The Obsession of the Turkish State with the Kurds This presentation will outline the Kurdish movement in Turkey and address the obsession of the Turkish state with Kurds by focusing on visual material. I will claim that the deep psychic attachment of the Turkish state to the figure of the Kurd stem from the fact that the state cannot otherize him/her since in the Turkish polity there is no place for the other. In order to recognize a group as the “other” we need to think of it as having desire. However, notwithstanding certain brief intervals when the question was asked “what do the Kurds want” albeit with negative connotations, the Turkish state and the public have not been interested in the desire of Kurds. Rather the Turkish state has been obsessed with annihilating the capacity of Kurds to experience desire, joy and fantasy. A related argument the presentation makes is that by binding Turkish citizens to this aim, the Turkish state rules not only over Turkish citizens behaviors but also their unconscious drives.
Universalism and the Human in the Kurdish Women’s Movement In recent years there has been a revival of the idea of universalism and a reengagement with the concept of “the human” grounded in the struggles and thought of the South. This presentation aims at joining these discussions on “the human” and “the universal,” and thereby contributing to the development of theories from the South by focusing on the knowledge Kurdish Women’s Freedom Movement has produced. Its further goal is to show what the decolonization of truth, freedom and being entails in the practices of the Kurdish Women’s Freedom Movement, which struggles both against the patriarchy of the Kurdish society and the colonization of Kurdistan by the Turkish, Iranian, Iraqi and Syrian states. I argue that the human and the universal in the Kurdish Women’s Freedom Movement are open categories that are collectively practiced by transgressing what we already are and have been, and by being inspired by our local heritage as well as the heritage of the world crafted in resistance. Decolonizing freedom, truth and being in this context is not so much a return to an original culture before colonization, as much as an exploration of new laws and norms according to which we can live, constituted by collective reflection and action.