Login
       
  • Space, place, gender and struggle in the AANES: Decoration as political practice

Grace, Charlotte, 2025, Book Section, Space, place, gender and struggle in the AANES: Decoration as political practice In: Lowe, Robert and Kaya, Zeynep, (eds.) Governance of Resistance in North and East Syria: The Experience of Rojava. Bloomsbury Publishing, pp. 225-246. ISBN 9780755654949

Abstract or Description:

This chapter pulls on a thread of my doctoral project, Spatial Labour and the Politics of Place in Rojava (Grace, 2023),which explores the social reproduction of space and the spatial reproduction of society in the Autonomous Administration of North-East Syria (AANES). Sociospatial scholarship on the region has so far been significantly outweighed either by (geo-)political study on governance structures and social practices or creative interest in film-making and poetry. However, there are many concepts, projects and practices - regarded as beacons of the AANES (Staal, 2016; Jinwar, 2019) - that attest to the significance of the spatial and to the need for apposite, situated frameworks that can understand and inform them, particularly in light of AANES commitments to the revolution of everyday life (Öcalan, 2013, Dirik, 2022). Here, I note how the practice of decoration - in which objects are gathered, arranged and placed on, in, or around architectural forms and/or urban landscapes - embodies, enacts and enhances the broader political aims of the region, noting how this seemingly-quotidian work is generally overlooked and undervalued. I proceed to unpack this in relation to a) architectural discourses on ornament and colonial aesthetics, and gender politics more broadly, I end by building on Marxists-Feminist ideas of gendered labour and the (re)production of identity to argue that it is these small sociospatial acts (along many others) which produce the category of woman and its corresponding oppressions; in turn, I advocate the redistribution of such work in order to, in the words of the Kurdish Freedom Movement, Liberate Women and Kill the Dominant Male or, more broadly, redistribute gender itself.

School or Centre: School of Design
Identification Number or DOI: 10.5040/9780755654956.ch-11
Date Deposited: 13 Feb 2026 11:11
Last Modified: 23 Feb 2026 00:10
URI: https://researchonline.rca.ac.uk/id/eprint/6862
Edit Item (login required) Edit Item (login required)