Profile
Mediha Sorma is a Ph.D. Candidate studying Feminist Studies in the Department of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington. She holds a BA degree in Translation and Interpreting Studies and an MA degree in Critical and Cultural Studies from Bogazici University, Istanbul. Her dissertation examines the ways in which Kurdish women in Turkey produce insurgent bodies, non-statist discourses of resistance, and anti-national epistemes of kinship through radical practices of mothering and reproduction. She investigates how Kurdish feminism defies the boundaries of Global North feminist scholarship on reproduction and motherhood that takes nation-state and modernity as the only site where historical subjectivity and politics of domination and resistance occurs.
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One of the primary questions of her research is how human subjects that have been historically rendered apolitical and peripheral to war become active participants of armed resistance in the Kurdish context. In addition, the project examines gendering processes and relations of power in conditions of constant duress and war from the perspective of Kurdish mothers who mother under genocidal attempts of the Turkish nation-state and whose response to military racism and other, relatively subtle, manifestations of state racism is not only affective but also militant. Her projects’ historical contextualization reaches back to the construction of Turkish ethnic nationalism during the late Ottoman and the Republican Era and the production of “Kurdishness” as a different part of the Turkification project of the Turkish nation-state.
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Mediha conducted the fieldwork for her dissertation in Istanbul and Diyarbakir, Turkey, in Fall 2019. She interviewed Peace Mothers, a Kurdish Mothers organization, in both cities and asked them about the militant ways of mothering in which they respond to Turkish state violence. She is currently a doctoral fellow for the Mellon Sawyer Seminar with the Simpson Center for Humanities at the University of Washington. Prior to her fellowship with the Simpson Center, Mediha taught courses for the Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies department, including Introduction to Gender, Introduction to Transgender Studies, Philosophies of Feminism and Academic Writing for the Interdisciplinary Writing Program at the English Department.
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Conferences
Sorma, M. P. (2019). “Subaltern Mothering and the Political Elsewhere: Militant Mothers of Kurdish Resistance towards a Stateless Freedom”. Kurdish Studies Conference, Buffett Institute at Northwestern University.
Sorma, M. P. (2018). “Denationalizing the Body: Kurdish Women’s Guerilla Resistance towards a Stateless Freedom”. National Women's Studies Association annual conference 2020.
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Sorma, M. P. (2019). “Subaltern Mothering and the Political Elsewhere: Militant Mothers of Kurdish Resistance towards a Stateless Freedom”. University of Washington Turkish and Ottoman Studies Workshop Series Spring 2018.
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