Women in the Kurdish Movement by Handan Çağlayan

Author:Handan Çağlayan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030247447
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Building the Blocks: The Kurdish Political Movement

The effect of the Kurdish political movement on women’s political and social activism has developed along multiple axes. I have briefly described their dynamic mass participation. Prior to this, I explained in Chapter 3 how the ideological discourse of the Kurdish movement transformed the meaning of honor and its space. This significantly helped women to step out of the domestic sphere and act with men in spheres previously deemed to belong to men. These factors enabled women to participate in party politics from the foundation of political parties onwards. Initially, however, women did not problematize the male-dominant structure of the political parties while the party authorities—overwhelmingly male—signaled their discomfort with women’s presence in party structures. During this first period, women related to the party through sentimental codes, similar to a sense of being part of a family. In the early 2000s, when I participated in women’s units, many women involved themselves in party work as a form of attachment to the memory of a disappeared family member, especially their children. For them, engaging with the party was a way of spiritually connecting with their lost children. For those whose children, spouse, or siblings were still in the mountains, party work was a means to do something about ensuring their safe return. Few of these women, who were mostly identified as mothers, took part in the decision-making and executive bodies. Instead, they were mainly involved in organizational activities. While this role-sharing ensured the women had respectable intra-party positions, it reinforced the traditional gender roles within the party structure and its work. This harmonious situation was disrupted as the number of women involved in party activities increased, the membership profile diversified, and the party’s gender equality approach spread through informal networks to women party members and into society at large.

Relations with imprisoned kin were one of the significant sources of informal networks as they motivated women’s participation in party politics and encouraged them to struggle for gender equality within the party.40 Another channel was the alternative Kurdish (mass) media that started to develop in the 1990s. Free Women (Özgür Kadın), first published in the late 1990s, and its successor after Free Women was closed down, Free Women’s Voice (Özgür Kadının Sesi), covered the general political agenda of the Kurdish movement as well as the issue of gender equality. Both magazines became important references for women party activists in their organizational work (Bozgan 2011). Sebahat Tuncel, who would later be elected as an MP while still in prison regarding the place of these publications in women’s politicization, shares her experiences:I and Fatma Koçak, who is an editor of Jinha41 (…) were involved in neighborhood work [of the party]. …We distributed six copies of Kadının Sesi, and met with three to four families; we were doing intensive work. That period was very important for my personal development. Writings in the magazine, our discussions on women had significant implications on my part for developing the consciousness of womanhood. That

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