Abstract
In tracing three facets of the Kurdish women’s movement, which are the presentation of Kurdish women fighters as the historical protectors of Kurdish national culture in the form of ‘goddesses’; the women quota promoting public understandings surrounding Kurdish women, and accordingly, the emergence of motherhood in the name of reconciliation; and the conditional-recognition which, as perceived by the West, demonstrates the Kurdish women’s military forces’ secular promise towards the Middle East as unbound by İslam, and maintaining their own agency, I explore the gendered issues surrounding discussions of non-territorial autonomy in the Turkey–Kurdish case and the Kurdish quest for recognition. The continuity between two founder ideologies of the Turkish state, which are namely Kemalist and neo-liberal Islamist ideologies, in terms of their (Turkish) nationalist investment in the non-national (Kurdish) female agency posits Kurdish women’s movement as a particular prism.
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Şimşek, B. (2018). Militancy, Reconciliation, Motherhood: A History of Kurdish Women’s Movements. In: Nimni, E., Aktoprak, E. (eds) Democratic Representation in Plurinational States. Comparative Territorial Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01108-6_11
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