Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Kultur-, Sozial- und Bildungswissenschaftliche Fakultät - Institut für Asien- und Afrikawissenschaften

About the Book
Amidst ongoing wars and insecurities, female fighters, politicians, and activists of the Kurdish Freedom Movement are building a new political system that centers on gender equality. Since the Rojava Revolution, the international focus has been especially on female fighters, a gaze that has often been essentializing and objectifying, brushing over a more complex history of violence and resistance. Going beyond Orientalist tropes of the female freedom fighter, and unpacking the movement's discourse and practices around the 'free woman,' Isabel Käser looks at personal trajectories and everyday processes of becoming a militant in this movement. Based on in-depth ethnographic research in Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan, with women politicians, martyr mothers, and female fighters, she looks at how norms around gender and sexuality have been rewritten and how new meanings and practices have been assigned to women in the quest for Kurdish self-determination. Her book complicates prevailing notions of gender and war and creates a more nuanced understanding of the everyday embodied epistemologies of violence, conflict, and resistance.

Kurdish Project
Virtual Event
Women and Gender

Please register via website https://watson.brown.edu/cmes/events/2022/book-isabel-kaser-kurdish-womens-movement