This ethnographic study uses Kurdish migrant women’s narratives to explore a low-income Kurdish community’s experiences with State violence in their hometown and the challenges they have faced after settling in an inner-city neighborhood of Istanbul. Many Kurdish people who migrated or were displaced from the southeast of Turkey settled in cities and became marginalized as the new urban underclass due to men’s limited education and lack of skills necessary to find regular jobs. Kurdish women have experienced social exclusion even further as their interactions with the city have been more restricted due to traditional gender roles, their limited fluency in Turkish, and low literacy levels. Semi-structured in-depth interviews with Kurdish women along with participant observations in the neighborhood documented various acts of violence Kurdish families witnessed in their hometown, and shed light to the social, emotional, and financial consequences of migration. The study particularly focuses on the strategies women developed to navigate everyday challenges they encountered in the city. Findings suggest that all the women in the study have been directly or indirectly affected by the armed conflict in their hometown. Their families were either forced to leave their village or they “chose” to leave due to safety concerns and growing rates of unemployment in the area resulting from the conflict. Since Kurdish families came to the city, their Kurdish identity has played a dual role, on one hand contributing to their social exclusion in the city and on the other creating a sense of safety and belonging through the Kurdish community that has been formed in the neighborhoods they settled. Their new “home” has posed various difficulties for Kurdish families, with poverty and loss of social networks being their main challenges. Kurdish women have played a critical role during this transition process by resiliently developing strategies such as seeking assistance from government organizations and compensating for loss of social networks by establishing and maintaining close ties with neighbors as fictive kin. Through women’s narratives, this study portrays the various struggles Kurdish families experienced before and after their migration/displacement and the active role Kurdish women have played in reconstructing their families’ lives in their new “home”. By exploring Kurdish migrant women’s agency, this paper challenges the dominant discourse that characterizes low-income Kurdish migrant women as “passive” and creates a revised view of Kurdish migrant women that brings agency to the center of discussions of migration/displacement and gender.

This study analyzes the social structure of three Kurdish towns located on the Turkish border of Syria and Iraqi Kurdistan by examining migration and the transformation of Kurdish identities through an ethnographic fieldwork. Drawing upon a number of interviews and participant observation with residents, I argue that in contrast to urban areas where the Kurdish immigrants have to structure their identity in relation to the Turks they come in touch with, Kurds living in rural areas form their identity in relation to their encounters with other Kurds as well as with the ever repressive state. These border towns have obtained their current social structure through ongoing changes over the past 30 years. The Turkish state started a settlement policy in 1979 with an aim to change the dynamics of the region. Approximately 500 collective estates were built to enable the settlement of the nomadic Kurdish tribes in the area. As a result of this project, the Assyrians felt compelled to emigrate, and the population of the towns came to consist mainly of nomadic and settled Kurdish tribes. Moreover, some of these Kurds became state-appointed village guards and had to fight against their own people. In recent years, a new uprising against the state has begun to occur among the youth of these towns. The youth’s participation in organized protests and demonstrations lead to greater distrust and resentment towards the state. The state reacts by arresting the rebels and by using violence against those who do not comply. The result of state suppression creates a lot of tension between different groups in desolate areas where the contemporary perception of Kurdish identity is highly related to this process of violence. Trying to shed light on this entangled web of social relations this study is trying to find answers to the following questions. What forms of dispute resolution, compromise or conflict do these people, who are usually relatives and/or neighbors, use? What tensions does serving as a village guard create for ethnic Kurds and how do these village guards legitimize their positions? How do non-Muslim minorities accustom their daily practices amongst the transformed structure of the society? How does the perception of youth and women differ from and resemble that of the elders’ and men’s view of identity, state and Kurdish traditional life style?

My paper will focus on the Kurdish diaspora’s ethno-national battles in London. It will examine diasporic Kurds’ desire for recognition of their ethnic identity and struggle, especially the translation and representation of Kurdishness in diaspora. Based on ethnographic data and analysis, the paper will discuss how Kurds (of Turkey) revive, translate and construct Kurdish struggle and ethno-political demands. It will examine how Kurdishness is translated by diasporic brokers to (a) British audiences and (b) to the second generation and elaborate how this translation of Kurdishness to both the British audiences and to the 2nd generation helps create a ‘diasporic battlespace’. This an alternative space, alternative to the way in which Kurdishness is discussed in popular media and discourse in Turkey. It thus challenges and disrupts the way in which the Kurdish question is told in Turkey. It is also transformative, it opens up space for challenge and reneweal within Kurds and Kurdishness. Translation of ethno-political identity, however, is always distraught. It includes ‘strategies of exclusion and inclusion’. The paper will thus also discuss the extent to which the diasporic brokers ‘keep a lid’ on the Kurdishness that is salvaged and translated (e.g. the silencing of ‘unsuitable’ Kurdish groups and demands, whilst encouraging and even inciting some others to speak).

In Turkey, thousands of Kurdish trans (transsexual and transvestite) women have migrated from Diyarbakir and other southeastern Kurdish regions to Istanbul, Europe and North America in pursuit of financial resources, ‘freedom’ and safety since the 1990s. Original ethnographic fieldwork in Diyarbakir in 2012, including structured interviews and participant observation with over 20 trans, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and heterosexual trans-desiring individuals, shows the cause of violence targeting gender non-conforming people is produced on the level of the state, the family, and within the trans sex-worker network’s competition for control of access to high paying clientele. As a result civil war between armed Kurdish militia members and the Turkish state in the 90s, many Kurdish families were forced to leave their villages and take refuge in Diyarbakir. It is no coincidence that many trans sex-workers there come from families uprooted by the conflict of the 1990s. Contrary to popular belief in Turkey, a large number of Kurdish trans sex-workers pursue illegal sex work as a means of securing income and survival rather than as a means of expressing gender non-conforming identity. Further, this study finds that in Diyarbakir a sense of belonging centered around Kurdishness is a foremost aspect of self-hood and community within the Kurdish trans sex-worker milieu. Narratives of migration by Kurdish trans sex-workers in Diyarbakir demonstrate the complexity of social hierarchies which are navigated on a daily basis by trans sex-workers in Turkey—woman and man, biological son and queer family daughter, sex worker/activist and student, Kurd and Turk. Temporary migration for sex work purposes occurs regularly between Diyarbakir and Western Turkey, as many young Kurdish trans women lead double lives as male providers for their families. Oftentimes Kurdish trans sex-workers are three-steps removed from accessing legal social and economic resources due to exemption by military conscription laws. Many trans women in Diyarbakir resist state and local violence through migration, by pursuing survival through the navigation of hierarchies within their own sex-worker milieu, by becoming activists for LGBT rights, or by obtaining a sex change and marrying legally. All Kurdish trans sex-workers interviewed supported the notion of Kurdish resistance in Turkey, whether by voting for the BDP, or by joining public rallies. As an exceptional lens through which to examine the working of power under the Turkish state, the narratives of Kurdish trans sex-workers paint a complex picture of displacement, belonging, and resistance with regard to Othering and Kurds.