What follows is adapted from Handan Çağlayan’s ethnographic study Women in the Kurdish Movement: Mothers, Comrades, Goddesses. Çağlayan probes how “a disposition against gender inequality and violence against women has been integrated into the political struggle based on Kurdish identity.” In a chapter titled “Jin Jiyan Azadi: Embracing Kurdishness Through Womanhood,” Caglayan explores how Kurdish women in Turkey transformed their double-sense of victimhood (as members of an oppressed minority and the “second sex”) through collective action.
One of the most significant reflections of this turn came through women’s funerals, which started in the 2000s. Women began taking responsibility for holding the funerals of women murdered on the pretext of honor in Diyarbakır and neighboring cities.
The first such funeral was held in Mardin for Şemse Allak, who was stoned to death by her brothers on 21 November 2002. While she remained in a coma for seven months in Diyarbakır, her care was undertaken by the Women’s Center (Kadın Merkezi, KAMER), women HADEP members, and the women’s units of the Diyarbakır Branch of İHD and Diyarbakır Bar Association. After her family refused to organize her funeral after her death on 7 May 2003, other arranged the funeral themselves. Allak’s family refused to claim her because she had supposedly dishonored them. In November 2003, 15-year-old Kadriye Demirler was murdered by her 19-year-old brother with a stone and a cleaver. Women organized a sit-in protest before holding her funeral themselves.
This sight of women carrying the coffins on their shoulders of women, murdered on the pretext of honor, and walking en masse to the graveyard to perform the burials, turned upside down all the gendered codes of Muslim funerals, which are traditionally conducted solely by men. Regardless of the deceased person’s gender, the coffin is carried by men while the funeral prayers are performed by men in the mosque and blessings are requested by men. Giving blessings is a symbolic statement that the material or spiritual debts, wrongdoings and faults of the deceased have been forgiven. During this ritual, women must remain in the mosque’s courtyard without taking up too much space, and stand either behind or apart from the male community. Those who violate this rule are warned by the imam. Transporting the coffin from the mosque to the graveyard and burying the body is done by men while women are expected to watch the procedure without intervening, although they can lament as loudly as they wish. Thus, the final duty regarding the deceased, which is one of the most important rituals of social life, is solely performed by men. Women are expected to remain as invisible as possible, whether outside or in their reserved rooms in closed spaces like funeral home or condolence houses. Given these traditions, the women’s funerals represented a radical protest whereby women completely reversed all the traditional codes governing gender roles and space in funerals.
The increase in funerals that paralleled the expansion of the armed conflict from the mid-1980s was one factor that facilitated the emergence of women’s funerals. Already, the funerals of those killed in fighting or murdered by unknown assailants had already gone beyond religious rituals to become political demonstrations. This transformation also involved a partial shift in the male-dominated funeral procedure in that women had already started to participate in marches and ceremonies in the graveyards. Nevertheless, a funeral procedure in which all rituals were performed only by women was a striking symbol of women’s empowerment. Owning the funerals of the female victims murdered for supposedly “dishonoring” their families or losing their “purity” meant standing up against defining honor through women’s bodies, sexuality, and behavior, and defining certain behaviors as unsuitable for women, such as losing one’s “purity.” Thus, these ceremonies, organized by women for women, were extraordinary in both their form and content. Given that, until then, the main focus of Kurdish women’s protests had been state violence, the women’s funerals marked the first step toward including domestic violence in Kurdish women’s political struggle.
Several factors can explain the diversification of women’s political struggle. One is interaction with other women’s movements in Turkey and their wider agenda. Another is the gender equality perspective of the Kurdish political movement’s ideology. However, the most decisive factor is women’s increasing awareness about the inequalities and violence that they witnessed and/or experienced in everyday life. This awareness has had a transformative effect in the way that the gender equality perspective expanded from the ideological level to taking a stance in practice. Thus, women started to mobilize the power in terms of organization and action that they had accumulated within the Kurdish movement to struggle against violence against women and gender inequality. Significantly, they pursued this struggle, not as a distinct agenda, but in articulation with the general political agenda of the Kurdish movement.
Hence, in the 2000s, the Kurdish women’s movement has been marked by the interwoven pursuit of rights claims and a disposition against violence that situated womanhood and Kurdishness in conjunction with each other. The disposition against gender inequality and violence against women has been integrated into the political struggle based on Kurdish identity. One of the most important symbols of this integration was the slogan of the mass campaign against violence against women and the murders of women in the name of honor, run by the women’s units of the Democratic Society Party (Demokratik Toplum Partisi, DTP) in 2008, which involved marches, meetings, and gatherings: Em jin in, namusa tu kesi nine, namusa me azadiya me ye! The first two clauses of this slogan were a radical feminist manifesto that read, “We are women, we are nobody’s honor” while the last clause read, “Our honor is our freedom.” This linked women’s claims to own their bodies indirectly to the claim to be free as Kurds.
Another slogan that marked Kurdish women’s political activities in the 2000s is Jin Jiyan Azadi. The slogan is attractive for its spelling and rhythm and significant for its connotations. For example, jin and jiyan might be considered for identifying women with life, as well as emphasizing that womanhood is important in itself. However, jin does not involve an essentialist glorification of womanhood. The slogan hints at a radical political stance, given a gender regime where being a woman corresponded to a subordinate status, gaining recognition required acting like a man, where women’s bodies and sexuality were defined as men’s property, and where honor is a constitutive element of male identity. It also means claiming and supporting womanhood as a valuable identity independent of manhood. Jiyan as the expression of the claim to the right to life while azadi is the claim to freedom, symbolizing the mutuality between womanhood and Kurdishness in women’s political participation. Above all, during the 2000s, women understood, read, and embraced Kurdishness less through traditional gender roles or cultural factors but increasingly in terms of a political disposition toward states of womanhood…
Motherhood identity was also at play in the funerals, which have had a significant meaning in this transformative process. Funerals form one of the most intense cases of collective action: “Wherever there was a martyr, we would go. We would tell our concerns to the mothers, to share … then … I became a member of the human rights [association] … then I became a member of the HADEP.” Women’s funerals in general have had a critical role in transforming the motherhood identity, and in the reframing of Kurdishness as a politically loaded collective identity. Women’s funerals have had a similar function in claiming womanhood as a political identity.
The politicization of motherhood identity had a significant role in women’s political activism; but it did not have immediate consequences for dissolving the traditional gender roles. The identities of comrade and warrior woman, or politician woman were effective in unsettling the traditional gender roles, and setting the grounds for the constitution of gender relations on an egalitarian basis. Here, it would be apt to note that for Kurdish women gender equality was a long-term political priority. I’ve noted that male members of the party have refrained from open objection to women’s equal representation, even if they did not agree with the equality in representation. In parallel, women’s representation has been treated as a matter of prestige and a signifier of the righteousness and legitimacy of the Kurdish political movement. For women politicians and activists, equal representation was just one aspect of women’s emancipation through participation in the public sphere. First, the adoption of gender egalitarian preferences by the Kurdish political movement was essentially a result of women’s struggles, their extraordinary commitment and hard work in party politics to the point of self-devotion as well as in grassroots organizations. Self-devotion and commitment might be considered as the reproduction of traditional gender roles. However, women’s political commitment and hard work have facilitated women’s participation in the decision-making and administrative processes by means of the particular organizational models that they developed. In other words, women’s gradual political empowerment, certainly, started from within the private sphere and the gender roles that define it. However, it was just the start, paving the way toward the development of women’s organizational capacities that enabled them to struggle for decision-making powers.
So, second, women have also struggled to transform the male-dominant political vocabulary and culture. It is a fact that women politicians have so far led a noteworthy change in both local administration and parliamentary politics on the basis of women’s perspective. However, as of May 2019 it is too early to talk about the successes and/or failures of women when it comes to this goal…
“ … I am a woman, a Kurd, and a social being. As I took my first steps [into the movement] it was Kurdism. In the Kurdish struggle I realized that I should in fact participate as woman, and that this is universal.”
Some of my interviewees, who defined themselves as Kurdish women, voiced demands that can be related to the motherhood role. Some in this category questioned their subordinate positions in the family, society, and organizations in which they participated. The second group emphasized the need to end this subordination. The variations in women’s demands are related to the heterogeneous composition of the Kurdish women’s identity. Thus, both the discursive strategies and the demands that run through the Kurdish political movement in respect of Kurdish women’s identity are plural. These demands, all, are related to women’s empowerment. But only some of them challenge the established gender relations…
I shall also note that Kurdish women’s political activism, shaped by the rights claims along ethnic, gender, and class lines, has been in constant interaction with the women’s movements in Turkey and worldwide.
I want to emphasize that Kurdish women’s goal of changing the political vocabulary and culture, which are related to their claims to life and freedom, will require a long-term struggle. Gültan Kışanak, who was arrested on 31 October 2016, when she was the co-mayor of the Diyarbakır Metropolitan Municipality is still in prison as of May 2019, reads this struggle as follows: “… women’s movement will continue in its march, relying on its own experiences, and drawing upon the women’s movements worldwide. This march will be determined by the dream of women to build a free and democratic future in peace…”