Women Guerrilla Combatants: What A Wonderful Phrase

D4TC (Wk 2)

'The Mastery Of Non Mastery'

These women guerrilla combatants are inspirational. They are utilizing their skills and numbers to fight ISIS. Michael Taussig does a great job emersing himself amongst the female combatants, truly witnessing their courage, calmness, and determination to stop ISIS from advancing into Turkey.

'Yet ISIS is frightened by these women, a visceral, mystical, fear, like what Bataille and Kristeva call “abjection.” “If killed by a woman they will not go to heaven.' (1)

I LOVE THIS. A Terrorist Organization is fearful of dying by the hand of a female, so in return the female combatant numbers grow! These women are utilizing this standard fear and belief to their advantage and at the same time breaking down the gender hierarchy. This all would not be possible without, sacrifice. These women forfit the possibility of seeing their families or creating a family of their own to when they join the fight, it doesn't matter where your from that is a huge sacrifice for anybody.

This article educated and informed me of the border tensions that result from war and quite frankly how close Syria is to Turkey. My knowledge of geography in that part of the world is terrible, and seeing the distance between Kobane and Suruc was shocking. Borders are interesting concepts. As a child, a border signified to me a grand entry way into a whole new lifestyle, culture, world. It was something positive, exciting, and exhilarating to come upon and ideally cross. As I've gotten older and seen the growing tensions between countries and groups of people, borders have become more of an unwelcoming barrier to outsiders. With Trump as President and having traveled to various parts of the world, I clearly see now that for many countries borders are meant to keep people out.

Citation:

(1) See Ocalan’s concept and book (in Turkish) of “killing the man within” and the various Kurdish women’s movements aimed at transforming the mentality of men; See also “Feminicide” by Havin Guneser in Stateless Democracy, p. 62, and Nukhet Sirman (of Bogazici University’s Anthropology Department), “When Antigone Is a Man: Feminist Trouble in the Late Colony,” to be published in Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay (eds.), Vulnerability in Resistance: Politics, Feminism, Theory (Duke University Press).