Dilar Dirik, The Kurdish Women’s Movement: History, Theory, Practice. London: Pluto Press, 2022. 

Discussed at our Book Club on March 7, 2023.

Dilar Dirik was born in Antakya and grew up in Offenbach am Main. She is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oxford and holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Cambridge. She has written on the Kurdish struggle for a range of publications including openDemocracy and ROAR. She tweets at @Dlrdrk1.

The Kurdish women’s movement was forged over several decades of struggle, most recently in the fight against ISIS. Dirik traces the movement’s origins, evolution, and political practice, drawing on original research and ethnographic fieldwork in guerrilla camps, in radical women’s academies, and in self-organized refugee camps.

Book club members found the history of the women’s movement in the 1990s to be very useful, as well as the account of the various organizations and military units that Kurdish women formed.  The chapter on revolutionizing love was popular in the group, as was the demand to “kill the man.”  We discussed the subject of movement celibacy versus the power of sexuality and love of family.

The chapter on Bakur addresses Kurdish political parties (relying on The Purple Color of Kurdish Politics, which we just read), but most of the book is about revolutionary socialism.  Members noted that the author has a notable ideological attachment. 

Several members found reading it very emotional because it caused them to relive events. One woman from Bashur said it triggered memories of fleeing in the 1990s. Another member had a cousin who had been a PKK military commander in the early 1990s; the cousin was executed by the PKK.  It was dismaying to him that the book devotes only one paragraph to the PKK’s dark period in that decade.

We had a stimulating discussion of the desire for revolution versus the choice to use tools that the system provides, in order to bring about fundamental social change.

Available for purchase from Pluto Press.