Women,body and war: Kurdish female fighters through Commander Arian and Girls’ War

Abstract

The historical relationship between women and war is largely mediated by their body, used as a symbolic expression of the process of occupation, extermination and subjugation of one people by another through the systematic violation of women and girls. Kurdish women live a triple struggle: against the Daesh, against the national oppression of their people by the different states of the Middle East into which Kurdistan is divided, and last – but not least – against patriarchy. In this fight, their body is their weapon: Daesh fighters are put into panic by them, since if they die at the hands of a woman they will not go to paradise. Commander Arian (2018) directed by Alba Sotorra and Girls’ War (2016) directed by Mylène Sauloy portray the struggle of Kurdish women against Daesh in the area of Rojava (Syrian Kurdistan). This article explores the media frame used in those documentaries to explain the relationship that these women establish with violence, a relationship allegedly denatured but sustained throughout history.

Keywords

body documentary framing Kurdish war

Introduction

Gender roles have been very consistent in most human societies. On a symbolic level, war is associated with action, courage, destruction, weapons, aggression or adrenaline, terms that are codified as ‘masculine’ in most cultures. On the other hand, terms such as peace, softness, commitment, non-violence, or lack of action against others are codified as ‘feminine’ (Goldstein, 2001).

There are different positions in relation to the role that women should play in war. On the one hand, those who postulate against feminism draw the image of the warrior woman as ‘unnatural’; they warn against increasing military participation of women, which destroys families and has an effect on military efficiency (D’Amico, 1996). On the other hand, multiple positions are taken from a feminism point of view. There is a certain feminist approach that warns of the dangers of the image of a warrior woman, a mystic who promotes male and martial values rather than redefining social values based on gender and power structures (Elshtain, 1995; Ruddick, 1989). However, for radical feminism, the image of the warrior woman is a representation of the potential of women’s power, evidence of the ancient Matriarchy. Military means are seen as necessary for the liberation and defence of women from Patriarchy itself. In addition, these authors reject the strategy of integrating women into a male domain: they propose a separate strategy of empowerment also in the military (Carter, 1996; Enloe, 1983; Hains, 2009; Wolf, 1993).

This same strategy is employed in Rojava (the Kurdish region of Northern Syria), where Yekîneyên Parastina Jin (YPJ) units are battalions formed entirely by female Kurdish combatants who, despite fighting in coordination with their male peers, maintain their own chieftaincies. Thanks to this strategy, they participate in decision-making centres along with men, a practice that is said to promote their emancipation and empowerment (Düzgün, 2016).

This article explores the dominant framework in which the story of two documentary films is articulated: Girls’ War (dir. Mylène Sauloy, 2016) and Commander Arian (dir. Alba Sotorra, 2018) in relation to women and war, which is a relationship mediated by a woman’s body. Although framing is a theoretical approach that is not unambiguously conceptualized (Entman, 1993; Goffman, 1974), it is commonly used in Media Studies as a concept related to the perspective, focus or point of view from which information is explained. Media constitute a principal social agent in the definition and interpretation of reality (Pan and Kosicki, 2001), and operate in a context with multiple social and political influences. Media also reproduce hegemonic social discourses, and reality reflected by them is socially constructed by frames (Carragee and Roefs, 2004; Hall, 1982; Valera Ordaz, 2016).

From this theoretical perspective, the object of study becomes highly relevant. Documentary films are seen as a result of the need to inform people, as a reaction against the monopoly of the film as entertainment (Minh-ha, 1990) andsful journalistic production routines, where ‘truth’ is produced and extended according to the regime in power (Butchart, 2006). On the other hand, documentary films do not simply record reality; there has always been an interpretational side to their work, with explicit ethical implications (Hongisto, 2015; Kilborn, 2004).

These documentary films share some relevant contextual elements that make the comparison suggestive. Although female Kurdish combatants are largely represented in the media, also in documentaries, both films are shot by women. The aim of this article is to explore the differences in framing female Kurdish combatants in a context of image and storytelling production with independent editorial criteria and production processes in Western Europe. In contemporary documentary cinema, critical discourse and the complex relationship between the filmmaker and the subject embody some key ethical challenges, especially when they raise issues such as sexual violence, devastation and murder. As independent filmmakers, and also as women, they can gaze from a position that is external to the hegemonic news media production; they can provide specific access to human stories and interpretations grown at the intersection of political activism, feminism and documentary discourse (Hilčišin, 2017; Schiller, 2009; Zanger, 2005).

This article outlines differences in the main frame from which the struggle is represented in both documentaries. While Sotorra emphasizes the frame of the women’s rights struggle in the female Kurdish combatants’ motivations, as is usually done by Western media news, Sauloy works within a more political frame of the YPJ’s motivations.

The article begins with a literature review of the broad problematization about the relationship between women and war. The importance of the female body in the representation of women’s main role in war (i.e. a victim) is also introduced. The following section contextualizes the YPJ combatants in the intersection of the Kurdish liberation movement and women’s liberation process, both of which are conceptually linked in Kurdish women’s imaginary (Çaha, 2011; Chatterjee, 2016; Düzgün, 2016; Grojean, 2013). Further on, the theorical perspective of framing is presented, along with a secondary literature review of the most common frames in which female combatants, and specifically Kurdish female combatants, are represented by Western media. The methodology is explained just before the discussion on the results of the analysis.

The controversial relationship between women and war

The relationship of women and war can be conceived from two different perspectives. According to the proposals of Herrmann and Palmieri (2010), women can be seen either as Amazons or as Sabines (i.e. as victims or as active participants). The notions of gender and war are related, and patriarchally constructed. In armed contexts, women are generally characterized as neglected, and in need of protection (Heck and Schlag, 2012; Sjoberg, 1979).

One of the forms of violence in which feminism has focused is sexual violence in contexts of armed conflict. This is an effective and extreme form of patriarchal control and a cross-cultural language of male domination. Sexual violence against women in war is not a new phenomenon, but has generally been ignored or trivialized in the chronicles of war (Card, 1996; Hynes, 2004). Despite this assessment, it was not until 2001 – as a result of the resolutions of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) – that rape against women and girls was conceived as a punishable crime. This took place in the context in which Rwandan soldiers and the former Yugoslavian soldiers were convicted of war crimes (ICTY, 22 February 2001). These crimes were then categorized as crimes against humanity, such as slavery or torture. As Amnesty International (2004) affirms, the impact of war weighs particularly heavily on women, who face additional obstacles to obtain justice because of the stigma borne by survivors of sexual violence, especially rape.

Bergoffen (2009) argues that body damaging through rape does not seek to inflict pain, such as in torture, but to deny the woman’s right to sexual self-determination. Specifically, it reveals the ways in which human dignity is materialized in the instrumental, sensory and sensual body, so that the prohibition of its existence is inserted in our way of being in the world. In times of war, rape exploits the sensual body in order to destroy desire and the community ties it creates. By identifying slavery, torture and rape as weapons of war and a violation of human rights, courts of law link human dignity and the integrity of the body, which stands as a symbolic icon for political violence (Dauphinée, 2007). In an interview (Düzgün, 2014), Kurdish female combatant Bejan Ciyayi states:

IS see women as sex objects. And yes, this does motivate me when I fight against them. This is why I know IS is scared of us women in the YPJ. They know how they treat women, and they know we are aware of what they do and can feel our resentment and hatred of them.

Physical violence in rape is increased by its symbolic character related to ethnic cleansing. Rape is the means by which a group of men humiliates another group, by shattering the possibility of ‘protecting’ their women (MacKinnon, 2006). It is in the violence executed by sexual means where the moral destruction of the enemy takes place: ‘The woman’s body is the frame or support in which the moral defeat of the enemy is written’ (Segato, 2014). Women and their bodies become territories to be seized and conquered (Hynes, 2004; Sjoberg, 1979). As women’s bodies are considered to represent the nation, their violation is perceived as the violation of the nation (Lentin, 1999).

In addition, rape works effectively as an instrument of low-cost ethnic cleansing. According to Münkler (2005: 83), three steps towards dissolution of a community, without genocide, are: the public execution of its prominent figures; the destruction of its temples, sacred constructions and cultural monuments; and the systematic rape and forced pregnancy of its women. Martial rape destroys a group’s identity by decimating cultural and social bonds. Many women and girls are killed after being raped. If they are not, survivors become pregnant or ‘dishonored’ and national unity may be thrown into chaos (Card, 1996). These are all outcomes that Daesh understood and, in the construction of their ‘Islamic state’, rape and sexual slavery became systematic tools of domination, especially among non-Muslim populations, such as the Kurdish Yazidi community in Syria. The genocide of the Yazidi people included the kidnapping and systematic rape of more than 3,000 women (Human Rights Council, 2016).

Although Kurdish female combatants’ fight against Daesh has been newsworthy in all Western countries, the use of rape against Kurdish women as a scare tactic by Turkish police and government officials (never fully recognized by the Turkish government despite a few court trials) has never been in the agenda setting of Western media (Düzgün, 2014). It was not until the siege of Kobane in September 2014 that the international media began reporting on Kurdish female combatants engaged in the battle against Daesh (Tank, 2017).

Women as combatants

The patriarchal culture has conceived a supposedly natural character of the ‘order of things’ and feminist practice seeks to denaturalize this order, which has historically established the invisibility of women in public spheres, specifically in the construction of knowledge and in politics. Women who do not conform to a natural order that defines them as passive, sweet and submissive, are condemned with severity, since it is not only the social norm that they transgress, but the ‘natural’ one (Londoño, 2005). As Elshtain (1995) suggests, the purpose of gender roles is to maintain social order through the idea of culturally made roles of ‘beautiful souls’ for women and ‘just warriors’ for men.

The non-inclusion of women in war has political consequences, such as their exclusion from the processes of political reconciliation (Cohen, 2013). Exclusion from reconstruction processes restricts and limits the empowerment of women. In analysing 67 Native American cultures, Adams (1983) concludes that in societies in which women have been excluded from active participation in war, men’s monopoly over warfare extends beyond the battlefield and women are excluded from all discussion centres.

It is in the female body where this conflict is set, since the body is the scene of identity and it is where warrior practices take place. The participation of women in war confronts us with the issue of the body in a dimension that is both physical and symbolic. In most cultures, the body is a vehicle of representation, sign and signifier (Augé, 1983). For the combatants, it represents a deep break with the model of women in which they were socialized. Bodies are seen as settings for meaning production.

From a feminist perspective, there is some discussion about the peaceful nature of women. Since the early pacifist feminist thinking, including that of Virginia Woolf (1938), women have been tied to peace (and men to war). Ruddick attributed three identities to woman: mater dolorosa (in reference to the sorrows of Virgin Mary’s life), outsider (a stranger to men’s war) and peacemaker (Ruddick, 1989). Her idea of ‘maternal thinking’ is close to the ‘ethics of care’ (Peach, 1996) that relies on the opposition to the military as a masculine immoral institution. This perspective accentuates gender differences and claims that women have a distinctive approach to ethics based on caring and relationality. This perspective is largely objected to by other authors, who deny this biological determinism as it ignores the role of culture in shaping personality (Carter, 1996).

Despite the efforts to denature combatant women, the truth is that they have been a constant throughout history. In 9 out of the 67 Native American cultures analysed by Adams (Comanche, Crow, Delaware, Fox, Gros Ventre, Maori, Navaho, among others) women went to war as active fighters. Women have historically participated in war both as soldiers and as leaders. This is the case of Queen Ahhotep I of Egypt, who led her troops in the battle against the Hyksos invaders; or of Fu Hao, a Chinese military female leader with the rank of General and Queen Consort of the Shang dynasty (Peterson, 2000); the Celtic warrior queen Boudica or Boadicea; or Zenobia, queen of Palmira. Although their participation in regular armies is not frequent, other characters stand out: Harriet Tubman, who commanded an action in the American Civil War and set free more than 600 slaves (Fraser, 1994); the Mino, warriors of the Dahomey Kingdom; the Russian Women’s Battalion of Death commanded by Maria Botchkareva in the First World War, or the more than 1 million women who participated in the Soviet Army in the Second World War. However, the greatest presence of female combatants is in guerrilla warfare, where gender roles become more flexible, given that the situation is perceived as exceptional. This is the case of most of the guerrillas in Latin America: the Sandinistas (and the leading role of Nora Astorga), the Zapatistas (Commander Ramona), or the FARC, have a high proportion of women in their ranks wielding weapons. And yet there is still a certain taboo in relation to women and the use of weapons.

Despite women’s historical presence in war, this has no evident effect on their social status. Woman’s emancipation during the 20th century in Western countries is seen as a partial consequence of their participation in the two World Wars (Carter, 1996). However, most literature disputes the transformation of the gender power balance due to the inclusion of women as combatants (Bucaille, 2013; Enloe, 1983; Herrmann and Palmieri, 2010; Tavera, 2016). Most of the women soldiers interviewed by Sasson-Levy in her research on the Israeli army referred to as ‘jokes’ or trivial ‘just kidding’ incidents some stories that could well be termed sexual harassment (Sasson-Levy, 2003). The perception of egalitarian rhetoric might be sometimes hiding certain levels of structural violence. This same lag is confirmed between the idealized image of Kurdish female combatants and Grojean’s gender reports in PKK structures (Grojean, 2013), although these women describe their time in war as an emancipating and plentiful experience. This same experience is described by Elshtain (1995) in other women fighters, who experience wartime activities as personally liberating and do not regret their choice to fight.

Context: Yekîneyên Parastina Jin (YPJ) and the Kurdish female movement

Yekîneyên Parastina Jin (Women’s Protection Units, YPJ) is a female military organization established in 2012 for the protection of people in Rojava (Western Kurdistan), a stateless form of autonomy called the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria (DFNS). This is the female battalion of the Yekîneyên Parastina Gel, YPG (Popular Protection Units), the official armed faction of the Kurdish Supreme Committee of Rojava, which has about 35,000 combatants. It is estimated that between 20 to 40 percent of the latter belong to the YPJ.¹

The presence of guerrilla women in the Kurdish forces is not new, neither in the military nor in the ideology. Since the 1980s, two Kurdish political organizations have historically recruited women into their military and political ranks. One was the Turkish Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan, PKK); the other was Komala, which was the Kurdish branch of the Communist Party of Iran (Mojab, 2000). Inside the PKK, the first women’s congress took place on 8 March 1995; by 1999 they had a separate women’s wing. In the early 1990s, women made up a third of a fighting force of 17,000 militants (Tank, 2017). Nowadays women account for 40 percent of the PKK (Grojean, 2013).

The ideological source of the Syrian Democratic Union Party (Partiya Yekîtiya Demokrat, PYD) and, as a consequence of the YPG and YPJ units, is the PKK (although this was formerly an autonomous party) (Pavičić-ivelja, 2017; Tank, 2017). Indeed, YPJ combatants look at Abdullah Öcalan, ‘Apo’ – the founder of the PKK, currently imprisoned in Turkey – as their ideological leader (Dean, 2019). However, the relationship between the YPJ and the PKK has been widely silenced in the Western media (Toivanen and Baser, 2016). The fact that the PKK is currently on the terrorist organizations lists of the European Union and the United States could be its cause.

Since the 1990s, the Kurdish movement has placed women’s liberation at the heart of the national struggle (Cağlayan, 2012). The Öcalan doctrine of ‘free woman’ emphasized the role played by women in the Kurdish liberation movement, arguing that freedom can only be achieved through the defeat of the patriarchal system: ‘the freedom of the Kurdish people can be viewed as inseparably bound to women’s freedom’ (Öcalan, 2010). Öcalan proposed a wide theory that merged communist and anti-colonialist views on women. According to his point of view, Matriarchy is a symbol of the traditional Kurdish society in Mesopotamia, whilst Patriarchy just appeared with the Turkish, Persian and Arabic colonizations (Grojean, 2013). There is, according to him, an urgent need for a Revolution to redress this situation, and achieve gender equality, by abandoning a predominantly tribal, feudal and conservative Kurdish society (Bengio, 2016).

Marxism–Leninism has an important influence on the ideology of the Kurdish movement. Aversion to capitalism is well rooted in the beliefs of Kurdish guerrilla women (Bengio, 2016; Çaha, 2011; Düzgün, 2016). Politically active Kurdish women and men fought for Socialism. In the 1980s, the struggle for Socialism went on to fight for the identity rights of the Kurdish people. Later on, a feminist scope was also integrated into the discourse. Being a Marxist organization, the PKK merged capitalism, nation-state and patriarchy. At that point they proposed separate units for women. In their own space, women would acquire more confidence in themselves and would reflect upon emancipation (Grojean, 2013; Pavičić-ivelja, 2017).

After Öcalan’s capture in 1999, his political reasoning – and, therefore, those of the PKK – shifted from orthodox Marxist principles and the idea of an independent Kurdish state to the so-called ‘Democratic Confederalism’. Öcalan was inspired by the work of American anarchist and libertarian socialist Murray Bookchin, with whom he maintained correspondence from prison. In fact, female leaders inside the PKK were the first in supporting his political and ideological shift (Krajeski, 2015; Tank, 2017). Democratic Confederalism proposes a political system of direct local rule, in which local communes are directly involved in their own organization (Jongerden, 2019). According to this, nationalism is seen as a product of capitalist modernity. The centrality of the state diminishes, and the social contract is replaced by direct democracy, in a new ‘alternative institutional framework to the current state system in the Middle East’.

Öcalan’s ideology, built upon the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (particularly in Engel’s views on marriage as an oppressive tool) and then moved to a more libertarian socialism view, was later merged with anti-imperialism, ecology and the so-called ‘Jineology’. Jineology comes from the Kurdish word ‘Jin’ (woman), but also has roots in ‘jiyan’ (life), literally translating as ‘the science of women’. Its aim is to highlight local experiences of women, along with postcolonial feminism (Dean, 2019). Its background is strongly politically defined as anti-state, anticolonial and anticapitalist, claiming the deconstruction of the ‘hegemonic masculinity’ in order to achieve the liberation of both women and men (Düzgün, 2016). In the PKK, at least 40 per cent of decision-making participants on all levels had to be women (Grojean, 2013; Tank, 2017).

One of the basic principles of YPJ is legitimate self-defence: their participation in war is reactive. This principle was defined by Öcalan as the ‘Rose Theory’: in nature, organisms such as roses develop their self-defence systems, such as thorns, not with the aim to attack, but to protect life (Pavičić-ivelja, 2017). Both principles, of Democratic Confederalism and Jineology, spread rapidly throughout Syria and became the pillars of the forthcoming revolution, establishing a stateless democracy that pursues female emancipation as a fundamental part of the democracy-building process, as well as ecology and internationalism, according to the Social Contract of the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria.

For YPJ, the fight is not only military, but also existential. They not only put up a resistance against Daesh, but also Patriarchy and rape culture prevalent in their own communities (Dirik, 2015). Female combatants often attribute their participation, at least partially, to the fear of being killed by male relatives and the existence of honour-based violence and ‘honour’ killings (Begikhani et al., 2018). In January 2016, YPJ commander Nessrin Abdullah stressed not only the international dimension of YPJ’s struggle but emphasized that Kurdish women were involved in two simultaneous battles. One is the national struggle for the liberation of the Kurdish people, and the other is the struggle for women’s rights (Toivanen and Baser, 2016). For YPJ, freedom is only possible through defeating the patriarchal and capitalist system. As one YPJ combatant expresses:

I am now a free woman, brave and able to defend myself and my people. I fight for the enslaved woman, help their liberation from oppression. I believe capitalism enslaves women. In capitalism, men dominate, while women are the underdogs. The main problem is that women accept this oppressive system . . . Capitalism first oppressed the European women . . . (Desine, quoted in Düzgün, 2014)

While some authors argue that since the Revolution it is estimated that 75 percent of Kurdish women in Rojava have become politically active and joined different organizations (Bengio, 2016), others discuss the influence of this political movement in real gender equality in a wider society (Begikhani et al., 2018).

Media framing and female combatants

The analysis perspective used in this article is that of media framing. Media framing is based on the idea that both journalists and documentary filmmakers frame reality, emphasizing some aspects and excluding others, a fact that determines the decoding of the content. In short, frames structure the social world with meaning (Reese, 2007). Some authors also suggest that, in fact, framing is an extension of agenda setting, which operates not only on selecting the relevancy of some issues, but also on highlighting some aspects of reality and darkening others (Entman, 1996; Scheufele, 1999). The social and political world is not a pre-given reality, it must be constructed, and this is mostly done by the perceptions we obtain from the media (Hackett, 1984).

Frames are not visible. They conform to what is called the ‘cognitive unconscious’(Lakoff, 2007), that we also term as ‘common sense’ and designates a specific way of thinking. Language is an important way in which frames are conformed, but also images are powerful in showing presences and absences in hegemonic discourse.

Different authors have analysed the representation of women fighters from the perspective of framing. Nacos (2005: 463) analyses the six dominant frames in media portraits in relation to Palestinian terrorist women. These are: physical appearance, family connection (honour crimes), love as the cause of their actions, women’s freedom and equality, their representation as fierce people like men or even more than men, and ‘bored, naïve and out-of-touch-with-reality’. Toivanen and Baser (2016) analyse, from their point of view, the frameworks on which Kurdish combatant women have been analysed in the Western media, specifically the British and French. They identify four main frameworks: fight for equality/emancipation/liberation; personal or emotional motivations; physical appearance; and exception. According to their narratives, women have had no choice but to join the fight because they are struggling for their survival, escaping from rape and torture. Revenge is also one of the fundamental reasons for taking up arms.

These women are also glorified by international media because they contradict the traditional portrait of the Middle Eastern woman who is not ‘emancipated’. Taking up weapons, they contradict the gender and ethnic stereotype, and this makes them newsworthy. Women combatants are an anomaly in relation to the representations of women in the Middle East as victims of gender repression (Tank, 2017). Thus, in the representation of Kurdish women in Western European media, there is an absence of discussion about their ideology and, consequently, a limited understanding of women’s political capacity. As in the case of Palestinian women (Nacos, 2005), Kurdish women are also described as part of their family ties. Their personal stories and harshness of their life experiences appear as an explanation of their involvement in the Kurdish cause (Tank, 2017). Therefore, a depoliticized idea of their struggle is transmitted. As Sjoberg (1979) stressed, violent women are rarely characterized by choosing violent actions or making a reasoned choice.

Methodology

The methodology used in this research is a comparative study between two documentary films focused on female Kurdish combatants, from the perspective of Ethnographic Content Analysis (ECA).

Analysing content through frames includes two possible approaches: quantitative or qualitative. The selection of a qualitative approach in this research responds to two main aspects. First, quantitative approaches operate in the explicit content of messages, therefore strategic omissions in the narrative are not assessed in the analysis (Valera Ordaz, 2016). Second, due to the lack of a strong image-based research methodology, the adoption of the principles of qualitative research strengthens the legitimacy of image-based research (Prosser, 1996). Kracauer (1952) advocated a qualitative approach to content analysis in order to approach the text more holistically than in a quantitative approach, that often simplifies and distorts meaning as breaking the text into quantifiable units in the analytic process.

Qualitative content analysis can be described as a method to classify fruitfully written, oral or image-based materials (Cho & Lee, 2014), and a technique with links to other research methods, such as ethnographic and grounded theory. Altheide proposes Ethnographical Content Analysis (ECA) in adding aspects of an ethnographic research approach to content analysis, defined as the reflexive analysis of documents that becomes particularly useful in studied cases and in a framing perspective (Altheide, 1987, 2004). The emphasis of ECA is on discovery and description involving underlying meanings, themes, patterns and also, frames. (Connolly-Ahern and Castells i Talens, 2010).

Coding, analysis and comparisons were carried out with the aid of Atlas.ti, a qualitative analysis software, through an inductive approach to content analysing frames, beginning with very loosely defined preconceptions of theses frames (Gamson, 1992) and then comparing them with previous literature (Nacos, 2005; Toivanen and Baser, 2016).

Kurdish female combatants portrayed in Commander Arian and Girls’ War

Girls’ war (2016) is a German–French documentary (produced by ARTE) directed by Mylène Sauloy. It describes the process of empowerment of women in the town of Qandil (Iraqi Kurdistan), exclusively enabled for militia women of the PKK, where they receive political and military training, which led to the appearance of YPJs in the war against Daesh. The starting point of the documentary is the murder, by an alleged member of the Turkish secret services in January 2013 in Paris, of Sakine Cansız, one of the founders of the PKK, along with two other Kurdish women activists (Bengio, 2016).

Commander Arian (2018) is a film, directed by the Catalan filmmaker Alba Sotorra, that portrays a group of Kurdish guerrillas in their fight to change their world. The filmmaker documents the liberation of the city of Kobane through the gaze of these women who want to ‘end the Patriarchy’ and know that they might die in it. The documentary is a story in two stages: first, it documents the progress of the YPJ until the liberation of Kobane in January 2015. Second, it recounts the recovery, months later, of the protagonist Arian, who had been wounded in combat. It is through her wounded body that the consequences of the crudest war are made visible.

Rape is represented in both documentaries, even without appearing in the images, as one of the engines of the action. On the jihadist side, it appears as the threat (widely fulfilled) of the establishment of terror perpetrated on the body of women. On the female fighters’ side, as a motivation to take up arms and protect not only themselves, but also their mothers and sisters:

Those of the Daesh are savages. They want a society and a life without women. For them a piece of cloth is worth more than a woman. That’s why we, the YPJ, are fighting against them. To stop being a threat against women. We will fight against them until there is not one left. (Arian, in Commander Arian, 2018).

In Commander Arian, the woman’s body takes on special relevance. Arian’s body shows the harshness of war, in the foreground. Buffon and Allison (2016), following Baudrillard’s analyses of media representation, affirm that the hypervisibility of the women’s injured body is the ultimate parameter against which the truth of women can be stated and tested. This sums up the two iconographic representations of Kurdish women in times of war: the female combatant and the victim, combined. The healing of Arian’s wounds puts into context the epic of the fight, moving down to the material sphere:

– What do you intend to do, I smell like urine, you don’t?

– It’s me.

– But it smells bad.

– It’s my body. (Commander Arian, 2018)

Both documentaries, filmed by women, avoid the framework of the exception to portray Kurdish combatant women, unlike Western media (Toivanen and Baser, 2016). ‘I always dreamed of becoming a guerrilla,’ says Arian, challenging the ‘natural order of things’ that has been imposed on her (Elshtain, 1995; Londoño, 2005). Sauloy and Sotorra do not assume the pacifist feminism position but the bond between fighting in war and women’s participation in public affairs and democracy.

Nor is physical appearance relevant in their stories, a significant issue because physical appearance has been usually highlighted by Western media, by describing female terrorists (Nacos, 2005), by performing women in politics (Braden, 1996) or more specifically by framing Kurdish female fighters in Rojava (Toivanen and Baser, 2016). In the YPJ, the militia forbids its fighters to wear makeup. And the clothes they wear disengages the girls from the way of being a woman they had known so far.

When I came here, I had a bad time. I did not believe in myself. But when I was integrating, I began to see things from another perspective. I saw that beauty has nothing to do with the body. And I want to learn more things. And have more enriching thoughts, and be free. (Rivan, in Commander Arian, 2018)

In Commander Arian, two frameworks coexist: the struggle for women’s rights and personal or emotional motivations. Arian represents the emancipatory discourse:

We all need to ask ourselves the following question: I am Arian, what should I do? What should I do in the future? What kind of woman do I want to be? If you do not fight to achieve your goals, you will live as slaves. Always behind a man. Rescue a woman who feels defeated, a weak woman, humble, vulnerable; that’s what freedom is for me. (Arian, in Commander Arian, 2018)

Among YPJ’s militants, personal stories of torture, murder and rape of their most direct relatives are usually the motivation for younger women to enlist. However, over time, emancipation and the struggle for women’s rights centre the discourse of the documentary:

When they attacked Kobane, they were over a thousand. It was chaos. It was impossible to count the bodies. My sister was captured. They cut off her head. (Female Kurdish combatant, in Commander Arian, 2018).

However, Girls’ war focuses its discourse on a totally different framework from the one proposed by Western media, not only in the case of Kurdish women (Toivanen and Baser, 2016) but also in relation to what was proposed for Palestinian women in Nacos’ (2005) research. Sauloy raises the ideological, socialist struggle of the PKK as the origin of the fight against Daesh:

In the Aleví belief, women are considered leftist, it is the same way of life. Everyone prays as he wishes, there is no true Islamic figure. We are rather believing in what we see. Therefore, at the philosophical level, our belief resembles socialism. (Nurhayat Altun, in Girls’ war, 2016)

Girls’ war goes deep into the Marxist roots of the movement and the PKK’s link with the struggle of the Kurdish militias against Daesh.

In Commander Arian, the importance of the PKK is visible due to the presence of Abdullah Ocalan’s image in different spaces of Rojava that appear throughout the film: houses, vehicles, graffiti, etc. This even appears in cheers and proclamations (‘Long live Apo!’). His presence can be felt. However, there is no explicit mention of this and, despite the presence of his image throughout the documentary, Öcalan’s figure and its significance for the Kurdish people are not explained. Nor are the socialist and anti-capitalist ideology of the movement mentioned, not even in the arguments of the main characters when they explain their struggle.

Following the postulates of Öcalan and the PKK, in Girls’ war, the struggle for women’s rights is indivisible from the struggle for the rights of people and democracy:

In the fighting, we realized that Daesh can’t stand fighting us. We often hear the brigades of the Daesh say: ‘How is it possible that these little women fight against us? We not only fight for the Kurds; we also fight for democracy in Syria. That is our vision of freedom. (Commander Rosa, in Girls’ war, dir. Mylène Sauloy, 2016)

Next, we read the feminists, Rosa Luxembourg, Clara Zetkin, Emma Goldman. We better understood the women’s liberation movement, and discovered feminism. (Nurhayat Altun, in Girls’ war, dir. Mylène Sauloy, 2016)

It is the masculine mentality that divides the Society, which creates social classes and inequality. The woman represents the link with the land, with the culture. Daesh wanted to destroy that culture with the conversion of women. It is not just a matter of Islam, but a masculine mentality. (Commander Rosa, in Girls’ war, dir. Mylène Sauloy, 2016)

Girls’ war is thus an exception in the way of representing the struggle of women combatants. Their choice is reasoned, and their motivations are political. Their referents, as shown, are classical socialist feminists, such as Rosa Luxembourg or Clara Zetkin. The ideological leftist rhetoric is intertwined with the gender perspective.

Girls’ war and Commander Arian present the women combatants of the YPJ from two different, and yet complementary, frameworks: Alba Sotorra emphasizes the emancipatory motivation of the struggle for women’s rights, which, of course, have personal and emotional motivations – personal issues are also political ones. However, Mylène Sauloy clearly draws the revolutionary character of this struggle. Her approach is perhaps the one that is farthest away from the representations offered by Western media, for which the movement’s anti-capitalist struggle is invisible.

On the other hand, it is Arian’s body that most clearly portrays the horror of war. Her injured body accompanies the documentary in temporary leaps that counter the epic of the fight and recall the dramatic consequences that war has, for all, men and women.

Conclusion

The association of women and war, both as victims, mainly, but also as fighters, is indisputable. Kurdish combatants of the YPJ and their fight against Daesh perfectly represent the place that women have been given in the war, and the place that they themselves have sought in it. This is the place where the enemy intends to inscribe the defeat of the enemy (in their violation and in their humiliation), but also a place from which the necessary force and legitimation arise to defeat jihadism.

The female body plays a symbolic role in this fight. While the violence inflicted on the body symbolizes the pain of the nation and its genocide, the female combatant and her fight appear to be the true resilience of the Kurdish people and the real possibility of defeating Daesh, also represented in the narratives around the fear of jihadists of being killed by women.

The YPJ female fighters have created their own organizational structures, which have allowed them to participate in the decision-making of the combat strategy in the same conditions as their fellow men. In Western media, as previous literature shows, this fact has been seen as an exception due to the specific hardness of the violence that jihadists inflict on women. The documentary films analysed here offer a gender perspective that differs from previous frame analyses of Kurdish female combatants in the media. The physical appearance frame disappears, and women are empowered in their struggle. However, only Girls’ War focuses on the political dimension of the struggle and presents female combatants as a rational choice, not just motivated by circumstances: women are political subjects.

Footnotes

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and publication of this article, and there is no conflict of interest.

ORCID iD

Aina Fernàndez Aragonès

Notes

Author biography

Aina Fernàndez Aragonès is a researcher in Tecnocampus – Pompeu Fabra University. Their interests are focused on violence and media. She has always combined her work in digital communication with teaching and research in media and new digital content. Also, she is the autor of Lliures o vassalls. El dilema digital (Free or Vassals. The digital dilemma).

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