Decolonizing Freedom at the Intersection of Being a Woman and a Kurd: Situating “Jin, Jiyan, Azadî” in Rojhelatî Kurdish Women’s Resistance

Freedom is one of the most contested yet pivotal concepts in both scholarly discourse and everyday life. The pursuit of freedom serves as the cornerstone for numerous movements, including women’s decolonial struggles against multi-scale forms of subordination, oppression, and violence. Although women worldwide have contributed to emancipatory movements, advocating for decolonized freedom and liberated lives, there remains a scarcity of studies on women’s decolonial resistance and their emancipatory politics. This article utilizes Hybrid Ethnography to explore how Kurdish Rojhelatî women activists in diaspora communities conceptualize azadî (freedom), as encapsulated in the slogan “Jin, Jiyan, Azadî” (“Woman, Life, Freedom”). Drawing on transnational feminist perspectives and critical feminist geopolitics, this paper contends that Kurdish women’s daily struggles and resistance give rise to embodied, feminine, and decolonial epistemologies of freedom. It provides a novel empirical account of how these marginalized and oppressed women, navigating a spectrum of oppressive and resistive dynamics, envision and pursue the ideal of freedom. Thus, this study enriches the literature on Kurdish women’s activism, particularly in an under-explored region of Kurdistan, and contributes to decolonial feminisms by linking Kurdish women’s everyday struggle to the conceptualization of active female subjectivity within decolonial resistance. Moreover, it critically assesses the transformative potential of women’s decolonial and feminine epistemologies for redefining the concept and ideal of freedom in world politics and political theories.