Uncovering Kurdish Women’s Voices in the Archives : Dr Farangis Ghaderi

Farangis Ghaderi, research fellow for DAME and joint director of CKS, will present her recent work.
Uncovering Kurdish Women’s Voices in the Archives 
Women are highly marginalized in Kurdish cultural and intellectual history. The history of Kurdish literature is virtually a men’s history, and Kurdish women’s contribution to the development of Kurdish literature has been discussed as a recent phenomenon, emerging from the 1980s. The exclusion of women has been reproduced and reinforced in literary anthologies, translation, and in academic research. Although uncovering new manuscripts, including women’s works, over the last decade has to some extent challenged the assumption of the “absence” of women in Kurdish cultural production, it has not instigated serious re-evaluation of the literary history and the canon. In this talk, I examine the erasure of women from Kurdish literary history and exclusionary mechanisms that Kurdish women writers have faced, from patriarchy to statelessness and cultural and linguistic suppression as well as the power dynamic between Kurdish political and cultural forces. Drawing on my recent investigation and scoping of public and private archives in Iraqi Kurdistan, I demonstrate opportunities that Kurdistan’s archives offer for uncovering women’s voices.