UC Merced

This project centers Kurdish women in modern-day Syria, as native to the land, to demonstrate how Syria’s deployment of state biopower produces stateless-ness and refugee-ness among indigenous communities. Borrowing Michel Foucault’s notion of biopower and Yen Len Espiritu’s reconceptualization of the refugee, I frame the minoritization process of Kurds during the French Mandate period, their subsequent denationalization from the nation-state, and their violent displacement and dispossession that is forcing them to become refugees of war during the 2012 Syrian war, as technologies of exclusion, in the context of colonialism, empire, and war for the past 100 years, that are not over. I seek to answer what are the ways in which Kurdish women’s movements across Mediterranean waters are represented in public discourse? Using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) I analyzed a sample of 28 newspaper articles that I obtained from ethnic media in the first five years of the war. I examined semantic strategies of marginalization to theorize about hierarchies of power, to help us remember the violences of a colonial past that are in danger of being forgotten, and to unpack ideological underpinnings of discourse that have become naturalized and may be out of vision through the ‘feminization of the Orient’ and the ‘Orientalization of the feminine’ (Dobie). My analysis shows three emerging themes: refugees as burdens to the nation, [white] savior narratives that deploy humanitarian discourses, and the prominent (in)visibility of Kurdish women in public discourse. As Kurdish women’s bodies wash ashore, they enact their agency, even in death.