Käser, Isabel Martina (2020). Leaving the movement: former PKK militants and the remaking of post-revolutionary subjectivities (Unpublished). In: Annual Middle East Studies Association Conference (MESA). Washington D.C., USA, online. 2020.
This paper looks at the socio-political trajectories of former Kurdish female fighters who have left the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK, Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê) and live as refugees in Iraqi Kurdistan or the European diaspora. By analysing the life stories of former fighters, this paper highlights patterns of militancy, migration, and political activism, as well as issues around body politics. In recent years, the female fighters of PKK and Women’s Protection Units (YPJ, Yekîneyên Parastina Jin) in North-eastern Syria (Rojava), have attracted much media and scholarly attention due to their fight against the co-called Islamic State. However, these publications in the wake of the Rojava Revolution (2012-) have often been essentialising and objectifying. While women are truly at the forefront of many of the armed and political struggles in the Kurdish Middle East, the idealising and sensationalising of female fighters brushes over much more complex histories and everyday experiences of violence and resistance. Based on ethnographic research with former fighters, this paper traces the individual trajectories of women who went from being revolutionaries, to ‘traitors’ to the cause, to refugees. Conceptually, this paper speaks to debates in transnational and postcolonial feminist thought, which show that post-conflict societies usually experience a shift towards more conservative gender norms, and that spaces carved out by women during a period of revolutionary struggle often close again post-conflict (Cockburn 2013, Enloe 2014; Hale 2001; White 2007). This paper zooms into a context where the revolution is not over but where militants leave because they are disillusioned, battle-fatigued, wounded or want to start a family. I ask how revolutionary ideologies and practices, such as the PKK’s commitment to gender equality, has played out in the lives of my respondents, during and post-revolution. I will share preliminary findings of my new postdoc project, which shows that women’s activism moves on a continuum, from armed resistance to political activism in the diaspora, but that there are also those who are so traumatised by their experiences in the PKK that they abstain from activism all together. I argue that while the PKK is committed to gender equality in its ranks and the societies it seeks to revolutionise, many former fighters upon their return to civilian life reproduce conservative gender norms. This, however, is highly dependent on their class and degree of education before joining the PKK, what happened to them in the party and where they seek refuge upon leaving.
Item Type: |
Conference or Workshop Item (Speech) |
|---|---|
Division/Institute: |
06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of Art and Cultural Studies > Institute of Social Anthropology |
UniBE Contributor: |
Käser, Isabel Martina |
Subjects: |
300 Social sciences, sociology & anthropology |
Language: |
English |
Submitter: |
Anja Julienne Wohlgemuth |
Date Deposited: |
21 Apr 2021 16:05 |
Last Modified: |
05 Dec 2022 15:50 |
URI: |
https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/154974 |
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