought a lamp.
When she looked, perceiving that it was ordure, she said, “The
things this foolish stubborn fellow is doing to himself!” Spitting,
having brought water and bathed him she went with him into the
house. Afterwards in many days she made him well.

North-western Province.

1 Nāki mahallāe kaṭantarē. ↑

2 Nākirālagē. ↑
3 From my own experience in the case of a severe burn, I can say that a paste
of cow-dung smeared completely over a burnt place entirely removes all pain, and
the wound soon heals under it. The paste dries immediately owing to the heat of
the skin, and after that no unpleasant smell remains. ↑
No. 128
 The Magic Lute Player1

In a country a Prince [after] constructing a Lute plays2 it.

Throughout the extent through which the sound was heard, not a
female elephant nor tusk elephant stays away; it comes to look. In
that manner he caused many elephants to be brought [up to him] in
the jungles.

A Princess of another city was minded to look at this Prince. Because

it was so she said, “I will (would) give five hundred masuran to a
person who brought and gave him; having given them I will marry
that person.”

Yet [another] Prince asked, “I will bring and give him; will you marry
me?” When he asked, the Princess says, “Cause him to be brought; I
will [then] marry you.”

Thereupon this Prince having also taken a great quantity of white

cloths, proceeded to that city. Having gone there, and having halted
(natara-welā) in a jungle, cutting sticks he constructed a white tusk
elephant with [them and] the white cloths; having made it this
Prince is under the tusk elephant.

Certain men (minissu wagayak) having seen this white tusk

elephant, say to the Prince who having played the Lute causes the
tusk elephant to be brought, “O Prince, there is a good white tusk
elephant in that forest,” they said.

Afterwards this Prince took the Lute and played it as on other days;
this tusk elephant did not come. Having said [to himself], “What is
[the reason of] it, Bola? To-day this tusk elephant did not come!”
and having gone a considerable distance he played it. Then this tusk
elephant went a little further off (epiṭaṭa). The Prince at that time
went near and played it; then this elephant went still a little further.
In that manner this Prince having placed and placed the Lute at the
end (assē) of the tusk elephant’s tail, plays it; still also this tusk
elephant goes on. In that way these very two went to this Princess’s
city.

Thereupon this Princess became much pleased, and having given

five hundred masuran to this Prince got married to this Prince. The
Prince who played the Lute she caused to remain as the Minister.

North-western Province.

Although there appears to be no Indian folk-tale of a musician who could attract

the wild animals like the Finnish hero, the notion is found in that country, and one
of the reliefs at the Rāmaswāmi temple in Kumbakōnam represents various wild
animals listening to Krishṇa’s flute playing. Colossal figures of animals are
sometimes taken in processions; they are formed on a framework of bamboos or
sticks; in one figure of an elephant the spaces in the frame were filled with leafy
twigs.

1 The Sinhalese title is, “The Story that tells the manner in which he played on
the Lute for the Representation of the Tusk Elephant (Ætāerinba).” ↑
2 The verb used throughout the story is gānawā, to rub. ↑
No. 129
 The Lad who Sang Songs
At a certain time there was a man; the man had a girl and a boy. At
the time when they were thus, the man went alone to the sea to
catch fish (mas). Having gone, when he was catching fish a very
large wave having knocked him into the sea, the man on account of
the water (current) drifted away.

At that time the men of the ferry-boat near there were laying nets.
This man having gone was entangled (lit., tied) in the nets. Then the
ferry-boat men drew out the nets. When they looked a man was
entangled in a net. Then, taking the man ashore they laid him on his
face, and while they were pressing on his belly with the feet, without
the man’s life going he breathed.1 Then without having caused hurt
to this man when they were treading on his belly for the water to
go, the man became conscious.

Then the men having said, “Of what country are you?” having
spread the news around, and given him cooked rice which had been
taken for the party to eat, they told him to choose [some] fishes. He
having selected them, in the evening they went to the village, taking
the man. Having gone [there], as this man who fell into the sea does
not know the road to go to his village, doing work for hire for the
ferry-boat men and continuing to eat [thus], he stayed [there].

The elder female child and the younger lad whom there were of the
man who fell into the sea, went to the Heṭṭiyā’s shop to bring salt. At
the time when they went, the Heṭṭiyās put the girl in the house, and
shut the door. Having beaten the boy, they drove him away.

At that time, the King of that city having made ready a very great
eating (kāema), sent letters to the Kings of other cities to come for
the eating. After that, those Kings all came to the city. In the royal
party, the King of the city at which was the man who fell into the sea
and went ashore, also came.

Having come, all the party having assembled in that day night, after
they ate the food this lad who had lost his father and elder sister
had come [there]. Having given food to this lad, while he was
[there] the royal party, having eaten and drunk, conversed together
regarding the happiness and sorrow in the various cities.

Then this lad who was without father and elder sister, thought of
telling the matters which the party omitted, by way of a verse.
Having thought of it he says,

Apuccī mūdē waeṭunā. Father fell into the sea.

Akkā Heṭṭiyā In his quarter the Cheṭṭi
Pādēṭa damalā Elder sister has set; he
Dora wahagattā. The door has shut on me.
Ayinān! Ayinān! Alas! Alas!

Thereupon, having met with this lad, hearing the words that ought
to be known at the city at which they are, they spoke, “Hahak!
Hahak!2 don’t speak.” Having stopped the talk, they said, “Who is
that lad who said the verse? Say that verse again for us to hear.”

Then the boy said again,

Father fell into the sea.

In his quarter the Cheṭṭi
Elder sister has set; he
The door has shut on me.
Alas! Alas!

Then the royal party, calling the boy near, and after that having
heard of the matters that occurred, gave food to the lad from the
royal house, and made him stay at the royal house.
When he was [there] in that way for a little time, the King of that
city having died, because a King was necessary to burn [the
corpse]3 they decorated the tusk elephant, and taking it they walk
through the whole city. Then the tusk elephant keeps coming
towards the palace itself.

Because of it, men came out on the path on which the tusk elephant
is coming. At that time, the tusk elephant having come, kneeling
down made obeisance to that lad.

Then those men, having made the lad bathe in sandal water (water
perfumed with sandal), and placed him on the tusk elephant’s back,
went in procession round the city, and having come back they burnt
that King, and made a funeral mound [over the ashes].

While exercising the sovereignty over the men of the city, when a
little time had gone the King went to that place called the Heṭṭiyā
quarter, and having beheaded all the Heṭṭiyās, came back calling his
elder sister [to accompany him], and gave her in marriage.

There was a daughter of the dead King. After marrying that

Princess, in a little time there was a child.

After that, he went to that city in which his father is, and calling his
father also, he returned. Having come back, he remained exercising
the sovereignty in a good manner.

North-central Province.

1 Husma elunāya. ↑
2 I do not know if this word is intended for an exclamation (= hāhā), or a noun,
hasak, a sorrow. ↑
3 See the variant from Tibetan Tales at the end of No. 190, vol. iii. ↑
No. 130
 The Hunchback Tale
In a certain city, at one house there was a Hunchback. One day, at
the time when this Hunchback went to the rice field, his wife, having
cooked rice, called him, saying, “Hunchback! Hunchback!”
Thereupon anger having come to him he went home and thrashed
his wife; thereupon the woman died.

Having buried the woman, at the grave he planted tampalā.1 When

the tampalā had become large a cow having approached there ate
the tampalā with the sound2 that goes “Kuda caw caw.”3 At that
time, also, anger having come to the man he struck and killed the
cow.

Having buried the cow, upon the grave he planted a foreign yam
plant. [When it had grown], cutting up the foreign yam plant [after
digging it up], and having gone and put it in a cooking-pot (haeliya),
when he had placed it on the [fire on the] hearth, at the time when
it boils4 with the sound2 that goes “Kuda goda goda, Kuda goda
goda,”5 the man having become angry carried [the pot] also away,
and struck it on the stone [and broke it].

After a few days, at the time when he was sleeping, with the sound
that goes Kuda rūn6 flies alighted on his body. Thereupon he having
arisen, with the intention of killing the flies set fire to the house.

After the fire became alight, having seen that it burns with the
sound that goes “Kuda busu busu, Kuda busu busu,”7 he, also,
sprang into the midst of the fire and was killed.

Ūva Province.
The story is a variant of No. 29, vol. i, “The Pied Robin.”

1 A vegetable cultivated in village gardens and chenas, Nothosærua brachiate. ↑

2 Ana-karaṇayen; the verb ana-karaṇawā is usually “to order.” ↑
3 Apparently understood by him to be intended for Kudā chawa chawa.
“Hunchback, [you are] vile, vile.” ↑
4 Idena, which ordinarily would mean “ripens.” ↑
5 He appears to have understood this to mean, “Hunchback, [you are] clownish,
clownish,” goḍayā being “clown.” ↑
6 Perhaps to be taken as one word, Kudarūn, = Kudō + arūn, “Hunchbacks
[are] fellows.” ↑
7 Busa means chaff, cow-dung; he thought the meaning was, “Hunchback, [you
are] chaff, chaff.” ↑
No. 131
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