The Kurdish Women's Organizing from the Feminist Neo-Institutionalist Perspective.
writing by: Lucie Drechselova.
Kurds in Turkey: Ethnographies of Heterogeneous Experiences.
2019

In March 2014, the “democratizing package” in Turkey allowed political parties to be chaired jointly by a man and a woman. This legislative measure came about after being de facto practiced for nine years by the pro-Kurdish parties. The introduction of co-chairing in 2005 was one of the major achievements of the Kurdish women’s movement. Intra-party – mostly male – opponents of the project argued that the existence of the co-chairing system would serve as a pretext for the closure of the party. The closure eventually happened but the co-chairing system survived and was legalized in 2014. Couple of weeks later, still in March 2014, municipal elections took place, in which the pro-Kurdish parties introduced the co-chairing system to local governments. The party nominated male and female co-mayors to almost all of its 100 municipalities in the southeast region. However, the co-mayoral system, an extension of the – now legal – co-chairing system in political parties, has faced severe negative response from the state and has largely been dismantled in the following years. /.../ The opening story of the co-chairing system spells out the main puzzle around which this paper revolves: how to explain the feminization of pro-Kurdish political parties? The feminist neo-institutionalist approach helps to elucidate this point by focusing on the evolution of women’s political organizing and the positive action measures within the pro-Kurdish parties in Turkey. This perspective reveals the contours of the changing morphology of the pro-Kurdish women’s movement. Kenny suggests from a feminist neo-institutionalist perspective that single case studies are particularly relevant as they allow capturing “the complex ways in which gender plays out in different institutional sites.” This is also the objective of this paper which builds upon my doctoral research focusing on the entry points of women into local politics in Turkey. It mainly draws on non-participant observation and fifty interviews carried out between 2015 and 2017 in Diyarbakır, Mardin, Siirt as well as the pro-Kurdish party offices in Izmir and Ankara, coupled with several interviews in Paris and London. [1]