5 - Unmaking and Remaking Sexuality: Body Politics and the PKK

Summary

The last chapter takes an in-depth look at body politics and sexuality and aims to do two things: first, to unpack the often sidelined aspect of the fighters’ desexualisation. How is this part of the subjectivity produced, believed, maintained and policed? What are the tensions that emerge from creating a desexualised guerrilla army that comes down from the mountains to liberate society? Second, this chapter discusses what I call ‘party bargains’. I argue that women break out of their particular societal constellations by joining the party and enter a new bargain, this time with the party. It discusses three sites of party bargains: the fighter, the civil activist or politician, and the mother, whereas the three categories are overlapping. I demonstrate that in each case these party bargains hold great emancipatory power and that chosen abstinence (for the guerrillas) can be seen as one of the main tools of female resistance that strengthens the female ranks. However, this process goes hand in hand with a strict process of discipline and coercion, and I ask whether the sex ban is in fact at the heart of the new gender norms and relations in the making and key to the party’s ability to control its revolutionaries.