The Mother, the Politician, and the Guerrilla: Women's Political Imagination in the Kurdish Movement

This is a brilliantly original reading of the nature of the resistance to the Turkish state's Kurdish policies by the Kurdish Women's Freedom Movement. The book is beautifully written even lyrical in places a kind of poetic tribute to the possibilities this movement embodies.--Joan Wallach Scott Institute for Advanced Study The Mother the Politician and the Guerrilla is a captivating story of Kurdish women persuading us to listen attentively to women's political imagination. Drawing from postcolonial decolonial and Black studies the book poetically narrates and eloquently theorizes the Kurdish women's power to transform the ruling relations.--Shahrzad Mojab coauthor of Revolutionary Learning: Marxism Feminism and Knowledge The Mother the Politician and the Guerrilla intervenes in discussions on decolonialism and feminism by introducing the example of the Kurdish Women's Freedom Movement. Üstündağ shows how the practices and the concepts of the movement contribute to debates on how the past present and future can be critically rethought in revolutionary ways. In the movement's images figures voices bodies and their reverberations Üstündağ elaborates a new political imagination that has emerged in Kurdistan through women's acts and speech. This political imagination unfolds between flesh body voice language. It is the result of Kurdish women's desire to find new ways of being and becoming between the necessary and the possible. Focusing on the figures of the mother the woman politician and woman guerilla Üstündağ argues that the Kurdish Women's Freedom Movement changes what politics consists of including its matter relationality temporality and spatiality. Although anchored in the specific Kurdish experiences the book puts the movement into conversation with feminist political theory psychoanalysis Black Studies Queer Studies and Decolonial Studies. In solidarity with the Kurdish Movement's tradition of resistance to History with a capital H that Kurds have built through reiterated performance the book seeks to establish what new entanglements with wide-ranging thought the movement offers as a provocation for contemporary politics. Nazan Üstündağ is Patrimonies Program Fellow at the Gerda Henkel Foundation.