Denationalizing the Body: Kurdish Women’s Guerilla Resistance towards a Stateless Freedom

• In Event: “Kinsurgency”: Articulating the Emergent Possibilities of Relational Life

Abstract

This paper looks at the ways in which Kurdish women produce insurgent bodies, discourses and anti-national epistemes of kinship through revolutionary mothering/reproduction. It presents a Foucauldian analysis of Kurdish armed resistance against Turkish nation state by revealing the ruptures in Power created by the contradictions of the modern statecraft and multiple sites/forms of resistance emerging from these ruptures. The primary purpose of the paper is to disrupt the national imaginary that sees modernity, its time and institutions as safe and progressive formations by exposing Kurdish home and reproduction as sites of state racism, militarized resistance and non-capitalistic temporality.

Presenter

• Mediha Sorma, University of Washington