Book Launch: Kurdish Women Through History, Culture, and Resistance

Join us for the launch of Kurdish Women Through History, Culture, and Resistance, edited by Shahrzad Mojab. This book is a study of the lives and struggles of Kurdish women in the past while also envisioning the social, cultural, and sexual transformation of gender relations for a future that is upon us. An interdisciplinary study of, by, and with Kurdish women, this anthology offers a rejuvenated radical analysis of transnational feminism by focusing on the interrelations between social forces and structures that constitute the totality of gender relations in Kurdish society at local, regional, and global levels. Stories of daily encounters of women’s bodies and sexualities with the state, patriarchal relations, religion, borders, and refugee camps is centered in some of the analyses; others explore the voices, images, and writings of women in cinema, songs, poems, folktales, and memoirs. The collective feminist ethos of the book is directed towards overcoming the absences and omissions of Kurdish gender relations in Kurdish Studies and in the study of women and gender relations in the Middle East and North Africa.

Chair: Alissa Trotz
Professor of Caribbean Studies at New College and Women and Gender Studies. Editor of Andaiye (2020). The Point is to Change the World, London: Pluto Books.

Discussant: Gulay Kilicaslan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Law and Legal Studies at Carleton University. Her research explores questions about how forced displacements influence the political mobilization of marginalized communities. Her writings on Kurdish forced migrants, the Kurdish freedom movement, migrant agency, decolonial knowledge production, decolonial feminisms, gender-based online violence and digital feminist activism have appeared in scholarly edited books and journals. Her current research projects include a study on how the forced displacement of Kurds has impacted political mobilization dynamics in Kurdish contentious politics across Northern Kurdistan, Turkey, and Europe. Additionally, she is working on a separate SSHRC-funded project that compares the resettlement experiences of Yezidi genocide survivors and their mobilization strategies in Germany and Canada.

Chapter Author: Susan Benson-Sokmen is a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow with York University’s Centre for Feminist Research and a sessional instructor with the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on Kurdish resistance in Turkey, its remembrance, and the remembrance of revolutionary feminist pasts as a form of resistance in and for present struggles for freedom and liberation in and beyond the Middle East. Based on her doctoral research, her first monograph—Poetry of the Past: Resistance and Remembrance in Kurdistan—is under contact with Peter Lang Publishing. 

Chapter Author: Elif Genc is a PhD student in Anthropology at the University of Toronto. She recently ran as the NDP (New Democratic Party) candidate for Vaughan-Woodbridge in this last parliamentary elections. She has taught as an Adjunct Professor at Marymount College in Middle Eastern politics in NYC and St. John’s University in Western Political Thought and Revolution theory. She is also an activist in the Kurdish women's liberation movement in Canada and the USA. She has worked for the last decade with the Kurdish diaspora and has recently been researching on the oral histories and lived experiences of Kurdish refugees in Toronto particularly focusing on the past violence and trauma of the women of the community. She has published “Commoning the Komal: The Toronto Kurdish Community Centre” in the academic Journal of Ethnic and Cultural Studies in 2019. She has had features in the online journals MERIP (Middle East Research and Information Project) and KOHL: A Journal for Body and Gender Research.

Editor: Shahrzad Mojab—scholar, teacher, and activist—is internationally known for her work on the impact of war, displacement, and violence on women's work, learning and education. She is Professor Emerita of Adult Education and Community Development and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto. She served as an interim Principal of New College, Directors of Women and Gender Studies as well as Critical Studies in Equity and Solidarity, University of Toronto. She is the authors of numerous books and articles and the recipient of many awards. A unique feature of Shahrzad’s work is making knowledge accessible to the public through the use of arts such as story-telling, dance, drama, painting and film.