This article focuses on the appeal that writing and authorship hold for Kurdish women singers in contemporary Turkey. It argues that authorship has come to the fore as an object of aspiration at a moment when a history of political silencing intersects with a more recent commodification of Kurdish culture. In this context, authorship constitutes an avenue for Kurdish women to insert themselves into struggles for political rights, discourses of history writing, and an emerging cultural market. Yet, as the analysis shows, becoming an author centrally relies on gaining access to means that allow materially inscribing voices and making them durable. Authorship therefore needs to be recognized as a fragile achievement, especially for subaltern authors, whose position is marked by restricted access to inscriptive means. Tracing Kurdish women's attempts at making their voices, quite literally, matter, the article contributes to our understanding of the politics of voice in the contemporary world.

My thanks are due to Yael Navaro-Yashin, Banu Karaca and Jeremy Walton for providing invaluable feedback on earlier drafts of this paper. I am also indebted to the anonymous EJTS reviewers for their critical engagement with the subject matter.1 "I am sick of politics [siyaset]!" Hatice 1 exclaimed with a sense of exasperation as we were trying to warm up over tea after the performance she had given together with a number of other women dengbêjs [Kurdish bards] at the occasion of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women on the 25 November, 2012. The rally had been organized by the Democratic Free Women's Movement [Demokratik Özgür Kadın Hareketi, DÖKH], the PKK-aligned wing of the Kurdish women's movement, and the seemingly never-ending speeches by various women politicians had not only made the cold seep into our bodies but also cut into the dengbêjs' performance time. Angry over having been cut short at a rally yet another time Hatice exclaimed with a mixture of passion and frustration: "I want to do art [sanat], not politics [siyaset]!" She felt that Kurdish culture and arts -paradigmatically embodied, in her view, by dengbêjs like herself -had lost out not only against the upbeat tempo of popular pieces like Aynur Doğan's "Keça Kurdan" that had been pounding out from the large loudspeakers during the rally, but also against the professional politicians of the Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) 2 and their speeches. But wasn't being a dengbêj and thereby preserving Kurdish traditions in itself a measure supporting the Kurdish cause, Hatice now asked us. Were they not supporting the aims of the Kurdish women's movement, as women dengbêjs out there on a stage in the freezing cold? Why then were they not given the attention she felt they deserved? Turning to me, Münevver, a great admirer of dengbêjs and their kilams 3 with a passion for Kurdish literature and poetry, felt the

This article investigates how ruined materialities are implicated in projects of governance by affecting people’s abilities to engage with the future. Based on ethnographic material from the Kurdish-inhabited city of Van (Turkey), which was heavily damaged by two earthquakes in 2011, I analyse Turkish state authorities’ mobilisation of expertise regarding Van’s ruined built environment as a form of techno-political governance. Yet as ruins’ material properties continuously exceeded attempts at governing them, they created a particular structure of risk, thereby contributing to the formation of political subjects feeling themselves to be at the constant peril of both natural and political disaster

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