Watson Events

Women have been at the forefront of many of the political and military struggles in the Kurdish Middle East, most visibly so since the start of the ‘Rojava Revolution’ in 2012. But women have in fact since the foundation of the PKK in 1978 played a key role in the ideological and political development of the Liberation Movement as a whole; as guerrillas, activists, politicians, mothers and prisoners. Based on her ethnographic work with the Kurdish Women's Liberation Movement in different parts of Kurdistan, Isabel Käser will discuss how the women's autonomous organizational structures have taken shape and how the process of becoming a freedom fighter unfolds in party education. By asking what kind of femininity has developed over the past 40 years of struggle, Käser's talk analyses the emancipatory power the PKK holds but also zooms into some of the tensions that arise from the interplay between militarism, the party’s body politics and the movement’s revolutionary quest for a more democratic Middle East.

Center for Middle East Studies

Co-sponsored by the Department of Anthropology