Representation of women in the new Kurdish cinema

Without doubt, the debates over the world of Kurdish cinema are rooted in the fact that it is a representation of a people which has not become a nation or a state. By virtue of being a discursive space for political subjects who activate their own history and collective memory in the face of a power which imposes violence, mourning, assimilation and destruction, Kurdish cinema is also a representation of a world expressed from a counter-hegemonic position. In that respect, despite historical and regional variation in the representation of the subjects, its political discourse consistently enunciates the primacy of spaces of existence against annihilation, and struggle against the reality of massacre/war/genocide. In the films from Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey, the collective memory of representations of women as political subjects in the intersecting universe of the past, the present and the future reveal powerful spaces of resistance. As they contest the acts of the power/patriarchy against those others/subalterns it designates, they also reveal the other/subaltern's discursive space and the practices of the self as politics of resistance in both the public and the private sphere. Within this thesis, I analyze examples of Kurdish Cinema from Iran, Iraq, Syrian and Turkey in the post 2010 era of political transformation. In this context, I present a discourse analysis and discuss the political transformation of seventeen films through feminist methodology with a focus on the representation of women. Accordingly, I discuss the representation of women in Kurdish under the subheadings of memory, political subject, and violence in a theoretical framework. I also assess the gaze of both male and female directors through feminist literature, and analyze the female subjects within the space of such gaze. Key Words: Kurdish Cinema, collective memory, political subject, others/subalterns, discourse analysis, feminist methodology, representation of women.