Nazan Ustundag
Biographic Data
| ID | 298619 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Nazan Ustundag |
| GIVEN NAMES | Nazan |
| FAMILY NAME | Ustundag |
| SIGNATURE | USTUNDAG N |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 7 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 30 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 7 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
The Birth of a People Under the Sign of the Hunger Strike: 2012 Hunger Strikes by Kurdish Political Prisoners in Turkey
This article focuses on the 2012 hunger strikes of Kurdish prisoners in Turkey. In the vast history of hunger strikes in Turkey, what sets 2012 strikes apart from the rest is that the strike was not related to the bodily autonomy of the prisoners or to the limiting of state's power over them. Instead the strikers demanded the PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan's freedom. In that sense the 2012 strikes, rather than being a complicated form of subjectiviza…
Kaçak as a mode of feeling and being: Sovereignty, Fantasy, and the Undercommons
The article addresses whether kaçak can be used as an analytic to understand and talk about fugitive ways of being and feeling in Turkey. It discusses the different meanings of kaçak and explores what the common underlying structure in the cultural life of Turkey is that brings these different meanings of leakage, smuggling, informal/illegal, contraband, and fugitive together in one word. It reveals the gendered nature of kaçak, and shows that if…
The Mother, the Politician, and the Guerrilla: Women's Political Imagination in the Kurdish Movement
The book’s aim is not to chronicle the rich and powerful history of the Kurdish Women’s Freedom Movement, which collects and keeps an extensive archive in the form of documents, diaries, and meeting notes to prevent erasure by the state and their own male comrades. Instead, the book follows images, figures, voices, flesh echoes, and reverberations. It thereby also aligns itself with the self-definition of Kurds “as having a tradition of resistanc…
Antigone as Kurdish Politician: Gendered Dwellings in the Limit Between Freedom and Peace
Research Article| October 01 2019 Antigone as Kurdish Politician: Gendered Dwellings in the Limit Between Freedom and Peace Nazan Üstündağ Nazan Üstündağ Nazan Üstündağ is an Academy in Exile and IIE-Scholar Rescue Fund fellow at Transregionale Studien in Berlin. She is finishing a book manuscript with the working title Mother, Politician and Guerilla: The Emergence of a New Political Cosmology in Kurdistan Through Women's Bodies and Speech. Sear…
Pornographic State and Erotic Resistance
This article explores the concepts of state pornography and resistance erotics respectively in order to understand the visual frames that the state aims to institute in regard to Kurdish bodies and the ways in which Kurds interrupt such frames. It dwells on three modalities of state pornography. The first concerns the Diyarbakır Prison, where thousands of Kurds were imprisoned during the 1980–84 military rule. Here, the state created a particular…
Mother, Politician, and Guerilla: The Emergence of a New Political Imagination in Kurdistan through Women's Bodies and Speech
This article addresses the question of what epistemic spaces women can occupy to produce truths other than that at the limit between life and death occupied by Antigone, a figure of truth widely celebrated in feminism and beyond. It reflects in particular on the mother, the woman politician, and the woman guerilla, figures who have emerged during the Kurdish struggle against repression and colonization by the Turkish state. The article argues tha…
Self-Defense as a Revolutionary Practice in Rojava, or How to Unmake the State
This intervention concerns the ways in which law and violence are being reorganized in Rojava. Based on observations and interviews I conducted in the Jazira canton of Rojava, I argue that, through democratic autonomy, the Rojava revolution poses a challenge to the politics of sovereignty and biopolitics. While democratic autonomy involves the institutionalization of radical democracy, radical democracy needs to be defended against attacks of cap…
Self-Defense as a Revolutionary Practice in Rojava, or How to Unmake the State
This intervention concerns the ways in which law and violence are being reorganized in Rojava. Based on observations and interviews I conducted in the Jazira canton of Rojava, I argue that, through democratic autonomy, the Rojava revolution poses a challenge to the politics of sovereignty and biopolitics. While democratic autonomy involves the institutionalization of radical democracy, radical democracy needs to be defended against attacks of cap…
Kaçak as a mode of feeling and being: Sovereignty, Fantasy, and the Undercommons
The article addresses whether kaçak can be used as an analytic to understand and talk about fugitive ways of being and feeling in Turkey. It discusses the different meanings of kaçak and explores what the common underlying structure in the cultural life of Turkey is that brings these different meanings of leakage, smuggling, informal/illegal, contraband, and fugitive together in one word. It reveals the gendered nature of kaçak, and shows that if…
Antigone as Kurdish Politician: Gendered Dwellings in the Limit Between Freedom and Peace
Research Article| October 01 2019 Antigone as Kurdish Politician: Gendered Dwellings in the Limit Between Freedom and Peace Nazan Üstündağ Nazan Üstündağ Nazan Üstündağ is an Academy in Exile and IIE-Scholar Rescue Fund fellow at Transregionale Studien in Berlin. She is finishing a book manuscript with the working title Mother, Politician and Guerilla: The Emergence of a New Political Cosmology in Kurdistan Through Women's Bodies and Speech. Sear…
Mother, Politician, and Guerilla: The Emergence of a New Political Imagination in Kurdistan through Women's Bodies and Speech
This article addresses the question of what epistemic spaces women can occupy to produce truths other than that at the limit between life and death occupied by Antigone, a figure of truth widely celebrated in feminism and beyond. It reflects in particular on the mother, the woman politician, and the woman guerilla, figures who have emerged during the Kurdish struggle against repression and colonization by the Turkish state. The article argues tha…
Pornographic State and Erotic Resistance
This article explores the concepts of state pornography and resistance erotics respectively in order to understand the visual frames that the state aims to institute in regard to Kurdish bodies and the ways in which Kurds interrupt such frames. It dwells on three modalities of state pornography. The first concerns the Diyarbakır Prison, where thousands of Kurds were imprisoned during the 1980–84 military rule. Here, the state created a particular…
Self-Defense as a Revolutionary Practice in Rojava, or How to Unmake the State
This intervention concerns the ways in which law and violence are being reorganized in Rojava. Based on observations and interviews I conducted in the Jazira canton of Rojava, I argue that, through democratic autonomy, the Rojava revolution poses a challenge to the politics of sovereignty and biopolitics. While democratic autonomy involves the institutionalization of radical democracy, radical democracy needs to be defended against attacks of cap…
Antigone as Kurdish Politician: Gendered Dwellings in the Limit Between Freedom and Peace
Research Article| October 01 2019 Antigone as Kurdish Politician: Gendered Dwellings in the Limit Between Freedom and Peace Nazan Üstündağ Nazan Üstündağ Nazan Üstündağ is an Academy in Exile and IIE-Scholar Rescue Fund fellow at Transregionale Studien in Berlin. She is finishing a book manuscript with the working title Mother, Politician and Guerilla: The Emergence of a New Political Cosmology in Kurdistan Through Women's Bodies and Speech. Sear…
Pornographic State and Erotic Resistance
This article explores the concepts of state pornography and resistance erotics respectively in order to understand the visual frames that the state aims to institute in regard to Kurdish bodies and the ways in which Kurds interrupt such frames. It dwells on three modalities of state pornography. The first concerns the Diyarbakır Prison, where thousands of Kurds were imprisoned during the 1980–84 military rule. Here, the state created a particular…
Mother, Politician, and Guerilla: The Emergence of a New Political Imagination in Kurdistan through Women's Bodies and Speech
This article addresses the question of what epistemic spaces women can occupy to produce truths other than that at the limit between life and death occupied by Antigone, a figure of truth widely celebrated in feminism and beyond. It reflects in particular on the mother, the woman politician, and the woman guerilla, figures who have emerged during the Kurdish struggle against repression and colonization by the Turkish state. The article argues tha…
The Mother, the Politician, and the Guerrilla: Women's Political Imagination in the Kurdish Movement
The book’s aim is not to chronicle the rich and powerful history of the Kurdish Women’s Freedom Movement, which collects and keeps an extensive archive in the form of documents, diaries, and meeting notes to prevent erasure by the state and their own male comrades. Instead, the book follows images, figures, voices, flesh echoes, and reverberations. It thereby also aligns itself with the self-definition of Kurds “as having a tradition of resistanc…
Kaçak as a mode of feeling and being: Sovereignty, Fantasy, and the Undercommons
The article addresses whether kaçak can be used as an analytic to understand and talk about fugitive ways of being and feeling in Turkey. It discusses the different meanings of kaçak and explores what the common underlying structure in the cultural life of Turkey is that brings these different meanings of leakage, smuggling, informal/illegal, contraband, and fugitive together in one word. It reveals the gendered nature of kaçak, and shows that if…
The Birth of a People Under the Sign of the Hunger Strike: 2012 Hunger Strikes by Kurdish Political Prisoners in Turkey
This article focuses on the 2012 hunger strikes of Kurdish prisoners in Turkey. In the vast history of hunger strikes in Turkey, what sets 2012 strikes apart from the rest is that the strike was not related to the bodily autonomy of the prisoners or to the limiting of state's power over them. Instead the strikers demanded the PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan's freedom. In that sense the 2012 strikes, rather than being a complicated form of subjectiviza…
Law (6 works) · Political science (6 works) · Politics (5 works) · Sociology (5 works) · Turkey's Politics and Society (5 works) · Philosophy (4 works) · Sovereignty (3 works) · Autonomy (2 works) · Epistemology (2 works) · Gender Studies (2 works)