Book Launch: Kurdish Women Through History, Culture and Resistance

Join us for the launch of Kurdish Women Through History, Culture, and Resistance, edited by Shahrzad Mojab. This book is a study of the lives and struggles of Kurdish women in the past while also envisioning the social, cultural, and sexual transformation of gender relations for a future that is upon us. This anthology offers a rejuvenated radical analysis of transnational feminism by focusing on the interrelations between social forces and structures that constitute the totality of gender relations in Kurdish society at local, regional, and global levels. Stories of daily encounters of women’s bodies and sexualities with the state, patriarchal relations, religion, borders, and refugee camps is centered in some of the analyses; others explore the voices, images, and writings of women in cinema, songs, poems, folktales, and memoirs. The collective feminist ethos of the book is directed towards overcoming the absences and omissions of Kurdish gender relations in Kurdish Studies and in the study of women and gender relations in the Middle East and North Africa.

Chair: Alissa Trotz, Professor of Caribbean Studies, New College, and Women and Gender Studies Institute

Discussant: Gulay Kilicaslan, Assistant Professor, Department of Law and Legal Studies, Carleton University

Editor: Shahrzad Mojab, Professor Emerita, Adult Education and Community Development and Women and Gender Studies Institute

Chapter Author: Susan Benson-Sokmen, SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow, Centre for Feminist Research, York University and Sessional Instructor, Women and Gender Studies Institute

Chapter Author: Elif Genc, PhD Student, Anthropology, University of Toronto