Limit search to available items
Book Cover
E-book
Author Schäfers, Marlene

Title Voices That Matter Kurdish Women at the Limits of Representation in Contemporary Turkey
Published Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2022

Copies

Description 1 online resource (233 p.)
Contents Frontmatter -- Contents -- Note on Language, Naming, and Musical Notation -- Introduction -- 1 The Potency of Vocal Form -- 2 Vocal Services -- 3 Voice, Self, and Pain -- 4 Claiming Voice -- 5 Making Voices Matter -- Conclusion: Resonance and Its Limits -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index
Summary A fine-grained ethnography exploring the sociopolitical power of Kurdish women's voices in contemporary Turkey. "Raise your voice!" and "Speak up!" are familiar refrains that assume, all too easily, that gaining voice will lead to empowerment, healing, and inclusion for marginalized subjects. Marlene Schäfers's Voices That Matter reveals where such assumptions fall short, demonstrating that "raising one's voice" is no straightforward path to emancipation but fraught with anxieties, dilemmas, and contradictions. In its attention to the voice as form, this book examines not only what voices say but also how they do so, focusing on Kurdish contexts where oral genres have a long, rich legacy. Examining the social labor that voices carry out as they sound, speak, and resonate, Schäfers shows that where new vocal practices arise, they produce new selves and practices of social relations. In Turkey, recent decades have seen Kurdish voices gain increasing moral and political value as metaphors of representation and resistance. Women's voices, in particular, are understood as potent means to withstand patriarchal restrictions and political oppression. By ethnographically tracing the transformations in how Kurdish women relate to and employ their voices as a result of these shifts, Schäfers illustrates how contemporary politics foster not only new hopes and desires but also create novel vulnerabilities as they valorize, elicit, and discipline voice in the name of empowerment and liberation
Notes Description based upon print version of record
Subject Kurds -- Songs and music -- History and criticism
Singing -- Political aspects
Women, Kurdish -- Civil rights -- Turkey
Women, Kurdish -- Turkey -- Social conditions
SOCIAL SCIENCE / General.
Women, Kurdish -- Social conditions
Turkey
Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9780226823034
0226823032