The "Life" of the State: Social Reproduction and Geopolitics in Turkey's Kurdish Question

At the heart of geopolitical concerns today are questions about life: the sustainability of life, the quality of life, and the biological capacity and resilience of life. Nowhere is this more demonstrable than in the contemporary partnership between security and socioeconomic development and aid. In Kurdish southeast Turkey, increased governmental investment in gendered development highlights the role of household, neighborhood, and community production and reproduction in processes of securitization and nation building. These events suggest a deeply corporeal geopolitics at play in Turkey's Kurdish question, one that rests on the intimate relationship between social reproduction and geopolitics. This article draws on interview and participatory observation data in Diyarbakr, Turkey, to explain how specific practices and ideas around motherhood, marriage, and mobility and rights in the city create and challenge ethno-national identities. In doing so, I contend that the Kurdish questionand understandings of Turkishness and Kurdishnessare embodied, reified, and contested in the spatial constitutions of "life's work."