Challenge Accepted? Systematic Erasures in Femicide Narratives from Turkey https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/41561  via @jadaliyya

The erasure of Kurdish women in debates about violence against women in Turkey has a complicated history. The issue of violence against women became an important agenda for women’s and feminist groups in the late 1980s, especially during the feminist campaigns of the 1990s.

One of the main criticisms towards the movement’s discussions and strategies at the time, particularly from Kurdish women, was that the movement was focusing exclusively on the issue of domestic violence, but not talking about state violence towards Kurdish women.

The 2000s, on the other hand, witnessed an overemphasis of Kurdishness in violence narratives. The popular media started to highlight the ethnic identities of victims and survivors in domestic violence narratives, framing these cases as so-called “honor crimes,”

embedded in “the roots of Kurdish tradition.” In other words, the discursive construction of “honor crimes” reproduced the colonialist and racist discourse of the Turkish state over Kurds as the “backward others.”

Consequently, women’s and feminist groups withdrew from specifying Kurdishness in narratives about violence against women to avoid reproducing these hegemonic discourses.

For a comprehensive analysis of how colonialist discourses of “honor crimes” frame racial and ethnic difference, see Dicle Koğacıoğlu, “The Tradition Effect: Framing Honor Crimes in Turkey,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 15, no.2 (2004): 118–151

and Nükhet Sirman, “Kürtlerle Dans,” Kültür ve Siyasette Feminist Yaklaşımlar, 2 (2007): 119-125.