Kurdish Women’s Knowledge from the Margins: An Ethnographic Study on Political Legitimacy and Feminist Solidarity in Argentina

Abstract (English)

This paper examines Kurdish women’s knowledge production through a decolonial feminist and anthropological lens, focusing on how the struggle for political legitimacy shapes epistemological approaches. Drawing from my situated perspective as a Kurdish feminist, I reflect on my ethnographic fieldwork in Argentina and my ethnographic engagement with Kurdish women politicians in Turkey, exploring how knowledge is produced, translated, and contested in transnational feminist networks. My research examines how feminist solidarity spaces and diasporic political networks engage with Kurdish women’s activism, contributing to broader circulations of knowledge and resistance across stateless and politically marginalized movements.
By shifting the analytical lens to Argentina, where state terrorism is officially recognized, I interrogate how state violence, nationalist methodologies, and dominant knowledge frameworks influence the ways in which Kurdish women’s activism is represented and understood beyond Kurdistan. Conducting fieldwork in Argentina provides a critical vantage point to explore how political recognition—or the lack thereof—shapes feminist knowledge production and transnational solidarities. I argue that positioning Kurdish women’s activism within feminist solidarity movements in Argentina allows us to critically reflect on the limits and possibilities of knowledge production in the absence of political sovereignty.
Through a comparative engagement with Indigenous women’s struggles in Argentina, I explore how both groups navigate nation-state oppression, visibility politics, and the challenge for self-representation. For stateless women’s movements, visibility operates as both a political tool and a site of contestation, shaping how their struggles are recognized, mediated, and appropriated within feminist and national discourses. Moving beyond conventional representational frameworks, I examine how feminist solidarity spaces and diasporic networks function as alternative sites of knowledge production, where the politics of visibility is actively negotiated, opening new possibilities for understanding gender and power in stateless and transnational movements.
By engaging with decolonial feminist theory, multi-sited ethnography, and transnational feminist methodologies, this presentation contributes to broader anthropological debates on epistemic justice, feminist knowledge production, and political legitimacy. It invites scholars working on gendered resistance, Indigenous feminisms, and transnational solidarities to engage in dialogue on how knowledge is produced and contested in politically marginalized communities.