Militant Mothers of the Kurdish Resistance: Statelessness, Mothering and Subaltern Politics in Contemporary Turkey

Abstract

This dissertation looks at the ways in which Kurdish women in Turkey produce insurgent bodies,non-statist discourses of resistance, and anti-national forms of kinship through radical practices of mothering and reproduction. Focusing on the politicization/militarization of the domestic space, the reproductive body, children, and racialized grief by Kurdish women, my research takes issue with the scholarship on war and militancy which constructs militancy as an exclusively masculine form of insurgency and sees motherhood and reproduction as private, apolitical sites of affective relations. It also disrupts Global North feminist frameworks that see mothers as vessels of peace by revealing Kurdish mothers’ militant and at times destructive mothering practices.