Voices That Matter: Kurdish Women at the Limits of Representation in Contemporary Turkey

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Marlene Schäfers

Voices That Matter

Kurdish Women at the Limits of Representation in Contemporary Turkey

Marlene Schäfers

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English

University of Chicago Press
11 April 2023

Family & health

Voices That Matter is a fine-grained ethnography exploring the socio-political 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.

By: Marlene Schäfers
Imprint: University of Chicago Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 10mm
Weight: 426g
ISBN: 9780226819808
ISBN 10: 0226819809
Pages: 240
Publication Date: 11 April 2023
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Marlene Schäfers is assistant professor in cultural anthropology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

Reviews for Voices That Matter: Kurdish Women at the Limits of Representation in Contemporary Turkey

"“A most welcome contribution to a steadily developing area of research. Written with great clarity and precision, Voices That Matter will be an instant addition to reading lists on gender in the Middle East, ethnography, sociolinguistics, and ethnomusicology.” * Christine Robins, University of Exeter * “Voices That Matter offers an invaluable contribution to anthropological scholarship on voice and to conversations in related fields of music, media, and sound studies. It is also powerfully written, and its arguments take shape in carefully composed and evocative ethnographic writing. This truly is accomplished and compelling work.” * Daniel Fisher, University of California, Berkeley * ""Voices That Matter is a book that will find resonance with multiple audiences. Drawing on diverse fields such as music theory, gender and postcolonial studies, discourse analysis, and the anthropology of affect, the book joins a larger body of recent work in charting out an alternative path for Kurdish studies away from its historical focus on the politics of nationalism toward a more varied set of thematic and theoretical concerns... readers of all disciplinary backgrounds will be impressed by the book's eloquent prose, its rich ethnographic analysis, and by its empathetic engagement with its interlocutors and the political and ethical questions raised by their desire for voice."" -- Patrick C. Lewis * Linguistic Anthropology * ""The book is a rich, minutely detailed, and assiduously researched anthropological treatment of Dengbêj women singers and the musical technicalities of its form, but it is also much more than that."" -- Francis O'Connor * Journal of Middle East Women's Studies * ""In her wonderfully written and theoretically rich book, Voices That Matter, Marlene Schäfers disrupts the a priori valence often given to voice...Voices That Matter thus performs two levels of impressive work. On the one hand, it detangles liberal equations of voice, representation, and agency. On the other, it provides an important critique of Turkish feminism, bringing about the limits of taking voice as a political metaphor which veils the racialized politics that curtailed representation in the first place."" * International Journal of Middle East Studies *"