Kurdish Militants & Feminist Violences: Expanding Fanonian Violence through Jineolojî

The art (!) of committing acts of (militarized) violences has conventionally been attributed to men, thereby rendering the agency of women as perpetrators invisible. Even if their existence is acknowledged, they're often looked at as a homogenous entity of victims falling into the trap of patriarchal whims and fancies. The discussion around the construction of military structures is premised on the theorizations of 'militarised masculinities' as given by scholars like Cynthia Enloe, where women engaging in combat are subsumed within patriarchal victimhood narratives. The discourse surrounding these women is often limited to the dichotomous discussion about how violence is masculine/patriarchal and how 'violent' women masculinize themselves in such roles. However, I here aim to reimagine certain violences that instead of being 'masculine or patriarchal', are rather 'feminist'. To do this, I anchor my theoretical framework in Fanon's theory of violence as a cleansing force, revisiting and reinterpreting it through a feminist lens and exploring how violence(s) committed by women liberates them not only from traditional colonization, but also the colonization of patriarchy. To further explore these feminist violences, I analyze Jineoloji (women's science) as introduced by Abdullah Öcalan- arguing that this strand of (Kurdish) feminism builds its major ideological framework through active military resistance with militant groups like PKK, YPJ and Peshmerga. Violence therefore, can be feminist.