"It Used to Be Forbidden": Kurdish Women and the Limits of Gaining Voice

Women’s rights and human rights projects in Turkey and elsewhere routinely
construe and celebrate subaltern voice as an index of individual and collective empowerment.
Through an ethnographic study of Kurdish women singers’ (dengbêjs) efforts to engage in
their storytelling art in Turkey, this article questions the equation between “raising one’s voice”
and having agency. It investigates two concrete instances in 2012, in Istanbul and Van, where
Kurdish women publicly raised their voices. It shows that public audibility does not necessarily
translate into agency, because these spaces, like most, discipline voices ideologically and
sonically. Audibility is not a neutral achievement but an ideologically structured terrain that
shapes voices and regulates whether and how they are heard and recognized. Voices routinely
have ambiguous and even contradictory effects once they become audible in public. It is not
simply a matter of “having voice” or “being silenced.”