3 - The Mountain Life: On Learning to Become Free

Summary

The third chapter is an account of how PKK revolutionaries are educated in the mountains, analysing how the liberation ideology is learned and lived in the everyday. Here, women find a language to talk about their oppression and learn about their responsibility: to liberate themselves, their minds, and through armed and political struggle, other women in the region. I demonstrate how this process of learning to become ‘free’ is both emancipatory and coercive, arguing that while the liberation movement opens spaces for women, women can only participate in those spaces if they learn to become soldiers for the cause. The ethnographic data of this chapter adds another layer to my concept of militant femininities by paying attention to the matrix of domination and the intersecting power structures at work and puts forward a more nuanced analysis of agency.