The Mother, the Politician, and the Guerrilla: Women’s Political Imagination in the Kurdish Movement by Nazan Üstündağ is a bold and generative contribution to decolonial feminist scholarship as well as social movements literature. Working according to Sylvia Wynter’s philosophy of the “genres of human,” Üstündağ shows how Kurdish women’s revolutionary praxis produces alternative political imaginaries that challenge the Turkish state and unsettle the ontological foundations of racial‑patriarchal and capitalist modernity. The book argues convincingly that the Kurdish women’s movement does not simply resist within existing political frameworks; rather, the struggle gives rise to a new genre of human, decolonizing being, time, and relationality through forms adequate to the revolutionary imagination they enact.

At the center of the book is “genre,” not as a metaphor, but as an analytical framework that allows Üstündağ to trace how political imagination takes shape. Drawing on Wynter, Üstündağ suggests that genre mediates how Kurdish mothers, politicians, and guerrillas struggle themselves into being by delinking subjectivity from the colonial terms through which it has been historically constrained. Each genre generates its own relationship to time and space. In the political genre of the Kurdish freedom movement, maternal time emerges from the practices of Kurdish mothers of the forcibly disappeared who publicly mourn and disrupt the violent strategies of erasure adopted by the Turkish state; female Kurdish politicians move within tragic and melodramatic temporalities that invoke myth; and in the mountains, guerrillas practice heval: a mode of intimate, nonheteronormative friendship that grounds an alternative genre of human. By tracing this genre, Üstündağ demonstrates how the Kurdish women’s movement generates new maps of the possible.

The book does not offer a conventional history, nor does it provide a linear historical account of the Kurdish movement, and this refusal is central to the book’s epistemological contribution. By rejecting hegemonic modes of historicizing the past, Üstündağ aligns with decolonial critiques that understand History as a technology of coloniality that consigns Kurds to a “zone of non-being.” Instead, the Kurdish movement for freedom becomes intelligible through the ways “Kurdish women occupy, evoke, and conjure practices that work against ‘History’” (p. 15). It is precisely this insurgent stance toward History—with a capital H—that moves Kurds into a zone of being. Grounded in ethnographic attention to the rhythms of funerals, protests, and vigils across Kurdistan, Üstündağ describes Kurdish women who persist and act despite a history of matricide and linguicide. In the book, Kurdish women inhabit history and myth at once: like Antigone, the female politician emerges as a figure who speaks truth from within tragedy while imagining a life beyond it.

One of the book’s most compelling contributions is its conceptualization of women’s agency. The argument is that Kurdish women’s agency emerges from inhabiting thresholds between life and death, past and future, legality and illegality, forgetting and forgiving, nature and culture. This formulation captures the ontological stakes of the book’s intervention. This liminal position is not incidental but constitutive of political imagination as well as agency. Kurdish women’s struggle is an effort to disconnect from the colonial script of death and, through creative reworkings of history, mythology, and cosmology, open a horizon of a world‑otherwise. In a sense, Üstündağ’s triptych consisting of the mother, politician, and guerrilla is not a developmental sequence but a constellation of coexisting, plural gendered positions. Drawing on feminist psychoanalysis, queer theory, Black studies, and decolonial thought, Üstündağ describes each gendered figure as it embodies distinct forms of agency, temporality, and relationality. Mothers interrupt the Turkish state’s fantasies of erasing Kurdish motherhood; female Kurdish politicians create spaces of public contact by risking their lives; and female guerrillas, through embodied resistance, open a space for politics beyond the state and heteropatriarchy. These figures unsettle the binary logic of violence–care, public–private, and nature–culture that often structures Western political and feminist theory. Instead, Üstündağ offers a “both, and” epistemology grounded in Kurdish women’s revolutionary praxis.

Although the book employs the analytics of genre (trope, temporality, space), embodiment remains central throughout the book. Political imagination, Üstündağ believes, unfolds between “flesh, body and voice” (p. 16), resisting the reduction of revolutionary praxis to discourse alone. The figures of the mother, the politician, and the guerrilla are not simply narrative types but embodied positions, material practices, and corporeal presences whose significance cannot be fully captured by semiotic analysis alone. Recalling Hortense Spillers’s distinction between body and flesh, Üstündağ speaks of Kurdish women suffering Turkish colonial violence, who are denied the legal personhood associated with the body and are reduced to flesh. Yet, paradoxically, it is within this condition that they exercise agency. A slap by Kurdish politician Sebahat Tuncel to a police officer becomes a gendered gesture of refusal; deputy Feleknaz Uca’s act of physically shielding another woman from police violence transforms her body into a protective surface. These moments exemplify embodied actions in the struggle against “male violence in Kurdistan and remap Kurdistan as a space where women resist rather than obey patriarchy” (p. 120).

The Mother, the Politician, and the Guerrilla is an inspiring read for scholars and students of gender studies, Middle East studies, decolonial scholarship, and social movements research. Üstündağ’s singular lens, shaped in part by her own position as scholar in exile, offers rare insights into the intimate political worlds of Kurdish mothers, politicians, and guerrillas. Her analytical framework of genre powerfully demonstrates the value of bringing literary methodologies to political analysis. If at times the density of the theoretical apparatus risks overshadowing the ethnographic intimacy that grounds it, this does little to diminish the book’s overall significance. Üstündağ has produced a striking account of Kurdish women living in the zone of non‑being who nonetheless create an imaginative zone of being, one that reverberates far beyond Kurdistan and speaks to broader struggles for life, dignity, and emancipation.