White Women Filming Kurdish Women: The Instrumentalisation of the Kurdish Armed Struggle

This paper looks at the gendered representations of female soldiers in war films and reflects on how the role of women in war is imagined. In particular, it questions the media and popular cultural attention that the female Kurdish fighters received, and thereby contributes to the research on women engaged in political violence and their popular representation. A visual, narrative and contextual analysis of two French films (Girls of the Sun (2018), Sisters in Arms (2019)) exposes how female Kurdish combatants are depicted and for what purpose. I argue that the films contribute to the instrumentalisation of the Kurdish Freedom Movement to promote an essentialist understanding of gender and to enact civilisational superiority. I derive several implications from this analysis. First, that it fosters Islamophobic policies at home. Second, that it undermines the revolutionary political project.