Female Cousins and Wounded Masculinity: Kurdish Nationalist Discourse in the Post-Ottoman Middle East

This article scrutinizes a highly gendered nationalist discourse shaped by a group of Kurdish nationalist men who sought to break with their Ottoman past while exiled in Syria and Lebanon in the 1930s and 1940s. Based on a critical reading of publications edited by Jaladet and Kamuran Bedirkhan, this study elaborates how the vision of Kurdish nationalism put forward by the Bedirkhan brothers, despite its emphasis on the emancipation of women, held the same patriarchal aspects of their rival Kemalist Turkish counterparts. A gendered approach is clearly discernible in Kurdish nationalists' views regarding major issues such as the failure of recent Kurdish nationalist rebellions and the prescribed national duties of women and men. Their reflections on the Second World War during the war years reveal another aspect of the Kurdish nationalist discourse. Kurdish nationalists, admirably watching the Allied European soldiers' sacrifices and victories, unwittingly expressed a crisis of masculinity emanating from their perceived inability to do anything for their own country.