The Sexual Politics of Kurdish Women Fighters and Gendered Experience of War

Kurdistan encompasses parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran, which makes its people particularly vulnerable to the conflicts engulfing the region. Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century, Allied forces attempted to create several countries within the empire’s former boundaries, Kurdistan being one of them.This did not happen for a number of reasons, and millions of Kurds were left without a state of their own. Since then, members of the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) have been engaged in a long-standing fight with Turkey, and have been looking for ways to gain international support for their cause.One such potential was seen in “girls with guns” which has objectified Kurdish women fighters presenting a false, vaguely glamorous reality to international audiences of “empowered” women leading the fight against the Islamic State.

The image of the Kurdish female fighter, defending her land that is recognised by no one,has become evocative in the international media. She is young, beautiful and yet stoic. She is in camouflage overalls and yet feminine.This is the image has been created and appropriated by the international media. These women are hailed as feminist icons, in stark contrast to her oppressed counterparts who have no voice. A couple of years ago, British retail brand H&M released an entire collection of guerrilla overalls with the image of Kurdish female combatants on t-shirts, apparel and accessories. Yet, no one really knows or engages in discourses about the social, political and cultural histories of not just the fighters, but of Kurdish women in general.

It is believed that almost 40% of the combatants in Kurdistan are women. Kurdish women first took up arms in the 1990s, as a part of the PKK, that has been engaged in a battle with the Turkish state for the right of self-determination with the demand for a separate Kurdish nation-state. These women form part of the Women’s Protection Units (YJP) and draw their political beliefs from the Marxist-Leninist ideas of their exiled leader, Abdullah Ocalan. These women have most often been treated as objects of fascination by the western media. News sources by British and French media houses have always presented Kurdish female combatants in their moments of femininity- of them living in sister-like communities in caves, braiding each other’s hair or plucking their eyebrows- not in their moments of power. They are often contrasted and juxtaposed against the brutish masculinity of the ISIS members they fight and eventually kill.

They are given the status of heroes but their origins, stories, lives or perspective are rarely discussed in mainstream media. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is prevalent and common for these women as they frequently encounter death. Bombings and attacks and open fire from both the Turkish and ISIS sides are so rampant and fatal events escalate so quickly that these women don’t even have time to process their experiences and their trauma. Most of these women have had to run away from their families and communities to be a part of their army. Despite the Kurdish community being more liberal than other Middle-Eastern Muslim communities, their norms regarding women and family are still very conservative.

Many combatants are teenagers, who had to flee their communities because of the prevalence of early marriage in some Kurdish communities. Ironically, the image of these same female combatants is represented in the diametrically opposite way in Turkish press, where the focus is on their sexuality depiction as ‘female terrorists’ and sexual slaves to their male counterparts. Newspaper headlines such as ‘Condoms and Contraceptives Found in PKK Caves’ are common. These portrayals have fuelled the development of a new-racism propagated by the media. There is also the issue of the representation of Kurdish women in general, who are almost always depicted as submissive, oppressed and without a voice by both the Western media and Turkish media alike. While the Turkish side mainly focuses on an exaggerated account of high birth rates, child marriages, polygamy and honour killings, both focus on the suppressed sexuality of Kurdish women — the female combatant’s sexuality which is questionable and that of the voiceless Kurdish woman’s which is  ‘honourable’ and follows community and cultural norms.

According to the ethnographic study of Nerina Weiss (“Theorizing Women and War in Kurdistan, A Feminist and Critical Perspective”, Kurdish Studies, May 2018) while the discourse of gender equality and female empowerment was always prevalent in the politics of the Kurdish Workers’ Party and in the nation-building process for Kurdistan, the roles available to women are very limited. Women involved in Kurdish politics can fit into only three roles prescribed to them- first, the political ‘male-female’, who is not treated as a woman and whose sexual desire, emotional attachments and attachments are all drawn from her male counterparts in politics. Her political existence is dependent on the existence of the male comrade. Second, is the guerrilla fighter, who is treated as the daughter of the nation, whose purpose is to fight but under the guidance of her father who must protect her sexuality at all costs. And finally the political mother who reflects the values of the nation and is the mother of the combatants, the fighters and all those whoare lost for the cause. They are well known public figures but unlike the political or guerrilla women, they are treated as just the normative social women whose sexualities are controlled for the sole purpose of male pleasure and legitimate childbirth.

There are very few accounts of Kurdish women in ethnographic, anthropological and political histories, but their representation has been intense, paradoxical and complex. For the Kurdish female combatant, her presence in the battlefield is not just a war against the people who have not granted her a nation, but also a war against patriarchy itself. The female experience of war and trauma is still not a matter of mainstream discussion and has been confined to the pages of niche academic traditions. The exclusion of women from histories is not just a moral or ethical dilemma it is part of a larger failure in the attempt at preventing war and their horrific consequences for the lives of millions of individuals.

Shromona Jana

Intern

AGA