The Inversion of Victimhood: New Social Agency of IDP Yazidi Women?

Abstract

Publications in the media on Yazidis, are female victim based and focus on either the sensationalist image of raped Yazidi women, or their ‘unexpected’ acceptance back into their religious community (that would traditionally banish women that marry men from another religion). While this changing boundary rule through religious ritual has played a pivotal role for the women that have been abducted and abused by the so-called Islamic State (IS), the focus on the hurt female body and her relation to the community as – potential - wife and child-barer, do not portray the reality lived by most internally displaced (IDP) Yazidis in the North of Iraq. Nor does it explain the way women in the community experience their victimhood themselves, and more importantly: it ignores their actual and potential agency. Instead, the focus on rape and religion recreates the idea of a passive female victim and reinforces the idea of a ‘backwards’ society, by placing emphasis on traditional notions of this often misrepresented community, while in reality the call to accept the women was welcomed by most of the Yazidis in the IDP community. The overflowing imagery of the hurt female body pushes all responsibility of suffering to IS and the community itself, overlooks the importance of structural and epistemic violence that was done to the community long before the current genocide, and still plays a role in the limited effort taken to restore the lives of the Yazidis. This thesis will give an account of the context in which the current violence towards the community takes place, and will attempt to reveal the narratives of the women in the IDP community that until now remained hidden behind the overwhelming imagery of manifest violence at the hands of IS. In that way, it also attempts to go beyond the gendered representation of the man as active perpetrator or savior and the woman as passively undergoing her suffering. Instead, this thesis will bring forward the way in which IDP women perform and thereby claim their victimhood and use the available opportunities that flow from ‘being a victim’. This will show that (especially young-) women in subtle ways symbolically invert their victimhood by actively claiming it, as well as showing their ability to contribute to changing the abhorrent conditions under which the community currently lives. Finally, this thesis will highlight how not all opportunities for changing these conditions arise from the efforts of the aid industry, but rather from the emergence of new opportunities for Yazidi men and women which have emerged in the past decades, partly hidden by Orientalist discourse regarding the abilities and needs of the greater ethno-religious group.