Europe at the Margins of Transnational Identities and Relations: Kurdish Women’s Political Mobilization Across Borders

• In Event: 405 - Regular Session. Transnational Social Movements

Abstract

In this article, I discuss the processes of Kurdish women’s politicization from a transnational perspective, relying on in-depth interviews I conducted in Germany and France. The Kurdish movement has established and defined itself in a transnational context in terms of its political mobility, imagination, and diasporic geography. The political subjectivities of Kurds have taken shape within this transnational setting and through these relations. Especially after the 2000s, with the changing political imagination of the Kurdish movement, the processes of Kurdish women’s politicization have begun to transform. In this article, I shed light on this transformation process in particular.

In order to explore the process of transformation, I examine the political subjectivities of Kurdish women in light of their experiences of migration and exile. Due to the problems related to being a migrant and political refugee, Kurdish women’s relations with the hegemonic political culture in Europe and also with the Kurdish women’s movement are becoming more fragile compared to the past. Thus, what kind of political subjectivity does this new relationship produce? What are the possibilities and impossibilities that Europe provides to Kurdish women in terms of their engagement into politics? Together with the difficulties that Kurdish women have experienced in their everyday lives, how do the identity-based conflicts and the conflicts that they have lived with the European political culture affect their political subjectivities and their struggles to protect their ‘revolutionary’ identities? In answering these questions, I methodologically and theoretically benefit from a perspective that brings local and trans-national together.

Author

• Nisa Goksel, Northwestern University