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Narratives of Exile and Migration: Kurdish Women’s Political Struggles in Europe
Abstract
The lives of politically active Kurdish women take shape at the intersection of migration and exile, and this paper explores how the conditions of displacement and ongoing war in Turkey’s Kurdistan region affect Kurdish women’s struggles in Europe as migrants and political subjects. Based on interviews and participant observations in Germany and France, I will examine the political subjectivities and activities of Kurdish women from a transnational perspective by considering the question of how they strive to sustain their political ties and agency despite the daily difficulties of migrant/exile life. War, displacement, and statelessness have forced the Kurdish community to maintain its political struggle beyond the territorial states located in the Middle East, while governments in both Europe and the Middle East see the dispersed Kurdish body politic as a major “threat” to the territorial sovereignty of their states. In this context, Kurds have formed a movement across borders against the transnational regimes of war and violence that have constituted the very foundations of their displacement and de-territorialization. Like the Kurdish movement as a whole, Kurdish women face a political and existential struggle of a transnational character, encompassing the sites where Kurds live beyond the Middle East. Therefore, I will approach the political activities of Kurdish women in diaspora and their identities as “liminal” in that it lies between their past and present political experiences, and between their revolutionary ideals and their family life in the tenuous terrain of migration/exile.
Discipline
Sociology
Geographic Area
Europe
Kurdistan
Turkey
Sub Area
None