White Women Filming Kurdish Women: The Instrumentalisation of the Kurdish Armed Struggle

ABSTRACT

This paper looks at the gendered representations of female soldiers in war films and reflects on how the role of women in war is imagined. In particular, it questions the media and popular cultural attention that the female Kurdish fighters received, and thereby contributes to the research on women engaged in political violence and their popular representation. A visual, narrative and contextual analysis of two French films (Girls of the Sun (2018), Sisters in Arms (2019)) exposes how female Kurdish combatants are depicted and for what purpose. I argue that the films contribute to the instrumentalisation of the Kurdish Freedom Movement to promote an essentialist understanding of gender and to enact civilisational superiority. I derive several implications from this analysis. First, that it fosters Islamophobic policies at home. Second, that it undermines the revolutionary political project.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender and war
• female Kurdish fighters
• film analysis
• imperial feminism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 When I speak of women/female, my understanding is not biological, but includes any person who recognises themselves in the political category of woman.

2 See for example the critiques to the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda articulated by De Almagro (Martin de Almagro 2018).

3 I place the term in brackets to point out to the constructed and imagined understanding of the “West” dialectically opposed to the “Orient”, as laid out by Said (Said 1979).

4 For an overview of the prolific Kurdish Cinema up to 2017, see (Şimşek 2019).

5 At least, the fact that the producers can finance the films proves that these films are expected to find an audience and to sell well.

6 The clash-of-civilisation is a term used by Samuel Huntington and since then, taken up and amplified by a number of conservative political actors, intellectuals and media.

7 On the Kurdish question, see Gunes and Zeydanlıoğlu 2014; on the PKK, see Joost and Akkaya 2013; on the female presence in the PKK and within the Kurdish (armed) struggle, see (Mojab 2001; Çağlayan 2012; Novellis 2018; Göksel 2019; Al-Ali and Käser 2020; Çağlayan 2020; Käser 2021); on the representation of Kurds and Kurdishness in films, media and popculture, see Smets and Sengul 2016; Smets 2016; Toivanen and Baser 2016; Rehbein et al. 2021.

8 Fot a detailed account of those principles: ecological, feminist, autonomous, confederal, self-organised, grassroot, anti-state and inspired by Bookchins libertarian-municipalism see (Gerber and Brincat 2021; Dirik 2018; 2022b).

9 However, authors have stressed the persistence of patriarchal structure, among other in the Iraqi-Kurdish society (Al-Ali and Pratt 2011).

10 As explained earlier, the film remains vague about the groups themselves, so we are left in doubt whether these are Peshmerga, YPG/YPJ or PKK/YJA-STAR.

11 Eric Zemmour, candidate to the 2022 French presidential election, claims that the Judeo-Christian civilisation is in decline and being replaced by Arabs and Islamists.