Decolonizing Gendered Knowledge: Feminist Epistemologies, Political Legitimacy, and the Anthropology of Resistance

Abstract (English)

Over the past half-century, feminist and decolonial scholarship has critically interrogated the production of knowledge about women in politically contested and marginalized spaces. As feminist anthropologists and scholars working on Kurdish women’s struggles, we engage with questions of epistemic justice, political legitimacy, and feminist methodologies that challenge dominant research paradigms. However, the issues we confront are not unique to Kurdish studies; they resonate across feminist, Indigenous, and decolonial research traditions that critically examine how knowledge is produced, whose voices are heard, and how methodologies shape our understanding of gendered resistance.
This panel welcomes scholars working on women’s struggles across diverse geographies, particularly those studying gendered resistance in stateless, colonized, and politically marginalized communities. We seek to explore how political legitimacy, transnational activism, and state violence shape the epistemological and methodological frameworks through which we study women’s struggles. Central to this discussion is the role of feminist reflexivity and alternative sites of knowledge production, including prisons, diasporas, revolutionary movements, and feminist networks, in decolonizing dominant knowledge systems.
By bringing together scholars working on Kurdish women’s activism and other feminist movements across the Global South and beyond, this panel aims to foster an interdisciplinary and comparative discussion on how feminist anthropologists can push the boundaries of knowledge production and redefine the politics of representation.