Beyond Critique of Carceral Feminism: Kurdish Women’s Movement and Its Transformative Vision of Justice

• In Event: Radical Love for Creative and Transformative Justice

Abstract

This paper discusses hevalti (revolutionary love), care, and solidarity operates as a transformative social force at the heart of the Kurdish Women’s Movement’s (KWM) justice practices and approach, offering a concrete alternative to carceral feminist approaches to gender-based violence. KWM builds feminist abolitionist alternatives to oppressive systems such as colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy in northern Kurdistan (Turkey) and western Turkey Dirik, 2022; Tas, 2022; Caglayan 2019; Kisanak 2022; Tan, 2024). Its justice mechanism reflects this broader feminist abolition vision, providing community-based, non-state mechanisms of justice that move beyond punitive state responses. The movement’s justice mechanism consists of only female members, provides a process that survivors do not have to provide any proof of the violence, threats or abuse they have faced, and has hearings based on dialogue with the survivors. Rather than centering punishment or state intervention, its justice mechanism adopts a transformative and communal approach through building relationships to start a transformative process with the people who do harm. Furthermore, it mobilizes informal community networks to provide safe housing, financial assistance, employment opportunities, and collective process of accountability for women faced gendered violence. Justice, in this context, is not limited to dispute resolution but is oriented toward transforming social relations, strengthening women’s autonomy, collective power, and community responsibility.
Based on a decade of ethnographic research with the movement and its justice practices in northern Kurdistan and western Turkey, this paper situates KWM’s justice practices in a global feminist abolitionist framework, analyzing how care, solidarity, and hevalti–understood as revolutionary love–constitute the core of KWM’s transformative justice vision. The paper argues that attending revolutionary love and care as both method and praxis not only reshapes how we understand transformative justice but also challenges how we produce knowledge about social movements and their vision of justice.

Author

• Tan, SUNY-Binghamton