After the two‐year‐long peace negotiations to resolve the conflict ongoing since 1978 between the Republic of Turkey and insurgent Kurdish groups, Turkey announced, on July 24, 2015, a military operation against PKK (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan or Kurdistan Workers’ Party) targets. As the operations continued, the images from the war in southeast Turkey began circulating on social media. One Twitter accountFootnote ¹ in particular became notorious for sharing, with sardonic, chauvinistic commentary, gruesome, uncensored photographs of tortured, disfigured bodies. The screen name for this account is JITEM, after the controversial secret governmental organization, Jandarma İstihbarat ve Terörle Mücadele or Gendarmerie Intelligence and Counter‐Terrorism infamous for extrajudicial killings of around seventeen thousand people, alongside the kidnapping and torture of those affiliated with PKK since 1987. The user name they picked, @BeyazToroscular (“the white Torossers”), refers to the white Renault 12 Toros automobiles, the official vehicle for the police and gendarmerie under military rule in Turkey in the 1980s, driven by officers for the purposes of surveillance, intimidation, and detaining suspects for “questioning” (that is, torture). Reclaiming this horrifying history and purposely aligning the ongoing military operations with it, the account received a lot of support from thousands in its celebration and exaltation of militaristic, masculinist, racist formulations of nationalism, consolidated through the displays of the torture, humiliation, and extermination of Kurdish bodies. There is, undoubtedly, a link, both historical and ideological, between the ongoing operations and this history that was shamelessly reclaimed by this act of self‐naming. Such self‐naming attests not only to the perpetuation of the history of violence but also to the state's laying a claim on the monopoly of violence. Although the circulation of these images served as a tactic of psychological warfare in that they sought to intimidate and suppress, creating the impression that the sovereignty of the nation‐state cannot (and ought not) be questioned or challenged, they served yet another purpose.

The spectacle of violence constituted a discursive site for the reproduction of militarized masculinity at the intersection of racial and gender oppression, which in turn was aligned with the sovereignty of the nation‐state. This reproduction hinges on a practice of gendered shaming, whereby racialization takes place precisely through the degradation of the feminine. Although shame as a gender‐policing mechanism in the making of manhood has been analyzed at length both in military and nonmilitary settings (Reference KimmelKimmel 2011; Reference StepienStepien 2014), the photographs I examine are indicative of a practice of shaming that seeks to racialize by way of feminization. Theorizing shame in an undertheorized context, I explore how Kurdishness, an ethnic identity, becomes a race, that is, how it is made to bear the mark of inferiority only through its alignment with femininity. The subjugation of the racialized enemy, in other words, takes place through the degradation of women. It would seem, then, that in this context, antiracist politics is inextricably (and necessarily) tied to feminist politics.

In the context of Turkey, shame is very much attached to the social meaning of the feminine body. Culturally, the feminine body is marked by shame in that its perceived sexual nature is seen to carry the necessity and urgency to suppress this sexuality and to keep the feminine body in check. In the case of honor killings, for instance, it is not uncommon that even if a woman was raped, she could end up being murdered by a male family member in an effort to “redeem the family's honor” (Reference KoğacıoğluKoğacıoğlu 2004). A man's honor in this context hinges on the “purity” of the woman's body. As a designator of the possibility of impurity (and thereby dishonor), women's bodies are seen as inherently shameful. Femininity therefore bears the mark of that shame. Such shame is seen to be linked to the dishonor that the woman could potentially bring to the family, often simply by virtue of existing.Footnote ² It is not surprising, therefore, that women's bodies are heavily policed in this social context by male family members in particular.

Yet shame also serves as a tool to discipline those bodies marked by femininity. Such disciplining is demonstrated in the sociological research that covers the cultural practice of honor killings, virginity examinations, and street harassment (Reference KandiyotiKandiyoti 1987; Reference ParlaParla 2001; Reference KoğacıoğluKoğacıoğlu 2004). These works demonstrate that shame is an essential tool in the making (and controlling) of femininity. In this sense, shame is an integral part of the construction of feminine subjectivity in the context of Turkey. Given that shame is also the “place where the question of identity arises most originarily and most relationally” (Reference SedgwickSedgwick 2003, 37), shame not only serves to discipline the feminine body, but also to situate it in a gender hierarchy. Shame as a condition of possibility for the emergence of feminine subjectivity affectively conveys the mark of inferiority that femininity bears. Shame disciplines not simply in order to repress, but as productive of subjectivity. The disciplinary effect that shame involves, in other words, is tied to subjectivation, the process of becoming a subject.

It is through shame that one becomes a gendered subject, bearing the inferior mark of femininity. Yet the project at hand reveals that in the context of the aforementioned military operations, the shame attached to femininity is extended and projected onto ethnic minorities, in particular the Kurdish population, in an effort to establish their inferiority and hence dispensability. This establishment of Kurdish inferiority and dispensability is inextricably tied to the perceived inferiority and dispensability of women at large. There is, in other words, a sexual economy of racial violence where racial violence is discursively founded on sexual violence. Shame, in this sense, serves not only as a tool for the state to discipline women's bodies (through dress codes, virginity examinations, and so on), but also to mark the Kurdish body (male or female) as racially inferior. I argue that this marking takes place through feminization (which I treat here as a form of gendered shaming) not by accident, but precisely because of the culturally sedimented idea that femininity, in and of itself, bears the mark of shame.

In this essay, I call the acts whereby the Kurdish subject is interpellated by the state in a gendered manner “gendered shaming.” Feminization is the name I give to the kind of gendered shaming through which the Kurdish rebel posited as male (thereby purposefully erasing the active involvement of Kurdish women) is interpellated as if he were female. Yet feminization as a form of gendered shaming is not limited to willful misgendering. Feminization also entails rampant sexualization and sexualized violation as discursively bound up with the social meaning of femininity. Feminization, in other words, names those mechanisms of marking the body as shameful—positing it as racially/sexually inferior—in that femininity, in the public imaginary, is seen as inherently shameful. In the first part of this essay, I explore how gendered shaming serves to racialize the Kurdish subject through a discussion of the leaked photographs from the military operations in question. Resisting such gendered shaming and the degradation of the feminine, Kurdish women and their allies have sought to transform and resignify shame through art. In the second part of the essay, I focus on the ways in which art offers tools to subvert the sexist/racist formulations of the state.

I. War and the Politics of Shaming

Out of thousands of images posted by the JITEM Twitter account, I picked four photographs that demonstrate the use of shame within the intertwining politics of race and gender in a militarized context. My intention was to pick images that had become most popular on social media, attaining a place in the public imaginary as the visual representations of the ongoing military operations in southeast Turkey. Many of the images I surveyed feature soldiersFootnote ³ in heavy military gear, wielding assault weapons that serve as phallic surrogates in the fashioning of militarized masculinity. Many of them also include messages written by the soldiers, through which they seem to be seeking to amuse their audience while intimidating the Kurdish resistance movement. The photographs that circulated involve similar messages and offer similar displays of masculinity. Such reiteration is a way in which these photographs constitute a kind of discursive production whereby militarized masculinity represents the nation‐state. The sovereignty of the state, in this sense, is established through these performances of masculinity that seek to feminize the enemy (posited as male), where femininity comes to serve as a marker of racial inferiority. The act of shaming, accordingly, constitutes here at once a mechanism of racialization and gendering in the making of a nation.

There is extensive scholarship on such a formulation of sovereignty and its link to masculinity. According to Judith Butler, sovereignty is a position that “denies its own constitutive vulnerability” and “tries to relocate injurability in the other” (Reference ButlerButler 2009, 178). It is possible to think this formulation of sovereignty alongside Michael Kimmel's historical account of masculinity in Manhood in America, where he traces the shifts in the dominant configurations of manhood in the United States. American manhood in its contemporary hegemonic form, Kimmel argues, requires constant reaffirming against threats: “Beginning in the early part of the nineteenth century, the idea of testing and proving one's manhood became one of the defining experiences in American men's lives” (Kimmel 2001, 2). He attributes this characteristic of fragility that masculinity has attained to the neoliberal era and the economic instability within which men have found themselves. Manhood under capitalism, Kimmel suggests, has been rendered vulnerable, yet it must deny its own vulnerability in order to affirm itself. We could draw a parallel here to Butler's notion of sovereignty in that both formulations involve a denial and a projection of vulnerability onto the other in an effort to consolidate and sustain itself. Bonnie Mann explores this connection in Sovereign Masculinity, wherein the understanding of sovereignty that “builds itself on the conceit of its own inviolability” (Reference MannMann 2014, 3) is inextricably tied to a national masculine identification. The following analysis of the photographs from the military operations in southeast Turkey is informed by such feminist thinking on the link between sovereignty and masculinity. Shame, in these accounts, constitutes a mechanism whereby masculinity is policed, disciplined, and reproduced. It would, however, be shortsighted to suggest that this link between sovereignty and masculinity is specific to the context of the United States in the era of global capitalism and global militarization. Although the aforementioned works focus specifically on US American masculinity, I find it helpful to think this relation between sovereignty and masculinity in terms of the notion of militarized masculinity, which I borrow from Cynthia Enloe (Reference EnloeEnloe 2000). Although not reducible to a single prototype, this notion offers the possibility of analyzing different and interconnected formulations of masculinity within militarized settings. While manifest in these settings, militarized masculinity, as I take it up in this essay, resonates beyond these settings as an (illusory) understanding of masculinity that violates, dominates, invades, and yet is supposedly inviolable, thereby embodying the notion of sovereignty. In this sense, I situate my analysis within the larger context of global militarization, but it pertains at the same time to the unique case of Turkey with its complex histories of race and gender. Moreover, in addition to its ties to a politics of gender, the practice of sovereignty here, I suggest, is bound up with a process of racialization, whereby the claim to sovereignty is achieved by way of racializing the other through feminization. In the sovereign denial of injurability that seeks to relocate it in the other, I suggest that the mechanisms of racialization and gendering coincide: the Kurdish enemy is marked as racially inferior precisely through feminization. The politics of race and the politics of gender, in other words, are in this case interwoven. It is my intention to attend to this simultaneity within the context of Turkey through a reading of the photographs that came out of the 2015–2016 southeast military operations.

In one of the most controversial photographs that have been in circulation, we see a soldier who had entered the bedroom in somebody's home. He is in his military uniform, holding a machine gun, lodged in front of the bedroom mirror, on which he has written with red lipstick, “Aşk Yüksekova'da Başka Yaşanıyor,” or in English, “Love in Yüksekova [a county of the city of Hakkari] is unique.” He drew a heart around this message, signing not with his name, but with his hometown, “From Beyşehir, Konya.” The photograph not only portrays an invasion, but also intimates that this invasion be understood in terms of “love.” The use of red lipstick mimics the notes lovers leave for each other on the mirror in popular music videos broadcast in Turkey in the 1990s, yet it is also resonant of the message the psychopath leaves on the mirror for his victims in horror movies. Encompassing this double meaning, the term “love” stands for a threat: the threat of violence, yet a specifically gendered kind of violence. The message of “love” conveys the idea of invasion, not only of one's home but also one's body, the idea of being “owned,” of domination. If love here signifies something like rape, it does so through the suggestion that the opponent is completely overpowered. Accordingly, this is what makes “love” so “unique” in Yüksekova: the implied meaning being the total domination of Kurds at the hands of the Turkish military.

Yet if “love” relays “domination” here as part of the psychological warfare, it is only because of the gendered meaning that the message purports to convey. The message is indicative of a heteropatriarchal logic where the domination is that of the feminized Kurdish enemy by the Turkish soldier who claims a masculine identity precisely through that domination. If “domination” here is aesthetically achieved by way of a display of militarized masculinity, its discursive significance lies in gendered shaming: the state is masculinized only insofar as “the enemy” is feminized (that is, rendered weak, insignificant, and dispensable), which coincides with the act of racial marking. Feminization provides such racial marking, that is, the mark of inferiority, insofar as it is culturally understood that femininity is marked by shame.

Some other photographs, not as widely popular as the aforementioned, depict police officers and soldiers who wrote similar messages on walls, which discursively seek to establish domination by way of the feminization (thereby the degradation and delegitimization) of the Kurdish resistance movement. In one such photograph, we see a soldier who has written in red in the background, “Bahar'da Tanga Giydircem Size,” or “This Spring, I'll make ya [sic] wear a thong.” Yet another one features a rocket that is insinuated to be an American made M40, which, according to Global Security, a website devoted to military news and information, is “an 106mm breech‐loaded, single‐shot, man‐portable, crew‐served recoilless rifle” (Global Security n.d.). We see a man's hand holding the rocket on which he has written, “HAVAN KİME FİSTANLI GÜZEL ‘106 mm’ :),” or “Who are you sassing, the beauty in fistan? ‘106 mm’ :),” taking catcalling to a new level in the context of war. “Fistan” is a traditional woman's dress, but it also refers to the kilt‐type garment traditionally worn by Greek, Scottish, and Albanian men. The use of “fistan” in this way serves to conflate all these cultures together with the Kurdish culture, which has little historical connection to the rest (if at all), in a xenophobic manner that also shames in a gendered way, in that the move seeks to emasculate and mock by way of suggesting a connection to femininity. Enacting a willful xenophobic ignorance, the statement insinuates that the particular identity of the enemy does not matter, whether they are Greeks, with whom the Turkish state historically has had contentious relations, or Kurds, given that they are all fistan‐wearers, all inferior to the virile Turkish man.

The modification of what is traditionally a catcall in Turkey, “Havan kime, güzelim?” or, “Who are you sassing, beautiful?,” also suggests an important connection between everyday gender violence that serves to discipline women as they navigate the public space and the context of war wherein the enemy is being “catcalled” as they are bombed. The violence here is operative both on a material and ideological level. Much like the interpellation that Althusser describes in the calling of an individual on the street by the policeman through which Althusser examines the relation between ideology and subjectivity (Reference AlthusserAlthusser 1971), the message written on the rocket is a fatal “hey you!” directed at the Kurdish rebel, seeking to eradicate both the material and the ideological presence of the bodies that partake in the resistance movement. Given that Althusser's description attempts to show that ideology denotes a situation whereby the individual is “always already interpellated” by the state, that is, s/he is always already the subject of the state (yet, we may add, in differential ways by virtue of one's social location), the exclamation, “Who are you sassing, beautiful?” is linked to the particular subjectivation of the Kurdish individual in relation to the state. “To sass” is to resist, yet this resistance is delegitimized because it is feminized. It insinuates a willful (mis)recognition whereby the existence of the resisting subject is acknowledged yet shamed by way of feminization. Within the sex/gender system that is imposed and enforced, where femininity bears the mark of shame, it is conventionally women who “wear a dress” and who are “sassy,” thereby who are seen as frivolous, weak, and not to be taken seriously. It is not simply women, but particularly “indecent” women (that is, “sluts”) who wear a thong, thereby the statement, “I'll make ya [sic] wear a thong” not only feminizes the Kurdish fighters by way of threatening them, but also sexualizes and slut‐shames them in the same move. Gendered shaming through feminization, in this sense, bestows the mark of racial inferiority. Yet this is only because femininity itself is marked by shame within this cultural understanding. These significations are indicative of a masculinist economy of desire at work that gets projected onto “the enemy.” Femininity here not only marks the racialized other but constitutes the very act of marking itself, that is, racialization takes place through feminization. The militarized aesthetics draws from and aggrandizes the everyday hostility that toxic masculinity breeds by carrying it into the context of war, and it not only enacts violence against women, but connects that to the violence perpetuated against marginalized ethnic groups. The racialization of Kurds here takes place through the marginalization of women as militarized masculinity as an apparatus of the state serves a racist and sexist function at once.

In another photograph, a police officer holding a Turkish flag in one hand and doing a “wolf sign” with the other (which symbolizes Turkish nationalism), is standing in front of writing on the wall that reads: “Aşk Bodrumda Yaşanıyor Güzelim :) PÖH :),” or, “The basement is where the love is at, darling” with two smiley faces, signed with the acronym for Police Special Action (Polis Özel Harekat), a division of law enforcement for counterterrorism. Below the writing, there is a stain on the wall that resembles a blood splatter. The basement in question refers to the basement that many of those who had been wounded by the attacks had turned into a refuge, which the Turkish army and the police blew up in February 2016, killing over sixty people. The operation was particularly controversial as the wounded had been denied medical care for days before they were executed, and some sources report that civilians were also hiding in the basement (Cumhuriyet 2016). If the basement is “where the love is at,” love signifies nothing but torture and extermination, victoriously celebrated by the Turkish soldiers. As the state massacres the racialized other, the gendered meanings underlying these messages not only make a mockery of the massacre but also eroticize it. Upholding the statement is the idea that “love” is domination, which could not be thought separately from the politics of gender whereby women are subordinated and violated. The dispensability of the Kurdish bodies is thereby established through gendered shaming, which at the same time consolidates a sense of sovereignty as tied to masculinity. Shame as projected onto the Kurdish body through feminization serves as the primary psychological weapon against “the enemy.”

I suggest that although the messages accompanying these grand displays of militarized masculinity comprise a tactic of intimidation and suppression, they also indicate something larger and perhaps more significant. When Foucault discusses the deployment of sexuality in the context of the history of its “invention,” as it were, he notes that although sex by itself constituted “a political ordering of life,” what was at stake was rather “the self‐affirmation of one class [the bourgeoisie] rather than the enslavement of another [the proletariat]: a defense, a protection, a strengthening, and an exaltation that were eventually extended to others—at the cost of different transformations—as a means of social control and political subjugation” (Reference FoucaultFoucault 1990, 123). Similarly, I argue that though these images seek to intimidate, humiliate, and shame the Kurds (militants and civilians) by feminizing them (many of whom, one must note, are women), their primary purpose is rather to consolidate a masculine identity for the Turkish nation. Such consolidation takes place through a performance of militarized masculinity whereby the exaltation and valorization of masculinity at the intersection of militarism, sexism, and racism constitutes a self‐affirming move: it establishes a positive self‐understanding for the nation‐state as masculine, rather than simply seeking the repression of the enemy. Militarized masculinity and its proud display become the very embodiment of this masculine national identity.

These images constitute a discursive production of militarized masculinity taken on as the identity for the nation. Militarized masculinity as a discursive production entails what Foucault describes in the context of the proliferation of the discourse of sex as the “displacement, intensification, reorientation, and modification of desire itself” (Reference FoucaultFoucault 1990, 23). These displays of militarized masculinity are linked to a particular shaping of desire, an economy of desire that constitutes the valorization of masculinity on a national level and its equation to power. Such an equation takes place through racialization by way of gendering, and more specifically, gendered shaming in the form of feminization. The significant support that this kind of masculinity receives from the masses is an important indicator not only of a widespread uncritical outlook on masculinity but also of a serious problem of desire that is at work politically. As Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari put it, “when subjects, individuals, or groups act manifestly counter to their class interests—when they rally to the interests and ideals of a class that their own objective situation should lead them to combat—it is not enough to say: they were fooled, the masses have been fooled. It is not an ideological problem, a problem of failing to recognize, or of being subject to, an illusion. It is a problem of desire, and desire is part of the infrastructure” (Reference Deleuze and GuattariDeleuze and Guttari 2004, 114). Masculinity, in this sense, offers a sense of empowerment by way of aligning oneself with the power of the state. Here, racialization serves as a tool to a masculinist economy of desire whereby the nation itself takes on a masculine identity by racializing the other through feminization and laying claim to power defined as domination.

In these photographs that perform gendered shaming, the soldiers are anonymous; their faces are covered. They never sign their messages with their own names, but either with their division's name or their hometown, such that their individual identity has been subsumed under the militaristic nationalism for which their uniform stands. With regard to militarized masculinity, David Morgan writes: “The uniform absorbs individualities into a generalized and timeless masculinity while also connoting a control of emotion and a subordination to a larger rationality” (Reference Morgan, Brod and KaufmanMorgan 1994, 165). It is, in this sense, common that the soldier sheds all individuality and comes to represent a generalized form of masculinity. Yet, paradoxically, it is precisely through that representation that the soldier is able to claim any kind of individuality. In the context of Turkey, where military service remains compulsory for men, but optional for many of those who can afford to “buy out,” the soldiers featured in these images are most likely uneducated men from urban working‐class and rural backgrounds.Footnote ⁴ The allure of masculinist nationalism is that it offers (an illusion of) power in the face of powerlessness.Footnote ⁵ Much like the “phallic appropriation” described by Carol Clover through the picking up of a gun by young women in horror movies, an act through which they shed their victimhood (Reference CloverClover 1992), phallic appropriation of working‐class men takes place once they put on military gear: they are no longer vulnerable and powerless but become heroic and inviolable. The reality of class oppression is mitigated and overcome through becoming the seamless embodiment of militarized masculine domination, despite the fact that, to borrow from Audre Lorde, “the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house” (Reference LordeLorde 2007). Victimhood is (supposedly) overcome here through the embodiment of a national masculine ideal. Militarized masculinity, in this sense, offers an opportunity to assume the position of the oppressor in an effort to no longer be in the position of the oppressed. Yet this is primarily a move of desire and not necessarily of self‐interest—for there is no true empowerment here. As Deleuze and Guattari put it, “For it is a matter of flows, of stocks, of breaks in and fluctuations of flows; desire is present wherever something flows and runs, carrying along with it interested subjects—but also drunken or slumbering subjects—toward lethal destinations” (Reference Deleuze and GuattariDeleuze and Guattari 2004, 115). Class oppression is not overcome once and for all in the embodiment of the inviolable masculine ideal, which paradoxically puts one in harm's way. In such embodiment, the denial of vulnerability and its relocation in the other takes place through finding oneself in a rather vulnerable position in the context of war. As proud displays of such sovereign masculinity, the photographs attest to this paradoxical situation whereby the desire for empowerment leads to another kind of powerlessness. The displays of militarized masculinity, the alignment they propose among masculinity, power, and domination, not only present a distorted view of reality, but also involve a “perversion” of desire, where desire, in Deleuze and Guattari's words, is “made to desire its own repression” (115).

In their representations of militarized masculinity as the kind of masculinity that dominates and violates, the kind that is desirable and sublime, these photographs are indicative of the phenomenon Walter Benjamin famously called the aestheticization of violence. Nowhere does this problem of desire become more visible than in the aestheticization of violence, which seeks to excite, provoke, and ignite desire. The supporters of the Twitter account JITEM were overjoyed by these images, lending support to the “courageous” soldiers. Violence is aestheticized; war is rendered beautiful, desirable, and naturally linked to the masculine body that serves as a metonym for the nation‐state at large. Much in line with the leftist underpinnings of the Kurdish resistance movement, Benjamin writes: “This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art” (Reference Benjamin and ArendtBenjamin 1969, 242).

The politicization of art constitutes a rallying point to combat the economy of desire around masculinist nationalism. Out of art—politicized, critical art—which could offer a retraining of sensibilities, new economies of desire may emerge. In the next section, I turn to the subversion and resignification of shame through politicized art. The politics of race and gender around this war operate by way of racialization through feminization and the aligning of masculinity with power and power with domination both on the level of the individual and the state, but women's peace movements in particular have been active in transforming this intended affect (shame) into honor and resistance. As the nation‐state itself attains a masculine identity precisely through the subjugation of the feminine that gets attached to Kurdish bodies, these movements undermine the circuits through which masculinist economies of desire operate in that they reject the tripartite alignment of masculinity‐power‐domination and allow for the celebration of the lives of the women killed by the state.

II. Women's Peace Movements and Transforming Shame into Resistance

In response to the leaked photographs, circulating on social media, of the exposed, naked body of a guerrilla woman, Ekin Wan (also known as Kevser Eltürk), who was killed by the Turkish forces in August 2015 in Varto, Muş, a demonstration was staged in front of the Swedish parliament in Stockholm, along with others (including a sit‐in protest at the historic square in Cologne, Germany and a gathering in Varto of women's rights activists from all over Turkey, where Wan was killed and tortured). The demonstration in Stockholm featured a woman lying naked on her stomach in tan underpants and with red paint smeared all over her back, to mimic the photographs. She is surrounded by the photographs of killed guerrillas and the ruins left from war. The sources report that she lay in front of the parliament for an hour, then others covered her body with a white sheet. This event was not only a protest against war, but also resembled a funeral. The gathering served as an opportunity to publicly mourn for Ekin Wan and many others, to hold a funeral that would not otherwise have been held.

The photographs that were leaked were meant to humiliate and dishonor the Kurdish resistance movement by exposing the naked body of a guerrilla woman, shaming her and the rest of the movement.Footnote ⁶ They were meant to delight those who support the state's counter‐terrorism warfare (and they did) and normalize the monopoly of violence assumed by the state (and they continue to do so). Yet these gatherings for protest not only bring attention to these war crimes, but also perform in a subversive manner and thereby serve to resignify the very violence inflicted by the Turkish state, turning it against itself. This performance has a different effect than that of the original photographs. It shocks and unsettles. It disturbs and provokes. It performs a refusal to aestheticize politics (which the photographs seek to accomplish) and instead politicizes and mobilizes art. Refusing to share the original photograph of the stripped naked dead body of Ekin Wan, many news outlets had used an illustration by the artist Serpil Odabaşı, which memorializes Wan. In Nusaybin, Mardin, a group of Kurdish activists wrote on a banner: “Ekin Wan is the most naked phase of our struggle.” In this way, the exposed body of Wan has become a site of resistance, and not of degradation, humiliation, and shame as was intended. In Varto, the civil rights activist group Peace Mothers “threw off their white scarves at the place [where Ekin Wan was tortured, killed and stripped naked],” Ruken Işık reports. “Throwing off the scarf has a symbolic meaning in Kurdish culture,” she notes, “where women can stop the fighting by throwing the scarf to the ground” (Reference IşıkIşık 2015).

Although Peace Mothers have not been able to stop this war at this moment in time by throwing off their scarves, it is such organized action that is going to bring an end to it as the public refuses to buy into the aestheticization of violence. The politicization of art intimidates the state. Nine activists were detained by the police in Izmir, Turkey on May 11, 2016 during a photography exhibit entitled “Where is the War?” depicting scenes from Kurdistan as part of the events to celebrate the International Day of Conscientious Objection. An officer reportedly stated, “There is no war, it's cleaning” (Reference Izmir'deIzmir'de Vicdani Ret 2016). As the state persistently holds onto this rhetoric of “weeding out” the terrorists, and glorifies these acts through the displays of militarized masculinity, the activists respond by showing this war for what it is. The term the officer used—“cleaning”—is meant to convey the meaning of “eliminating terrorism,” but it is also resonant of ethnic cleansing. One must remember that Turkey continues to be haunted by a history of genocide and ethnic cleansing, with the systematic extermination and displacement of Armenians, Christian Assyrians, Syrians, Chaldeans, and Greeks in 1915, the population exchanges between Greece and Turkey in 1923, and the mob attacks fueled by the governing party against the Greek minorities living in Istanbul in 1955 (also known as the Istanbul pogrom). The resonance of these events continues to be felt today, as the state persists in defining the nation through the homogeneous category of “the Turkish race.” Militarized masculinity embodies these exclusions and enacts them as it racializes by way of gendering. There is, in other words, an intersection between practices of gendering and racializing by state apparatuses in that the politics of gender and race become intermeshed. Militarized masculinity, in this sense, serves as a tool for homogenizing the nation. Politicizing art, then, involves an intervention in and a transformation of the established economies of desire whereby masculinity has become synonymous with power (as domination) and the nation. In her powerful piece entitled “Your Body is My Life,” Gülfer Akkaya notes that although guerrilla men too are tortured (like Hacı Lokman Birlik, whose body was tied to a police vehicle and dragged for several feet), these actions are not undertaken with “sexist rage,” but instead with “malice toward the enemy,” as “revenge.” Yet women's bodies are subject to methods of torture that are sexualized in nature, that are specific to women's bodies. She writes: “What we have here is not a clash of enemies as seen in standard wars, but a male brutality used in the struggle between the genders” (Reference AkkayaAkkaya 2015). Akkaya assiduously points out that the treatment of guerrilla women is gender‐specific and particularly reflective of a culture of misogyny, but I would like to add that a politics of gender is also very much at work in the violation of the bodies of men. As the commentary on the Twitter account JITEM shows, the degradation of women takes place not only by virtue of the gender‐specific ways in which women's bodies are violated, the misogynistic practices of the state, or the sexist commentary directed at women in particular, but also through the feminization of men, the feminization of “the enemy” at large, in an attempt to discredit the movement. This is indicative of the masculine identification of the nation through the degradation of the feminine: the nation‐state establishes its masculinist authority through a fundamental exclusion of women, an exclusion enacted here by way of gendered shaming. Rape as a weapon of war operates in a similar fashion, as something that not only violates and degrades, but also feminizes while affirming and consolidating masculinity, where masculinity is tied to domination. The leaked photographs from the Abu Ghraib prison after the invasion of Iraq similarly demonstrate the intertwinement of racialization and gendering in practices of torture, suggesting that such practices of feminizing the racialized enemy in an effort to humiliate and torture comprise a rather commonplace military tactic. Similar practices are also employed by the Israeli authorities toward Palestinian rebels. Julie Peteet notes that although imprisonment and physical violence inflicted by Israeli authorities have generated and empowered a new generation of Palestinian men involved in resistance as these practices have come to serve as a rite of passage to manhood, the tactics have since been changed, as sexualized forms of violence are introduced to break the sense of (heterosexual) masculinity of these men and thereby to break the resistance: “One cannot return from prison and describe forms of torture that violate the most intimate realm of gendered selfhood. If knowledge of such sexual tortures circulates widely, violence and detention will be diluted of their power to contribute to a gendered sense of self informing political agency” (Reference PeteetPeteet 1994, 45). In such cases, violence serves as a practice of gendering, which has direct bearing on both political and individual senses of agency. What these practices show is that the state operates through the established meanings and hierarchies of gender and has a stake in their violent perpetuation. As Angela Davis stated in a speech she gave at the University of Oregon on May 11, 2016, “State violence relies on intimate violence and intimate violence reproduces state violence” (Reference DavisDavis 2016). Gender violence in this way serves as a hinge between state violence and intimate violence, as it is operative in both. The next step would be to consider this crisscrossing between state violence and intimate violence within the politics of gender in a transnational context, as a matter of global justice, such that it would (or should) constitute a major concern for international peace movements.

Moreover, such a logic of gendering through violence often exceeds military settings, saturating the political field as a whole. In the context of Turkey, even those who are critical of the actions of the government tend to use similar masculinist language. After a Russian bomber aircraft was shot for border violations by a Turkish jet near the Turkey‐Syrian border, social media was flooded with various photographs of Putin depicting his virility, some of which were Photoshopped by Turkish users (probably the most popular Photoshopped image was Putin riding a bear, shared with the commentary, “Putin rides a BEAR. Erdogan can't even ride a horse,” referring to the time when Erdogan fell off a horse). In the sharing of these images, the political and military power that Russia had has been equated with Putin's masculinity, which is contrasted with the perceived failure of Erdogan's masculinity. It is clear, based on this equation, that in the social imaginary, it is commonplace to equate political power with masculinity, and masculinity with domination. The dominant social imaginary, in other words, has been colonized by these equations through which individuals become invested in masculinist politics. Masculinism is prevalent in politics because it sells; it is desired. As Deleuze and Guattari note, “It was not by means of a metaphor, even a paternal metaphor, that Hitler was able to sexually arouse the fascists” (Reference Deleuze and GuattariDeleuze and Guattari 2004, 114). Similarly, many nationalists in Turkey are thrilled by these images circulating on social media that depict gruesome violence. Social change requires a dismantling of this masculinist framework itself, by disrupting the circuits of desire that are at work. Art can give rise to the creation of new circuits of desire. Having a critical outlook on the politics of masculinity entails paying close attention to the links among sexism, racism, and militarism that have become particularly salient in the representations and practices of militarized masculinity. In her piece about the leaked photographs of Ekin Wan's exposed naked body and the history of state violence against the Kurds, Işık writes: “The Kurdish Women's Movement has taught women that honor cannot be reduced to women's bodies, honor is struggle, honor is not to be ashamed of resistance” (Reference IşıkIşık 2015). This message should find its rightful place in the social imaginary, at a moment when gender is seldom a point of discussion in the context of these military operations, despite all the ways in which gender is operative in the forms of violence that are inflicted. The role of gender (and of gendering) in this war shows that insofar as the dehumanization of racialized groups operates through the dehumanization of women, our oppressions are bound up together. And so will be our liberation.

III. Conclusion: Jin, Jîyan, Azadî

Masculinity is a social construct that is historically specific and context‐dependent, but there are pertinent connections, crisscrossings if you will, between the kinds of masculinity that get conjoined to militarization. These forms of masculinity often serve as a site of investment for the racist and sexist practices of the state, while constituting an identity for the nation. The resonance of this intertwinement among race, gender, and nationality is felt beyond the confines of the military, infecting the social imaginary by aligning masculinity with (political) power. In the ongoing war in Turkey (which is yet to be recognized as a war, apparently),Footnote ⁷ the body of the soldier constitutes a site for the reinscription of the national masculine ideal, the majestic Turkish male who slaughters his enemies like he violates his women.Footnote ⁸ In the global war against terrorism, where masculinity often gets folded into the narratives about sovereignty, power, and revenge cloaked as justice, feminists chant in Kurdish, Jin, Jîyan, Azadî, against state terror, against gender violence, racialized violence, and all other forms of violence inflicted in the name of justice. Jin, Jîyan, Azadî, this is no justice. Jin, Jîyan, Azadî, power with, not power over. Jin, Jîyan, Azadî, people over profit. Jin, Jîyan, Azadî. Woman. Life. Freedom.