Voices That Matter: Kurdish Women at the Limits of Representation in Contemporary Turkey, Schäfers
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A fine-grained ethnography exploring the sociopolitical power of Kurdish women’s voices in contemporary Turkey. “Raise your voice!” and “Speak up!” are familiar refrains that assume, all too easily, that gaining voice will lead to empowerment, healing, and inclusion for marginalized subjects. Marlene Schäfers’s Voices That Matter reveals where such assumptions fall short, demonstrating that “raising one’s voice” is no straightforward path to emancipation but fraught with anxieties, dilemmas, and contradictions. In its attention to the voice as form, this book examines not only what voices say but also how they do so, focusing on Kurdish contexts where oral genres have a long, rich legacy. Examining the social labor that voices carry out as they sound, speak, and resonate, Schäfers shows that where new vocal practices arise, they produce new selves and practices of social relations. In Turkey, recent decades have seen Kurdish voices gain increasing moral and political value as metaphors of representation and resistance. Women’s voices, in particular, are understood as potent means to withstand patriarchal restrictions and political oppression. By ethnographically tracing the transformations in how Kurdish women relate to and employ their voices as a result of these shifts, Schäfers illustrates how contemporary politics foster not only new hopes and desires but also create novel vulnerabilities as they valorize, elicit, and discipline voice in the name of empowerment and liberation.
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Voicing Kurdish History Center for Middle Eastern Studies
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CARAM - Centre for Anthropological Research on Affect and Materiality
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Last Week on Jadaliyya (April 24-30) - Jadaliyya
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Jadaliyya - Marlene Schäfers, Voices that Matter: Kurdish Women at the Limits of Representation in Contemporary Turkey (New Texts Out Now)
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Archived Voices, Acoustic Traces, and the Reverberations of Kurdish History in Modern Turkey, Comparative Studies in Society and History
UChicago Kurdish Cultural Association (@UChicagoKurdish) / X
Turkey Studies Network in the Low Countries-TSN
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PDF) Archived Voices, Acoustic Traces, and the Reverberations of Kurdish History in Modern Turkey
Love Songs in Motion by Christina J. Woolner (Ebook) - Read free for 30 days
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Subject catalog: Anthropology from the University of Chicago Press
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology: Vol 33, No 3