Voices That Matter

Kurdish Women at the Limits of Representation in Contemporary Turkey

“Raise your voice!” and “Speak up!” are familiar refrains that assume, all too easily, that gaining voice will lead to empowerment, healing, and inclusion for marginalized subjects. The world over, countless feminist, development, and human rights activists are deeply invested in measures that seek to give voice to the ostensibly silenced so as to ensure their participation and agency, while liberal democracies encourage their citizens to voice their sentiments and opinions as an integral mechanism of political decision-making.

My book, Voices that Matter published in 2022 with the University of Chicago Press, examines the consequences of contemporary politics that incite marginalized subjects to voice in the name of empowerment, emancipation, and representation. Based on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork in eastern Turkey with Kurdish female singers, poets, and women’s activists, it argues that “raising one’s voice” in the contemporary world is not always or necessarily empowering but constitutes an endeavor full of risk, dilemma, and contradiction. What is more, an equation of voice with agency and empowerment fails to adequately capture the effects of such incitement. By narrowly focusing on whether the marginalized have already acquired voice or are still being silenced, it loses sight of how contemporary politics of voice foster new understandings of self and community and engender novel arenas of struggle and contestation.

To bring these effects into view, Voices that Matter attends to the voice as form, shifting attention away from what voices say to how they do so. I trace how oral genres have been changing in a context where Kurdish voices have gained increasing moral and political value as metaphors of empowerment, representation, and resistance. Focusing on the transformations in how Kurdish women relate to and employ their voices, I illustrate that “gaining voice” is no straightforward path to liberation, especially when one’s voice can be selectively appropriated to further empty displays of pluralist representation.
I currently serve as the managing editor of the Kurdish Studies Journal.

Read more about the book in author interviews on Jadaliyya and CaMP
Anthropology, or listen to an interview on the New Books Network podcast.

What People Say

“Voices that Matter offers an invaluable contribution to anthropological scholarship
on voice to conversations in related fields of music, media, and sound studies. It is
also powerfully written, and its arguments take shape in carefully composed and
evocative ethnographic writing. This truly is accomplished and compelling work.”

“A most welcome contribution to a steadily developing area of research. Written with
great clarity and precision, Voices that Matter will be an instant addition to reading
lists on gender in the Middle East, ethnography, sociolinguistics, and
ethnomusicology.”

“Marlene Schäfers’ Voices That Matter is a compelling and excellently-crafted
ethnography of Kurdish women dengbêjs (traditional Kurdish folk-singers/story-
tellers) and their struggle for voice in Turkey and North (‘Turkish’) Kurdistan.
…readers of all disciplinary backgrounds will be impressed by the book’s eloquent
prose, its rich ethnographic analysis, and by its empathetic engagement with its
interlocutors and the political and ethical questions raised by their desire for voice.”

– Daniel Fisher, University of California, Berkeley

– Christine Robbins, University of Exeter

– Patrick Lewis, Linguistic Anthropology

“In her wonderfully written and theoretically rich book, Voices That Matter, Marlene
Schäfers disrupts the a priori valence often given to voice… Voices That Matter thus
performs two levels of impressive work. On the one hand, it detan- gles liberal
equations of voice, representation, and agency. On the other, it provides an
important critique of Turkish feminism, bringing about the limits of taking voice as a
polit- ical metaphor which veils the racialized politics that curtailed representation in
the first place.”

“Marlene Schäfers’ Voices That Matter: Kurdish Women at the Limits of
Representation in Contemporary Turkey provides readers with a comprehensive and
nuanced understanding of the diversity and complexity of Kurdish women’s lives and
experiences. … It emerges as a profound and thought-provoking contribution to the
ongoing dialogue about voices, agency, and empowerment of the subaltern.”

“The book is a rich, minutely detailed, and assiduously researched anthropological
treatment of Dengbêj women singers and the musical technicalities of its form, but it
is also much more than that. Dengbêj culture is the prism through which Schäfers
lays out the internal tensions in Kurdish society as it undergoes a reckoning with its
patriarchal structures, interrogates liberal conceptualizations of musical culture and
its “ownership,” and highlights the flawed logic behind the trope of minority
representation as an end in itself, when it is often forced to depoliticize to be
acceptable to hegemonic political society.”

Alize Arıcan, International Journal of Middle East Studies

– Özgün Basmaz, Women’s Studies Quarterly

– Francis O’Connor, International Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies

“A clear contribution to Kurdish studies, Kurdish musicology, and Kurdish gender
studies, this work also takes a major step towards affording Kurdish cultural life—and
in particular questions surrounding the agency and experiences of Kurdish
women—greater visibility within the scholarly arena of anthropology. This book
underscores Marlene Schäfers’ considerable skill and technique as an anthropologist
but also attests to her dedication as a citizen to consolidating, reinforcing, and
enriching the intellectual toolkit and interdisciplinary stature of Kurdish studies.””