The Mother, the Politician, and the Guerrilla

Focusing on the figures of the mother, the woman politician and woman guerilla, Üstündağ argues that the Kurdish Women’s Freedom Movement changes what politics consists of, including its matter, relationality, temporality, and spatiality. Although anchored in the specific Kurdish experiences, her new book puts the movement into conversation with feminist political theory, psychoanalysis, Black Studies, Queer Studies, and Decolonial Studies.

The Takhayyul Project joins the author, Nazan Üstündağ, to discuss her new book, The Mother, the Politician, and the Guerrilla, and the way in which political imagination has shaped, and been shaped, through women’s acts and speech within revolutionary movements. All members of the public are cordially invited.

About the speaker

Nazan Üstündağ is a sociologist specialising in social policy, gendered subjectivities and state violence in Kurdistan. Between 2020 and 2023, she was a Patrimonies Program Fellow at the Gerda Henkel Foundation. Before that, she held a joint fellowship from Academy at Risk and IIE-Scholar Rescue Fund and was affiliated with the Forum for Transregional Studies in Berlin (2018-2020).

Accessibility

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About TAKHAYYUL

TAKHAYYUL is a collaborative research project that will ethnographically excavate the imaginative forces in the formation of populist religious aspirations in the interconnected geographies recently coined as the Balkan-to-Bengal complex - namely the Balkans, the Middle East, and South Asia.