Placing the liberation of women at the center of his theory, Ocalan identified monotheistic religions, the nation-state, and capitalism as three roots of women’s oppression and traced the emergence of gender hierarchies as far back as the Neolithic era. Together with the focus on ecology and direct democracy, women’s empowerment is one of the pillars of democratic autonomy and confederalism – Ocalan’s vision of a non-oppressive society, pursued by the movement both in Turkish (Bakur) and Syrian (Rojava) Kurdish regions.
Putting this theory in practice, the Kurdish movement has set up 40% women’s quotas in their organizations, created women-only organizations parallel to mixed-gender ones, as well as women’s neighbourhood assemblies, academies and cooperatives, and introduced a co-leadership system with one woman and one man at the head of any administrative body, including in municipalities under the control of pro-Kurdish parties. [...]
This is the main dilemma for us as we deal with other women’s movements. When we propose to use a different paradigm, to think from a different perspective, western feminists feel as if we reject feminism and replace it with jineoloji. This is not the case. We have strong criticisms. For example, just like black feminists, we have criticized white feminism for taking only one – middle class white perspective and trying to solve all the problems around the world with the same method. But this cannot work. One theory cannot handle all the issues. For example, queer theory may work very well in Europe but it is not sufficient for us to explain what society is facing in Kurdistan.
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