Mellan hemmet och bergen : Fängslade kurdiska partikvinnors vokala motstånd och sångens politik

As one of the largest demographics of political prisoners in Turkey and among the most incarcerated women politicians in the world, Kurdish women are able to share precious knowledge about anti-imperialist feminist struggle. Framed by Adriana Cavarero’s (2005) theory of vocal expression, Patricia Hill Collins’ (2000) notion of self-definition, and Saidiya Hartman’s (2019) critical fabulation of the Black chorus, I have conducted a text analysis of imprisoned Kurdish women MPs’ letters to understand how they practice a vocal resistance in contradiction to the binary economy that privileges political speech to Man and relegates Woman to silence or the maternal lullaby. Instead, this thesis argues that Kurdish party women practice a politics of song. Meaning, that the sound of the Kurdish party women’s voices communicate their uniqueness in excess of patriarchal scripts, creating in-between them a co-sonorous, democratic space where speech itself becomes the embodied site of political subjectivity and freedom affirmed through the sensuous act of reciprocal listening. Emerging from the rupture between their lips is a voice of “I am”, neither confined to the domestic sphere nor distanced in the guerrilla mountains, but “here”.