Writing against loss: Kurdish women, subaltern authorship, and the politics of voice in contemporary Turkey

This article focuses on the appeal that writing and authorship hold for Kurdish women singers in contemporary Turkey. It argues that authorship has come to the fore as an object of aspiration at a moment when a history of political silencing intersects with a more recent commodification of Kurdish culture. In this context, authorship constitutes an avenue for Kurdish women to insert themselves into struggles for political rights, discourses of history writing, and an emerging cultural market. Yet, as the analysis shows, becoming an author centrally relies on gaining access to means that allow materially inscribing voices and making them durable. Authorship therefore needs to be recognized as a fragile achievement, especially for subaltern authors, whose position is marked by restricted access to inscriptive means. Tracing Kurdish women's attempts at making their voices, quite literally, matter, the article contributes to our understanding of the politics of voice in the contemporary world.