Mother, Politician, and Guerilla: The Emergence of a New Political Imagination in Kurdistan through Women’s Bodies and Speech

Abstract

This article addresses the question of what epistemic spaces women can occupy to produce truths other than that at the limit between life and death occupied by Antigone, a figure of truth widely celebrated in feminism and beyond. It reflects in particular on the mother, the woman politician, and the woman guerilla, figures who have emerged during the Kurdish struggle against repression and colonization by the Turkish state. The article argues that while the figure of the mother occupies the limit between the sacred and sacrilege, the woman politician occupies the limit between the legal and illegal, and the woman guerilla, the limit between the past and future. The truths of these figures reveal the impossibilities of living under colonial, patriarchal, and repressive conditions and unleash a force that challenges the boundaries instituted on speech, law, and politics by liberal democracies and state sovereignties. The Turkish state, this article argues, wages a war against these truths by attacking women and destroying the limits that they have carved for themselves during their struggle.

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How does a protest last? Rituals of visibility, disappearances under custody, and the Saturday Mothers in Turkey

“…Peace Mothers (Barış Anneleri) were founded by the mothers of Kurdish guerillas in 1999. Because of the victims’ connection to the armed Kurdish movement, it has always been difficult for these mothers to gain public visibility and much easier for the state authorities to label them as “terrorist” mothers (Üstündağ 2019).…”