Most, if not all, of the initial striking images that represented Gezi in media were of women: civilian women bearing no arms, showing no violence, bursting with life, standing for freedom. There was the woman in the red dress, a university student, being tear-gassed by riot police in the park that city contractors had been bulldozing in preparation for the building of a shopping mall. Or the young woman standing in the middle of the street with her arms wide open, her chest bearing the impact of water firing from water cannons the riot police was using to disperse crowds. And women standing arm-in-arm, mothers of protestors at Occupy Gezi, who one night formed a chain around their adult children. Woman, life, freedom. Jin, jiyan, azadî: The Kurdish phrase that gained visibility in mainstream media as part of women’s struggles beyond the Middle East after 2022, as an extension of the movements following the death of Jina (Mahsa) Amini—a Kurdish-Iranian woman who died in police custody after being detained for allegedly disobeying Iran’s dress code for women. However, it has long been a global slogan for protests that stood against violence, patriarchy, and police states, and in solidarity for the freedom of all. Gezi was the first Turkish movement that reached exponential impact through digital diasporas and global communities. In Gezi, too, images of women first fighting for life, for trees in a park, then for social freedoms, galvanized the rhetoric of these communities.

Others have written about the role of Kurdish women in armed resistance and combat, sometimes also attributing the emergence of the slogan to such roots. For instance, more recently the media has widely covered Kurdish women in combat fighting ISIS. My focus, however, is on nonviolent resistance, peaceful protests, and civil acts of disobedience functioning to change society, both because I consider this to be the only means of effective protest and because I recognize a para/military uniform still performs an extension of patriarchy and militarism.[2] Narratives of women fighters, often pretty and attractive, captured in media—whether it’s Kurdish women fighting ISIS or Ukrainian women fighting Russian forces—do not empower women’s lives or freedom. Women have always been fighting in wars, whether in militarized attire or not. Such images, expressing wonder at feminine women wearing uniforms or holding massive guns, glorify symbols of power associated with patriarchy. When I look at these images of women, often gendered by their carefully framed beautiful long hair and attractive faces, I see the guns, rifles, and other machinery sold by the capitalists of the “civilized” western states profiteering from wars which nearly never happen on their own land. As such, I don’t consider women holding rifles or wearing helmets—performatives mostly associated with male masculinity and heroic or nationalist narratives—to be related to liberation, life, or feminisms.[3] The power afforded to embodying such patriarchal symbols reaffirms existing hegemonies, situating liberation in performatives of male masculinities and militarism rather than women or their role as fighters for liberation and equality.

Like Jina—who needed to officially use the Persian name Mahsa to be recognized by the Iranian state, but reportedly otherwise went by her Kurdish name Jina—Kurdish people in Turkey too for decades couldn’t claim agency even over their own names or the names of their children. As a Kurdish woman living in the cultural hegemony of Iran, unable to even publicly claim her name, Jina had an embodied experience of what it meant to be marginalized and to resist for change by disobeying the disciplining of her body and identity, through radical resistance. Kurdish women in Turkey, too, found expression for their suppressed identities through radical resistance.

Radical resistance puts marginalized bodies at stake, even when it does not bear the slightest hint of violence, oppression, or traditional active elements of resistance, such as chanting slogans. Its ultimate aim is not to create awareness or a cathartic experience; rather it aims to enact change from within. As such the pacifist acts of radical resistance—e.g., sitting in a public square, taking a headscarf off, cutting hair, defying authority through simply disobeying how and where your body needs to be—are much more threatening to the power of the patriarchy than organized marches on a Saturday afternoon, in designated spaces, joyfully wearing crafted pink hats by mostly white women who didn’t work the shifts, who could travel, who were allowed to be there and then, and wearing their pink beanies which did not disturb any authority disciplining women’s bodies and identities.[4]