Hevaltî: Revolutionary Love in Kurdish Women’s Freedom Movement

Abstract (English)

Within the Kurdish women liberation movement (KWM), the topic of romantic love has been a source of much debate and critique. Heteronormative relationships are seen between a man and a woman as inherently patriarchal. Contrastly KWM addresses this by engaging in what is known as hevaltî which means friendship but for the purposes of this paper will be interchangeable with revolutionary love. Essentially that you strive towards self-awareness (xwebûn) through not engaging in any relationship aside from friendship with your heval (your fellow cadre in the KWM). The movement claims this is the only way that allows for men and women to fight alongside each other in the struggle for the emancipation of the Kurdish people from their colonial oppressors: Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. I will argue that the revolutionary love of hevaltî is part of a larger feminist decolonizing project from within the Kurdish movement. Revolutionary love in the movement is further explored examining how the movement attempts to transform our idea of romantic love and sexual relations into revolutionary love and in the case of the movement, hevaltî through the act of achieving and constantly striving towards self-awareness (xwebûn). This research paper, as a component of my preliminary field work, will consider the complicated and nuanced relationship that the women guerrillas of KWM’s liberation struggle have with love and sexuality from within the movement. Revolutionary love is considered an act of resistance, it is collective and dismantles oppression. In this paper through the theoretical works of mostly the late bell hooks (2000) and Sara Ahmed (2013) I will explore further these crucial aspects of the concept of revolutionary love. One that love is an act of resistance. Two that it is collective, building communities of care, and three how it dismantles systems of oppression like colonialism and how all three of these components are essential to Kurdish women’s movement’s praxis of love with all its contradictions and dilemmas. The idea of hevaltî and xwebûn is derived from the tradition of KWM both theoretically and practically from the school of Serokatî: Abdullah Öcalan’s (1999;2009;2013;2020) Through a sociocultural ethnographical approach I will draw upon the work of: Dilar Dirik (2022), Mustafa Topal (2024), Isabel Käser (2019;2020), and Nazan Üstündağ (2023). Along with primary sources and my own lived experiences in the movement.