Ofra Bengio
This article argues that Kurdish society historically enabled the rise of charismatic women. More recently, upheavals brought by the so-called Arab Spring have acted as a catalyst for Kurdish women to improve their social standing.
Along with gains made by Kurds in creating new autonomous spaces, the advancement of Kurdish women constitutes a “double revolution” that shows the feminist and nationalist agendas can be complementary, and not in conflict as they have for the greater part of modern history.
Kurdish women have only recently become a subject of scholarly inquiry in the West:
books devoted to the topic have only been published since 2001.
The reasons for the late “discovery” of this field of study are manifold, but the most important one is that the study of Kurds and Kurdistan in general was quite neglected for the greater part of the 20th century. However, at the turn of the 21st century, there was a sudden explosion of scholarly publications on the Kurds, which came to include Kurdish gender studies as well.
This is not to say that Kurdish women were altogether absent from the writings of missionaries, travelers, or historians. Indeed, among researchers there is a debate regarding the image of women in historical works as well as the role of Kurdish women in society. Some researchers have challenged the notion often present in these writings that Kurdish women have enjoyed far greater freedoms than their Persian, Turkish, and Arab counterparts, viewing it as part of Western observers’ inclination to romanticize Kurdish women. In addition, these researchers accuse Kurdish nationalists of promoting such an image in order to emphasize the uniqueness of the Kurds and thus advance their nationalist agenda. Shahrzad Mojab argued that with “this glorification of difference,” between Kurds and their neighbors, “solidarity among women of different backgrounds disappears and [Kurdish] patriarchal oppression is vindicated.” Generally..[1]
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