Kurdish migrant women and the re-conceptions of race within forms of feminism

The main aim of this paper is to discuss research into the very unique set of migration circumstances of Iraqi Kurdish women migrants to the UK, and illuminate how categories and concepts of race have been applied and projected onto certain women by some postcolonial and Black feminist writers because they have assigned whiteness as a homogenised concept that excludes whiteness outside of a Western context. Data from the research sees many of the Kurdish women shifting between racial and social spaces that impact their experiences (Brodkin, 2002). These shifts challenge concepts and models of power held within the work of some feminist writers—specifically those who can be interpreted as fixing and positioning women in particular racial subjectivities. What has been significant in terms of race and forms of feminism is the Kurdish women’s racial identification as white, and certain gender-related struggles with which that they also identify. Whilst most of the women generally did not wholly identify directly with all struggles and concepts held within the work of some white Western feminist writers, fundamental groundings, such as notions of women’s rights and equality, found conceptualised within them did hold much appeal to, and a strong sense of identification for, the women. This strong appeal to and identification with sat in contrast to much less appealing concepts of only oppressive relationships that exist between women that ground other forms of feminism, such as some postcolonial and Black feminist writers (Anzaldua, 1987; Minh-ha, 1988; Mohanty, 1991; hooks, 1984; Lorde, 1984). It further suggests that it is possible for women’s bodies to move through actual, social, and racial spaces, and to do so as an empowering experience of self-determination and not always as victims of oppressive governing dominant defining powers (Appadurai, 1999; Brodkin, 2002; Ong, 2003). The Kurdish women’s movements, through actual, social, and racial spaces, illustrate how forms of transnational feminism are unfixed forms of feminism that are ever-changing, and being reorganised, recontextualised, and reconstituted