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. UEstundag 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 UEstundag 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, UEstundag 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.

About the Author
Nazan UEstundag is an Independent Scholar. Between 2020 and 2023, she was a Patrimonies Program Fellow at the Gerda Henkel Foundation. Between 2005 and 2018, she worked as an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Bog azici University, Turkey. She was subsequently an Academy in Exile and IIE- Scholar Rescue Fund Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien.


Book Information
ISBN 9781531505523
Author Nazan UEstundag
Format Paperback
Page Count 272
Imprint Fordham University Press
Publisher Fordham University Press
Weight(grams) 404g