Racialised & Gendered Unseen Workers: Displaced Kurdish Women in Pink-Collar Works in Germany (2024)

2024, Historical Materialism

In this paper, I will analyze gendered and racialized social reproduction practices through pink-collar workers who have experienced forced displacement. I will do it by asking about the effects of displacement on social reproduction. I will also ask what makes pink-collar work unique and possible for Kurdish women in Germany. The rigid separation between production and reproduction under capitalism has created a gendered and racialized labour hierarchy. Migration patterns have surged in the last 50 years, with many from the global south moving to the north for “better”; exploitation. Predominantly women migrants now fill domestic roles abandoned by native women entering the formal workforce, perpetuating this cycle of inequality. The “pink collar” jobs , which are created by categorizing social reproduction, develop on the axis of -gender/migration/social reproduction. Therefore, this process has globally mainstreamed both gendered migration and racialized - and previously gendered - social reproduction. In light of this theoretical background, my paper draws a line of analysis on the gendered and racialized labour process of pink-collar Kurdish migrant women in Germany. The growing number of Kurdish women in Germany have also experienced unique challenges at the intersection of ethnic, gender and class identities. The most common obstacles are limited job opportunities, domestic labour liability, male- dominated working conditions, Turkish-Kurdish confrontation, and integration problems. This situation leads women, who are seen as the providers of social reproduction, to pink-collar jobs. In the post-war period, women in our target group, who have no previous work experience, generally define house cleaning, child/elderly care and home-based work as “familiar jobs”. In my fieldwork, I will interview 10 pink-collar worker Kurdish women aged 35-50 who were displaced by forced migration after 2015. Methodologically, the multi-sited and feminist ethnographic method is adopted to make visible the statistically invisible data and challenges 5 , and gendered and racialized forms of social reproduction at the micro level. The use of ethnographic methodology allows for more realistic assessments at the micro level, as it includes field and practical data.

Forced Displacement and Changing Socio-Economic Status of Migrant Women in the Urban Kurdish Communities of Istanbul

PEOPLE: International Journal of Social Sciences, 2017

Book review: Ne Degisti?Kurt Kadinlarinin Zorunlu Goc Deneyimi [What Has Changed? Kurdish Women's Experiences of Forced Migration] by Semsa Ozar, Handan Caglayan and Ayse Tepe Dogan. International Feminist Journal of Politics (IFJP) 15 (3): 2013

2013

The Doubly Bound World of Kurdish Women

2003

It is a great honor to have been asked to edit this issue of VOICES, the newsletter of the Association for Feminist Anthropology. We have not had a" regular" issue of VOICES in a couple of years; in 2002, Sandi Morgen edited a special issue of VOICES on the critical topic of" Women and Impoverishment."[This special issue is still available for purchase.

Reproductive practises: Kurdish women responding to patriarchy

Womens Studies International Forum, 2011

Kurdish Women's Struggles with Gender Equality: From Ideology to Practice

THIRD WORLD QUARTERLY, 2021

The article explores the relationship between theory and practise in terms of gender-based equality and justice within both the armed units as well as the political-legal movement linked to the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in Turkey and transnationally. An analysis of the historical developments of both political ideology and mobilization reveals the radical shift towards a stated commitment to gender-based equality that has taken place within a wider political transformation from a nationalist independence movement to a movement pursuing radical democracy. The article focuses on the dialectical relationship between the writings of the founder of the PKK, Abdullah Öcalan, and the struggle of Kurdish female militants and political activists to challenge male hegemony and patriarchal gender norms. We recognize the centrality of Öcalan's writings in the shift away from the emphasis on national liberation to the idea of radical democracy with gender equality at is centre. However, our main argument developed in the article is to recognize the importance of women's resistance and struggle to implement gender-based equality while we also highlight gaps between ideological pronouncements and everyday practises. Throughout the article we refer to Kurdish women fighters' and activists' personal experiences within the movement, which they themselves refer to as discrimination, forms of exclusion or marginalization.

The Core of Resistance: Recognising Intersectional Struggle in the Kurdish Women's Movement

2018

The paper addresses the women's movement in the Northern Syrian region known by Kurds as Rojava, a movement whose central role in building an autonomous political project has its roots in the Kurdish nationalist struggle, specifically that organised by the Kurdish Worker's Party, also known as the PKK, in Turkey. This study brings to the fore reflections on the power relations that cross the struggle carried out by these women, who, for their part, are crossed by the intersection of gender, ethnicity and class, which feeds and composes the critical praxis of this organised struggle. The Kurdish women's political path is approached through the contradictions and ambiguities they encounter when they face the challenge of becoming aware of their own place in a political project, which at first had a nationalist character and is now beginning to gain new contours. The presence of the female figure in a political context of armed conflict endows these women with the role of challenging the boundaries on which the foundational elements of international politics rely, namely, the boundary between public and private spheres and gender roles played socially and politically. The Kurdish women's movement in Rojava disturbs the foundational boundaries of the modern nation-state alongside the hegemonic constructions of masculinity and femininity, and the militarised character of politics, which are constitutive of the modern imaginary of political community .

Invisible Lives: Gender, Dispossession and Precarity amongst Syrian Refugee Women in the Middle East

This paper attends to the connections between neoliberal and neo-developmentalist labor regimes, asylum and immigration management, and the exploitation of undocumented, refugee and migrant women based on the experiences of Syrian refugee women in Turkey. The concept of precarity is explored not just as a way of understanding intensification of insecure work within the post-Fordist framework as a marker of late capitalism, but also as a selectively applied strategy by states to people who lack 'status' or who are unable to benefit from 'membership rights'. In this matrix, Syrian women are singularly disadvantaged. Forced migrants, illegal migrants and asylum seekers are directly implicated in highly precarious work experiences at the bottom end of labor markets across the Global South, including becoming trapped in forced labor and human trafficking arrangements. Building on existing research on the experiences of Syrian women who have become migrants and asylum seek...

From Social Reproduction Theory Perspective Georgian Migrant Domestic Workers in Unye/ORDU (the full text in English and abstract in Turkish)

Mediterranean Journal of Gender and Women’s Studies, 2020

Historically, capitalist social production and reproduction relations have close interaction with patriarchal gender hierarchies. This interaction has been transformed dramatically. Especially, the interaction between patriarchal gender roles and capitalist reproduction relations has been examined and debated by the distinct branches of feminist movement. In this paper, I will investigate this interaction via activities of migrant women domestic workers in Turkey which, I believe, represent essential features of the recent global dynamics of capitalism such as informalization, feminization of un/under-paid work force, feminization of immigration, globalization of domestic works. I will introduce the results of my field research about life and working conditions among migrant domestic workers in Ünye, Ordu Province of Turkey, in the Black Sea region. I have conducted semi-structured, face to face interviews with a certain number of Georgian migrant women. This method is consistent with many of the qualitative approaches pioneered and adopted by feminist researchers. Öz: Tarihsel olarak kapitalist üretim ve yeniden üretim ilişkileri, ataerkil toplumsal cinsiyet hiyerarşileri ile yakın etkileşim içindedir. Bu etkileşim dramatik bir şekilde değişim göstermektedir. Özellikle ataerkil toplumsal cinsiyet rolleri ile kapitalist yeniden-üretim ilişkileri arasındaki etkileşim feminist hareketin çeşitli oluşumları tarafından incelenmekte ve tartışılmaktadır. Bu çalışmada, Türkiye'de bu etkileşimi temsil ettiğini düşündüğüm somut bir örnek olan Gürcistanlı, göçmen ev-içi işçilerin yaşamlarını, çalışma süreçlerini inceleyeceğim. Bu incelemenin; enformalleşme, ücretsiz/ücretli işin kadınlaşması, göçün kadınlaşması, ev-içi işçilerin küreselleşmesi gibi küresel kapitalizmin güncel görünümleriyle yakın ilişki içinde olduğunu düşünüyorum. Çalışmada, Ordu ili Unye ilçesinde çalışan Gürcistanlı, göçmen ev-içi işçilerin yaşam ve çalışma koşulları hakkında yaptığım araştırmanın sonuçlarını sunacağım. Araştırmada Gürcistanlı, göçmen ev-işçisi kadınlarla yarı-yapılandırılmış, yüz-yüze, derinlemesine görüşmeler düzenlenmiştir. Bu yöntemin niteliksel araştırma yöntemlerini uygulayan birçok feminist araştırmacı tarafından kullanıldığı tespit edilmiştir.

Double Trouble: Analyzing the Impact of Statelessness on the Status of Kurdish Women

Flux: International Relations Review, 2021

The struggle of Kurdish women at large has been, as many media outlets suggested, an extraordinary and unique example of women’s status in the Middle East. In contrast to the widespread, surface-level narrative of Kurdish women’s empowerment, a complex political, socio-historical background of Kurdish statelessness has intensified women’s empowerment or oppression. This essay will demonstrate how nationalist ideology, autonomous spaces, and violent conflict may provide the conditions for a 'double revolution' and/or 'double oppression' of stateless Kurdish women through the lens of statelessness. These three features of statelessness intersect with unique features of the stateless Kurdish populations across the Middle East to determine a woman’s status. More specifically, the case of Syrian Kurdistan exemplifies a 'double revolution' while Iraqi Kurdistan exemplifies a case of 'double oppression' for Kurdish women.

The emerging intersectional performative gender of displaced Syrian women in southeast Turkey

Journal of Gender, Place and Culture

This article explores the interconnection between intersectionality and gender performativity. It aims to understand how the interplay between multiple identities based on gender, nationality, ethnicity, religion and sexuality contributes to shaping different forms of gender performativity within the context of Syrians’ displacement in Turkey. The article presents an analysis of interview data collected from 40 Syrian refugee women living in three southeast Turkish border cities: Gaziantep, Mardin and Sanliurfa. The research used the method of personal narrative interviewing to explore changing gender practices in the context of displacement. It is argued that the emerging gender performativity of Syrian refugee women is shaped by the intersecting of their multiple identities; the interconnection between the past and the present experiences of these identities; and the different effects of identity practices over time and place on women’s lived experience and social relations.