kurdish migrant mothers in london enacting citizenship
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Kurdish migrant mothers in Londonenacting citizenshipUmut Erelaa Department of Sociology, Faculty of Social Science, The OpenUniversity, Milton Keynes, UKPublished online: 19 Dec 2013.
To cite this article: Umut Erel (2013) Kurdish migrant mothers in London enacting citizenship,Citizenship Studies, 17:8, 970-984, DOI: 10.1080/13621025.2013.851146
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Citizenship Studies, 2013 Vol. 17, No. 8, 970–984, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2013.851146
Kurdish migrant mothers in London enacting citizenship
Umut Erel*
Department of Sociology, Faculty of Social Science, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK
(Received 1 May 2011; final version received 20 August 2012)
The article explores the mothering work of a group of Kurdish women in London as enactments of citizenship. Rather than focusing on their integration, it foregrounds the migrant mothers’ ability to disrupt hegemonic citizenship narratives and bring into being new political subjects. They co-construct diasporic citizenship, through their mothering work, producing their children’s cultural identifications as both British and Kurdish. These identifications are contingent, involving intra-ethnic contestations of legitimate Kurdish culture. Kurdish migrant mothers’ cultural work is not simply about making nation state citizens. By giving meaning to cultural continuity and change, the mothers reference multiple levels of belonging (local, national and diasporic) which challenge state boundaries. The article shows that although mothers play a key role in constructing their children’s cultural identities and their articulation in ethnic and national terms, they also contest the meaning of ethnic minority cultural practices and group boundaries, potentially disrupting hegemonic narratives of good citizenship as ethno-national.
Keywords: migration; gender; citizenship; Kurds; enacting citizenship; performativity
Introduction
Britain is becoming increasingly ethnically ‘superdiverse’ (Vertovec 2007) and in 2008,
almost a quarter of children born in the UK were born to migrant mothers, rising in London
to over half of all children (4Children 2011). However, we know little about the women
who bring up this future generation of citizens. This article examines the mothering work
of a group of Kurdish migrant women in London as exemplary of the enactment of
citizenship as cultural and caring subjects, suggesting that this approach opens up new
insights for citizenship studies, gender studies and migration studies. This article explores
how migrant mothers’ orientation towards engendering a Kurdish cultural identity in their
children challenges nationally bounded notions of citizenship in their home countries and
in Britain, and brings into being new political subjectivities and actors. Despite the
profusion of the gender neutral language of parenting, mothers continue to be charged with
the bulk of child-rearing tasks (Gillies 2007, Ellison et al. 2009, Thomson et al. 2011); that is why this article focuses on mothering work. This is not to suggest that mothers’ cultural
work exists in isolation or that it overrides other social influences on children. The notion
of ‘mothering practices’ (cf. Morgan 2011) foregrounds the diversity of ways in which
women mother. In the process, they embody, negotiate and challenge culturally specific
‘institutions of motherhood’ (Rich 1976). Migration research often views mothers as
transmitting traditional, ethnically specific values and cultural resources to their children
(Ganga 2007). Moreover, researchers and policy-makers often investigate the extent to
which migrant mothers’ cultural orientation helps or hinders their children’s integration
*Email: [email protected]
q 2013 Taylor & Francis
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into the country of residence, in particular for Kurdish Middle Eastern women who are
conceived in public discourses and policy through Orientalist knowledge paradigms
(Kraler 2010).
This article takes a different approach: it presents mothers who emphasise the
continuity of their cultural identity as Kurdish and those who emphasise that they embrace
cultural change. Yet, both groups of mothers see themselves also as belonging to, and
participating in, British society. Rather than viewing mothers’ orientation towards
continuity or change in Kurdish cultural identification as a measure of their ability and
willingness to integrate, the article argues that a perspective of ‘enacting citizenship’
allows more complex insights into mothers’ cultural orientation. The article focuses on
migrant mothers as cultural subjects since this is a central means through which they enact
citizenship. As ‘cultural workers’ (Hill-Collins 1991, Kershaw 2005, 2010) who validate
marginalised cultural practices to instil a sense of self-worth in their children, racialised
migrant mothers enact citizenship. That is, their mothering practices constitute a political
intervention that challenges the notion of cultural homogeneity of the citizenry and the
racialised hierarchisation of migrant and ethnic minority cultures, as well as the
intergenerational reproduction of these.
The article is structured as follows: the first section introduces the notion of enacting
citizenship and explains the role of migrant mothers as cultural workers through the lens of
cultural citizenship. The following section provides some methodological and background
information of the case study, i.e. the situation of Kurds in London as a migrant group from
a non-state nation. Then, the article presents and discusses extracts from interviews with
Kurdish mothers in London, exploring the ways in which they enact cultural
citizenship. The article concludes that in Kurdish migrant women’s mothering work,
cultural and ethnic identity are a highly politicised and contested site where they enact
themselves as citizens, at once of their diaspora communities and the multicultural London
to which they claim belonging, as well as the British state from which they claim rights, in
particular rights of residence and social rights such as health care, education and in some
instances benefits.
Migrant mothers enacting cultural citizenship
While citizenship is often understood as mainly about formal rights and duties, here
I explore its wider sociological meanings as encompassing participation and belonging,
especially through the concept of ‘enacting citizenship’ which foregrounds transformative
and creative performativities of citizenship, rather than the status or habitus of existing
citizenship practices: ‘acts of citizenship’ are ‘those acts that transform forms (orientations,
strategies, technologies) and modes (citizens, strangers, outsiders, aliens) of being political
by bringing into being new actors ( . . . ) through creating new sites and scales of struggle’
(Isin 2008a, p. 39). The focus of analysis thus becomes the potential of acts to rupture
given definitions of the political community and narratives of citizenship. This depends
on the
positionality within the accepted frames of rights which envision who are entitled to have rights. This approach to citizenship as performance defines the meaning and acts of participation in terms of their subversivity, which is in fact given by their positionality. (Isin 2008b)
These positionalities should be investigated empirically rather than inferred from the
formal citizenship status of the actors. Here, I investigate the potential of migrant women’s
mothering practices to create new political actors and subvert given narratives of how
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cultural and ethnic identification created in the family relates to citizenship and belonging
(for more detail, cf. Erel 2011). I have elsewhere elaborated three key moments of migrant
women’s citizenship: firstly, becoming subjects with agency; secondly, substantiating
their capacities as political, cultural, working, sexual and caring subjects and thirdly, how
migrant women link these with rights claiming (cf. Erel 2009). In this article, I focus on
migrant women as caring and cultural subjects, focusing on mothers’ cultural work as
enacting citizenship.
Despite the universalist claims of citizenship as a juridical status, it remains inflected
with national and ethnic belonging. Mothers’ emotional labour constitutes an important
resource for producing and representing ‘kinship emotion’ (Baraitser 2009), which is
ethnically specific and often mobilised for an identification with the nation. The
assumption of affinity between family and nation means that inheritance of citizenship
from parents is commonly seen as a natural birthright, defining social entitlements, so that
citizenship represents the main mode of transfer of goods and resources between the
generations within a nation state (Stevens 1999, Turner 2008, Shachar 2010).
By bringing up children who articulate multiple cultural and ethnic allegiances, migrant
mothers challenge the notion that the citizenry is constituted as culturally homogeneous
within the unity of a territory and polity (cf. Lentin 2003, Tyler 2010). Ethnicised and
racialised migrant women, particularly if they come from so-called Muslim countries or
identify as Muslim, are often portrayed in public debates as bearers of the more authentic
version of the culture of origin, often seen as backward and not compatible with British
values (cf. Hinsliff 2002, Henry 2007). Where the cultural practices of racialised and
ethnicisedmothers are devalued by the ethnically dominant society, mothers’ cultural work
to engender a sense of self-esteem in their children enables them to resist racism. This
constitutes a political aspect of mothering work (Hill-Collins 1990, Kershaw 2005, 2010,
Reynolds 2005).
By instilling within children the confidence to trust their own self-definitions, minority parents equip their offspring with what Collins (1991, p. 51) terms ‘a powerful tool for resisting oppression’. Such resistance is a quintessential political act of citizenship regardless of where the caregiving is performed. Ethnic minority mothers contribute to sustaining the self-definition of the collective minority identity, and the collective political agency to which this self-definition gives rise, by working to ensure that children cultivate a proud affiliation with their cultural history. (Kershaw 2010, p. 396)
Kershaw (2010) argues that ethnic minority mothers’ cultural work should be seen not
only as enabling their children’s citizenship, but also as an aspect of the mothers’ own
political citizenship, as it challenges racism. I suggest that migrant mothers’ cultural work
is also an active engagement with cultural citizenship. Claiming ‘a right to full cultural
participation and undistorted representation’ (Pakulski quoted in Lister 2008, p. 50),
migrant mothers co-construct new meanings of cultural and ethnic identity and belonging.
In this way, migrant mothering constitutes an epistemological intervention into cultural
and social processes of making ethnic groups, negotiating their boundaries and their
association with rights and responsibilities: in short an enactment of citizenship. In the
following, I explore how Kurdish migrant mothers in London articulate these issues.
Kurdish mothers in London
This article draws on a small-scale study with Kurdish migrant women and their children in
London from April to June 2008. Kurdish migrants are positioned contingently vis-a-vis
cultural and national identity and citizenship, both in the places they come from and in
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London. While this case study thus refers to a specific configuration of contingent
identifications of ethnicity, nation, culture and citizenship, it is particularly instructive as
this specificity engenders a high degree of self-reflection and discussion of these issues
among Kurds in London. As members of a non-state nation (Mojab 2001), which has
experienced ethnic persecution in their homelands, Kurds are in the peculiar, though not
unique, position that key cultural resources for constructing belonging, such as language,
have been elaborated and developed in diaspora rather than in their homelands. In this sense,
their cultural citizenship is already constituted contingently in transnational spaces (cf.
Madge et al. 2009): firstly, between the Middle Eastern states which comprise the territory
claimed by Kurds as their homelands and secondly, between their homelands and the
diaspora. Many Kurds closely identify with a homeland, and Kurdish national movements
have contributed to imagining a Kurdish nation. As with other non-state nations (Mojab
2001) subject to colonialism, Kurdish national movements have organised in the diaspora,
giving cultural and political impulses to national movements in the homelands. In their
homelands, which are divided between the states of Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria, Kurds have
long been treated as a minority rather than as full citizens and experienced varying degrees
of ethnic persecution (McDowall 2000). There is no Kurdish state, and only in the aftermath
of the Iraq war, since 1991, has there been a form of Kurdish regional autonomy in Iraq,
notably with the establishment of a Kurdish Regional Government, including the
institutionalisation of elements of cultural citizenship such as establishing Kurdish-
language educational institutions and media. Because of the long history of ethnic
marginalisation and persecution, claiming an ethnic and cultural identity as Kurds has been
highly politicised in the homelands and the diaspora (McDowall 2000). Kurds have
experienced varying degrees of marginalisation, discrimination and persecution on the basis
of their ethnic identity in the nation states in which their homeland is located, i.e. Iraq,
Turkey, Iran and Syria – though in this article I present only stories of migrants from Iraq
and Turkey. This is a complex and changing experience, so that here I can only provide a
brief sketch to contextualise my data. In Iraq, Kurdish language and customs were not
criminalised. Yet, Kurds have been militarily attacked, including through chemical
weapons, most notably during the Anfal campaign during the 1980s, where 2000 villages
were destroyed and around 50,000 Kurds killed. Although the establishment of a Kurdish
autonomous region in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War has allowed some Kurds to
flourish culturally and economically, during and after the 2003 Iraq War Kurds, like other
Iraqis, were forced to flee. In Turkey, Kurdish culture and language have historically been
criminalised. Although the teaching and speaking of the Kurdish language have been
decriminalised in law since the early 1990s, Kurds still encounter obstacles exercising their
cultural rights (Fernandes 2012). The question of Kurdish political and cultural rights is one
of the key challenges to the democratisation of the state and civil society in Turkey, and
Kurds and supporters of Kurdish rights continue to be criminalised, persecuted and
intimidated in the arenas of formal politics, education, media and wider civil society: thus,
arrests and intimidation of human rights and pro-Kurdish activists, intellectuals, elected
politicians and human rights defenders and detention without trial for months are among the
key obstacles to a wider democratisation in Turkey (cf., for example, Human Rights Watch
2012, Roj Woman 2012). The most violent expression of the conflict, the Turkish state’s war
against Kurdish guerrillas, has been ongoing, though intermittently, since the mid-1980s. It
is estimated that this has cost 40,000 lives, and has led to the forced evacuation of thousands
of villages and the internal displacement of 1million Kurdish villagers (ECRI 2011). Ethnic
persecution, together with other political and economic factors, and the Gulf wars have been
factors that have motivated Kurdish migration to Europe (Erel 2009, Keles 2011).
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In the UK, the largest group is Kurds from Turkey who came to Britain mainly as
refugees since the late 1980s. Kurds from Iraq arrived as students and business people and
as refugees fleeing political persecution or the Gulf wars and their consequences.
Depending on the time and circumstances of their arrival, Kurds in the UK have different
legal and residence statuses: e.g. some have arrived as asylum seekers, others as family
migrants, on business visas and some have taken on British citizenship. In this study, the
majority arrived claiming asylum and have now taken on British citizenship. Kurds are not
recognised as an ethnic identity in the Census and most statistics subsume them under the
nationality of their states of origin (Keles et al. 2012), allowing only an estimate that
200,000 Kurds live in London (Summers 2011). This statistical invisibility, reflecting the
invisibility of Kurds in wider public discourses, has meant that the categories of ‘Muslim’
and ‘refugee’, rather than ethnicity, have been key in their racialisation. Despite the
brevity of this account, it becomes clear that questions of Kurdish ethnic identification are
very complex: cultural diversity and hegemonic struggles around definitions of legitimate
culture within the migrant group are highly politicised issues and therefore a topic of
explicit reflection, discussion and struggle. Kurdish mothers have varying positions vis-a
vis Kurdish ethnic and national projects, some supporting Kurdish cultural expression,
others committing to the building of a Kurdish nation state, while yet others might support
some form of regional autonomy.
Semi-structured, in-depth interviews were conducted with nine women and separately
with one child of each mother (aged 12 –18 years) by multilingual fieldworkers, mostly in
Kurdish or Turkish since many Kurds from Turkey do not speak Kurdish, a consequence
of what some scholars refer to as linguicide (e.g. Hassanpour 2000). Participants were
recruited through interviewers’ personal contacts as well as through community centres,
Saturday schools and women’s organisations. The two Kurdish interviewers had work
and/or voluntary experience with Kurdish organisations, which facilitated trust building
and access, both for recruiting participants and during the interviews. All the women in the
sample identified as heterosexual; the sample included married, divorced and separated
women from Iraq, Turkey and Iran who had been living in the UK between 15 and 10
years. They had diverse class and educational backgrounds, ranging from primary school
education to higher education. Some were involved in political groups and parties, and
others did not see themselves as activists. However, this distinction was not clear-cut, as
even the latter participated in protests and regularly attended community centres, many of
which rely on the informal work of female volunteers, although this is rarely
acknowledged (Erel and Tomlinson 2005). Despite assurances of confidentiality, some
feared that disclosing their family circumstances might have negative consequences for
their welfare benefits. This indicates the extent to which they have been publicly
stereotyped as refugees and outsiders to a citizenly solidarity, and as abusing social
citizenship to which they supposedly have no moral claims (Sales 2002). This is one
instance in which cultural citizenship of Kurdish mothers, i.e. their performance of an
identity that is not only British but also encompasses elements of Kurdishness, is used as a
measure of their entitlement to social citizenship.
Interviews were conducted in the participants’ homes, workplaces or in cafes,
according to the respondent’s preference. Access to the children was gained through the
mothers, and the purpose of the research was fully explained to participants in age
appropriate language. Children have been included in the research in recognition of the
importance of children as motivating families’ migration decision-making, as well as
actors in their own right (Ackers and Gill 2008, D’Angelo and Ryan 2011, Ryan and Sales
2011, White 2011). However, for reasons of space, this article draws on interviews with
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mothers only (for children’s perspectives, see Erel 2013). Where possible, interviews were
conducted privately; however, in some cases this was not achieved as family members, co
workers or friends popped in and out of the room. Although this may have limited the
openness of some interview participants, it also sheds light on the living circumstances of
research participants. Arranging interview appointments was difficult as mothers were
busy with family responsibilities and those in paid employment worked long and
unpredictable schedules, so that interviews between clients at the workplace or in the
evening in a kitchen full of neighbours and children were the best that could be achieved.
Interviews were fully transcribed and translated into English. The transcripts were
analysed to identify key themes across the sample to uncover how ‘life story, social
structure, narrative and theory are all at work together’ (Plummer 2001, p. 166).
The next sections explore the Kurdish migrant mothers’ cultural work, in particular the
question of cultural continuity or change as this came out as a key theme in the Kurdish
mothers’ interviews, and the conclusion discusses how this relates to enactments of
citizenship. While the Kurdish mothers also discussed other key themes, such as
community building within and across ethnic boundaries, intergenerational relationships,
diasporic and transnational identities, the question of continuity and change was a key
structuring element of their narratives. I suggest that this is, at least in part, due to the
prominence of the issue of cultural change and continuity in Orientalist discourses on
Middle Eastern migrant women in Europe. Women’s supposed ability to integrate into
European norms, values and cultural behaviours is attributed key significance and
explanatory power in integration policies and discourses on social cohesion (Erel 2009,
Kraler 2010). At the same time, Kurdish mothers are also ascribed a key role in fostering
and maintaining a Kurdish ethnic identity for their children by Kurdish national
movements; thus, issues of continuity and change feature prominently in the media,
community and public debates of which the women are active audiences and participants.
I have argued elsewhere (Erel 2007) that available public discourses on migrant women
form an important inter-text in dialogue with which they develop their narratives, at times
to evidence the rightness or wrongness of these discourses. Even where researchers prompt
migrant women’s self representations, they need to acknowledge the disciplining,
enabling and structuring role of such wider public discourses to which migrant women’s
subjugated knowledges can form a local, partial at times fragmented challenge (Erel
2007). For this reason, this article explores the structuring theme of change and continuity
of cultural identification in the Kurdish mothers’ narratives.
‘I have not changed’
While migration can open up new ways of living gender and family relations (cf. White
2011), the literature on migration and families tends to emphasise migrant women’s role in
preserving and reproducing the culture of origin (e.g. Kucukcan 1999).Mothers’ cultural and
caring work has been conceptualised in Western thought as repetitive, close to the everyday
and the body and therefore lacking in creativity and significance (Young 1997, Felski 2000,
Gedalof 2009). Yet, it provides the necessary grounding for agency, reflection and creativity.
Migrant women’s work of home-making in the new country enables the family to construct a
sense of ontological security in new circumstances (Gedalof 2009), a particularly
challenging task for refugees whose migration is often the consequence of, and accompanied
by, traumatic upheavals. Against this backdrop it is not surprising that some mothers
explicitly stated that they wanted to instil in their children a clear sense of continuity of
Kurdish identity. The mothers’ strategies for this encompassed regularly visiting ethnically
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specific community centres, teaching children the language to communicate with relatives
back home and attending religious, political and other social events.
[My children] agree with me. I go to Cemevi [the Alevi religious institution.] for religion and community centres. I go to these places with my children. I have differences with my children in terms of language, I cannot speak English. But there are no cultural differences or differences of values or religion. They behave according to our values. They feel they belong to our culture. I am quite happy about that. They learned their culture, not anyone else’s culture. I am very pleased with this.
. . .
I have not changed. My ideas have not changed. I live my own culture here which I learned back home. (Evin, 39, Kurdish from Turkey)
For Evin, the continuity of Kurdish identity, despite the disruption of migration, is an
achievement of which she is proud. Felski (2000, p. 21) proposes that change is not always
a sign of freedom but instead often imposed on individuals against their will. For many
Kurdish mothers, claiming a sense of intergenerational cultural continuity is one way of
preserving personal dignity and resisting assimilation: where Kurdishness is not
recognised as a legitimate national identity, in the countries of origin and only partially in
the country of settlement, insisting on the viability and intergenerational continuity of
Kurdish cultural identification and practices is indeed a form of resistance against the
denial and oppression of Kurdish ethnic or national identity.
Rojda emphasises the values she associates with Kurdish culture, such as care for
others, respect for elders and an orientation towards the collective rather than individual
good. She sees her role as mother as crucial in enabling her children to learn this culture:
I want [my children] to know our culture because we are more respectful towards communities compared to others. . . . First of all, parents need to live their culture. A child sees this behaviour and they learn like that. Home is very important in that sense. If you want your child to be respectful to you, as a parent, you have to be respectful first. I want them to watch Turkish and Kurdish channels. They learn our culture through those television programmes. (Rojda, 35, Kurdish from Turkey)
Rojda views her role as a parent in modelling Kurdish culture and the good behaviour
she values. But in addition, she monitors her children’s exposure to cultural products, in
particular satellite television programmes. Indeed, she uses television to assist in
acculturating her children and encouraging them to pick up the language and values
associated with her culture. Both Rojda and Evin draw attention to staying true to ‘their’
Kurdish culture. By emphasising in the interview that their children share the same
cultural orientation as them, the mothers perform shared intergenerational belonging, instantiating that belonging is not an ontological given but achieved through repeated
everyday rituals, as well as more formal rituals in religious or political sites (Bell 1999).
Both mothers stress the continuity of their cultural identification with Kurdishness across
space and international borders as well as across generations. Yet, they are also aware of
changes. Rojda references the personal and familial context of migration motivating her to
emphasise her own Kurdish identity in her mothering work:
I became more attached to my culture and identity [in London]. Just for the sake of my children. I pretend that I am very close to my identity. I am doing this to influence them. I want them to behave like me. They are between two cultures. This is a decisive age. They are very young now and whatever you give them now, they will grab that and live like that. (Rojda, 35, Kurdish from Turkey)
Rojda acknowledges the conscious effort that goes into constructing intergenerational
ethnic continuity as she emphasises the performative and pedagogic character of her own
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ethnic and cultural identification, since she believes that children learn by emulating their
parents’ behaviour. Evin, on the other hand, refers to the geopolitical context of cultural
change and continuity, pointing out that she could not publicly express her Kurdish
identity before migration:
While I was living in [city in Turkey with a predominantly Turkish population], I did not feel very safe because we were Kurds and my neighbours were Turks. I was concealing my Kurdish identity from my neighbours, otherwise they would avoid any contact with me.
. . .
[In London] I am closer to my ethnic community and identity than compared to the past. This is because I am with my family [of origin] I used to have just Turkish neighbours in Turkey and as I said, they do not like Alevis and Kurds. You have to conceal your identity in Turkey. (Evin, 39, Kurdish from Turkey)
Evin acknowledges that migration to London has enabled the formation of an ethnic
identity that can be claimed and performed not only in the private space of the home but
also in public. In Turkey, speaking Kurdish in public was illegal until the 1990s and
continues to be stigmatised. Turkishness is constitutionally defined as the nationality of the
republic’s citizens, and public expression of Kurdish ethnic identity is regarded as a
political challenge to the state. This contrasts with the multi-ethnic composition of
London, where migrants can publicly claim a Kurdish identity. Indeed, until the shift from
multiculturalist to social cohesion policy in the 2000s, refugee integration policies in
Britain mediated social citizenship through ethnically defined community centres (cf.
Wahlbeck 1999). In the late twentieth century, the experience of diaspora was important in
generating a sense of Kurdish identity among young people in Europe, galvanising
political and cultural struggles back in the ‘homeland’, too (van Bruinessen 2000). Both
Rojda and Evin enact themselves and their children as unequivocally positioned as
members of the Kurdish ethnic group, emphasising the continuity of the cultural resources
and forms from which Kurdish ethnic identification is drawn. Yet, despite their strong
claims of cultural continuity, they are aware of the changes in their personal and
geopolitical positioning which give different meanings to cultural identification as
Kurdish in the home country and in diaspora. Furthermore, the cultural resources which
Rojda and Evin claim as ethnically specific are contingent and can be interpreted in
different ways. Cultural resources can be transformed and the boundaries of ethnic
groups can be reinterpreted. These processes are political and the public identification as
Kurdish thus is an enactment of citizenship challenging the denial of Kurdishness
within Turkey and drawing attention to an emergent political subject of British Kurds in
the UK.
‘Something new’
The interviews with Rojda and Evin show that even avowed continuity of ethnic
identification is bound up with change. Other interview partners explicitly challenge the
idea of transmitting ethnically bounded cultural continuity to their children:
I personally don’t like [my son] to spend time with friends from the Kurdish community. Instead I whish he could be more involved with the English community. I think my children should learn more about English culture, because I am familiar with my culture more than enough and I would teach my children my culture at home. For me it’s important they learn something different, like something new from English society. Many things we do at home or in our community are a repetition and I don’t like carrying out again and again the repetition of these cultures. (Mina, 45, Kurdish from Iraq)
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Mina appreciates that migration to the UK offers her the opportunity to learn about
different ways of doing things and change her lifestyle. Open-mindedness and tolerance
towards difference are important values she wants to transmit to her children. While she
does not claim these as ethnically or culturally specific values, she emphasises their
compatibility with her religious beliefs. She identifies as Muslim and draws some of her
value orientations from religion. At one point she refers to her uncle, a religiously learned
person, to support her orientation towards change as a positive principle in her life: ‘the
whole world changes constantly and you can’t stay in the past like Mohammad’s time’.
While clearly distinguishing between ‘Kurdish’ and ‘English’ culture, she wants to cross
this boundary through her own and her son’s cultural practices. Thus, she encourages
her children to form friendships with non-Kurds and engages in cross-ethnic friendships
herself, too. Mina’s positive attitude towards change and desire for new ways of doing
things may contain an implicit criticism of hegemonic notions of authentic Kurdish
culture.
Such a criticism is articulated explicitly by Ronak. Like Mina, Ronak supports her
children in forming cross-ethnic friendships and engages in building a cross-ethnic support
network for herself as a single mother, too. She does not prioritise her daughters’ learning
of Kurdish and defends her daughter’s lack of Kurdish language knowledge from her own
parents who criticise her for it. She does not view an identification as Kurdish as a priority,
for herself, or for her children. Indeed, she is critical of the idea of Kurdish communities in
London. When asked whether she feels part of a Kurdish community in London she
replies:
Kurdish community, no. You know but in my view there are Kurdish people who fight for freedom and equality. But it isn’t a sort of a community. People are Kurds but they don’t call themselves Kurdish community. I don’t feel that I belong to any Kurdish community, or I don’t feel that Kurdish community has a very big role in my life. No, it’s not like that. Some Kurdish people or if we call them Kurdish community, have blown up some traditional and cultural issues here, which don’t exist in Kurdistan. They reproduce these traditions which belong to the past. (Ronak 39, Kurdish from Iraq).
Ronak critiques Kurdish migrants in London for producing a notion of Kurdish
tradition to control women and children, such as
women must be at home for housework and men would work. Or women must stay at home and be controlled by their men. Or their children are not allowed to be with other children from different communities and they are Kurdish people who must follow the traditional rules from their parents. This is a view for many Kurdish families here, but in Kurdistan these views have decreased. In spite of all you hear about political issues in Kurdistan, people have a secular view about civil rights, women’s and children’s rights. People like a modern culture, they try to build it and behave like modern people. (Ronak, 39, Kurdish from Iraq)
Rather than accepting that the idea of a ‘Kurdish community’ is based on a desire to
maintain ‘Kurdish’ culture, Ronak critiques how references to culture are used to justify
power relations of gender and generation. She challenges the authority of these
interpretations of Kurdish culture and tradition by referring to the authority of cultural
practices in Kurdistan, which she claims are diverse and more progressive than the narrow
interpretations of tradition in London (for a discussion of contestations of gender and
culture in Kurdistan of Iraq, cf. Al-Ali and Pratt 2011). Ronak is engaged in feminist
activism and encourages her children to develop their own values, regardless of the
approval of hegemonic notions of Kurdish culture they might encounter in Kurdish migrant
settings. Thus, for example, she celebrates cultural festivals such as the Kurdish New Year
at home with friends rather than taking part in celebrations organized by Kurdish migrant
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community organisations, as she wants to avoid subjecting herself and her children to social
control over their compliance to gendered and generational norms.
Ronak’s and Mina’s experiences shed a critical light on Kershaw’s (2010) argument,
quoted above, that ethnic minority mothers’ reproduction and transmission of their own
ethnically specific cultural forms constitute a resistant political citizenship practice. While
I agree with Kershaw that migrant mothers’ work of raising their children with a
‘confidence to trust their own self-definitions’ and thus resist racist devaluations can
constitute a form of resistance and political citizenship, I would like to problematise the
way in which this argument homogenises ethnic minority culture, and collapses ethnic
minority identity with ‘collective political agency’ (Kershaw 2010, p. 396). In fact,
I explore migrant mothers’ cultural work through an analytical lens that views culture as a
meaning-making process that negotiates, contests and challenges, as well as produces and
reifies, particular power relations. Culture is a key site of contestation, symbolic challenge
and exclusion. By struggling around different meanings of Kurdish culture migrant
mothers engage in ‘interpretative conflict’, a central arena of cultural citizenship struggles
(Stevenson 2001, p. 2). Scholars of cultural citizenship warn against an analytic tendency
to conflate culture and ethnicity, instead emphasising the polyvalent characteristics of
cultural forms (Bloomfield and Bianchini 2001, Solomos 2001, Erel 2009). Thus, in
migrant women’s mothering practices, culture is a site where they contest not only racism
but also intra-ethnic hierarchies. Mina and Ronak’s cultural work involves equipping their
children not only with the tools to resist racist devaluations of their Kurdish or immigrant
identity, but also to challenge power relations of gender and generation among Kurds
which are frequently justified with reference to assumed homogeneous cultural norms.
While I agree that their mothering work enacts citizenship, I would like to draw attention
to the fact that these acts of citizenship not only challenge racism in the society of
residence, but can also challenge the narratives of citizenship within Kurdish Diaspora
communities. Migrant mothers claim diverse, even conflicting, values and practices as
‘Kurdish’ and they also differ in the ways in which they aim to transmit ethnically defined
cultural practices and values to their children.
Discussion
I have shown a range of mothers’ orientations towards cultural continuity and change:
some are committed to creating cultural continuity between themselves and their children,
emphasising a unitary notion of Kurdishness. Other mothers contest homogeneous notions
of Kurdish identity and would prefer to transmit to their children a positive orientation
towards changing cultural and ethnic identities, and do not invest in the idea of an
intergenerational ethnic and cultural continuity. Despite these different orientations
towards cultural continuity or change, both groups of mothers closely engage with the
society of residence. I analyse how both orientations can be seen as challenging
hegemonic notions of citizenship, beginning with mothers who embrace cultural and
ethnic continuity and then discuss those who embrace cultural and ethnic change.
As evidenced in Evin and Rojda’s stories, some mothers engage in contesting the
ethnic assimilationist projects they experienced in the homeland by emphasising that
their cultural work creates intergenerational continuity of Kurdishness across geographic
distance, an identity that has been denied to them in the context of Turkey. Thus, they enact
a diasporic citizenship that challenges the authority of the state of origin to define their
ethnic identity. On the other hand, they also contribute to bringing into being an imagined
Kurdish community, which, in the absence of a state that sponsors the cultural
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identification of the children, is chiefly supported by these Kurdish diasporic mothers’
cultural work. These Kurdish mothers do not just transmit a pre-given ethnic identity or
simply reproduce an existing form of cultural membership from the home country, but enact
something new, i.e. an imagined Kurdish cultural citizenship that becomes possible in the
diaspora. Yet, such a ‘Kurdish culture’ is already contingent and hybrid, and indeed, it is
important to maintain an analytic distinction between ethnic and cultural identity. However,
the connections between cultural and ethnic identifications and the political projects
through which the migrant mothers in this project articulate these are also contingent and
depend on a number of factors. Thus, perhaps surprisingly, Rojda and Evin who are both
committed to a political project of Kurdish nation building teach their children the Turkish
rather than Kurdish language at home. As a result of longstanding assimilationist policies in
Turkey, they do not themselves have a good command of the Kurdish language. However,
attending Kurdish community centres, claiming a publicly visible identity as Kurdish in
Britain and connecting this with particular traditions and values are ways in which these
mothers bring into being cultural practices and identifications that contest the devaluation
of Kurdishness in their homelands. The Kurdish membership they enact envisages a
collectivity and form of nation-ness against the grain of the formal citizenship status of the
sending states, particularly for Kurds from Turkey. However, the modes of enacting
themselves as Kurds, such as attending Kurdish community centres, are clearly shaped by
the multi-ethnic context of British citizenship, which relies on ethnically defined groups to
mediate access to services, using the political space of Britain to bring into being new modes
of beingKurdish which they transmit to their children. Publicly claimingKurdish identity at
the same time as claiming belonging and rights in Britain is an enactment of citizenship
challenging notions of cultural homogeneity in Britain which brings new collective
political subjects, British Kurds or Kurdish British children into being.
Yet, articulations of Kurdish diasporic cultural citizenship are contested, as
particularly the examples of mothers who embrace cultural change, rather than continuity,
show. Thus, women such as Mina or Ronak challenge locally hegemonic forms of
Kurdishness, instead invoking alternative values to ethnic culture for community building.
One reason for these different attitudes of women such as Evin and Rojda on one hand and
Mina and Ronak on the other may be the experiences before migration: in Turkey, the
expression of Kurdish cultural and ethnic identity was long criminalised and continues to
be highly stigmatised, so that Evin and Rojda’s emphasis on cultural continuity of
Kurdishness can be seen as resisting the pressures to assimilate that they experienced pre
migration. Mina and Ronak have migrated from Iraq, where cultural and linguistic
expressions of Kurdishness were possible, especially since the establishment of the
Kurdish autonomous region in 1991. Indeed, these and other cultural, political and social
differences between Kurds from different states mean that the Kurdish migrants in London
from different states of origin to an extent engage in distinct activities, despite a shared
identification as Kurdish. Mina and Ronak critique the hegemonic use of culture to
legitimise gendered and generational social, familial and political power relations among
Kurdish migrants. Resisting these, they foreground openness to difference and promotion
of ethical and political orientations to ‘freedom and equality’ as Ronak puts it, as the
values they wish to transmit to their children.
Conclusion
Policy and public debates often construct a dichotomy between migrant mothers who
foster their children’s adaptation of a British cultural identity, as willing to integrate, and
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on the other hand, migrant mothers who encourage their children to learn the culture and
language of the migrant group, as unable or unwilling to integrate. In this discourse,
migrant mothers’ orientation to cultural continuity and change is read as evidence of their
commitment to Britishness. Implicitly or explicitly, the social rights and ability to belong
of those deemed not integrated enough is questioned. In this article, I have challenged
such a dichotomisation. I have found that all mothers in this study, regardless of their
orientation to cultural change or continuity, positioned themselves as part of British
society. They claimed rights for themselves and their children and saw themselves and
their families as contributing to this society through paying taxes, working and raising
children who would contribute to Britain in the future through their work. Some mothers,
like Rojda, even went further and argued that the ‘UK occupies and exploits other
countries’ resources. So, it should be the right of migrants to benefit from the support
provided by British institutions’. Rojda here challenges the national boundedness of
citizenship rights and responsibilities, further arguing that transnational economic and
political domination should be regarded as normatively generating transnational rights for
migrants (cf. Baubock 1994). For these Kurdish migrant mothers, their cultural work is
not simply about making nation state citizens, but about enacting a ‘flexible citizenship’
(Ong 2006) that refers to belonging and participation on multiple, overlapping levels –
the nation of origin, the state of residence and local and diasporic non-state Kurdish
identifications.
One of the key means by which Kurdish migrant mothers enact citizenship is their
cultural work. By instilling in their children a Kurdish cultural identity, they equip them
with resources for constructing a counter-hegemonic narrative of citizenship and
belonging across homeland and diaspora and across the generations. This identification as
Kurdish is also a resource for building new citizenship identities as British Kurds in
London. In this sense, Kurdish migrant women’s mothering work can challenge existing
narratives of citizenship which marginalised migrant identities in the British context.
Kershaw (2005, 2010) assumes that migrants’ culture is resistant since it has the
potential to challenge the racist ways in which ethnically dominant institutions devalue
ethnic minorities’ identities. I have rendered this notion more complex by arguing that
migrants’ culture should not be viewed as homogeneous and a-priori resistant. Instead,
cultural identification is a site of struggles around multiple identifications and power
relations beyond ethnicity. The framing of migrant mothering as enacting citizenship
allows us to explore their caring and cultural subjectivities as conflictual and engaging
with a range of social divisions: the interviewees highlighted contestations around
ethnicity – Turkish or Kurdish – (for Evin and Rojda), gender and generation (for
Ronak) and religiosity (for Mina). Migrant mothers do not necessarily prioritise ethnic
identity as a key aspect in their cultural work; this depends on their own personal cultural
and political projects. As suggested above, actors’ positioning cannot be inferred from
their formal citizenship status. Instead, enactments of citizenship need to be investigated
empirically, exploring how actors position themselves and what meanings they give to
these positionings. Indeed, this highlights the complexity of enactments of citizenship
which do not simply position migrant actors in a duality of society of origin versus
society of settlement, but in multiple power relations within and across these. Studying
migrant mothers’ caring and cultural work brings into view the changing constitution of
the citizenry at the crucible of changes in time and space. Migrant mothering creates
turbulences in hegemonic understandings of the relationship between culture, as
constitutive of the legitimate belonging of citizens, intergenerational continuity of a
citizen body, territory and the nation.
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Acknowledgements The author would like to gratefully acknowledge the Open University Sociology Department for funding this research project. The author especially thanks Ozlem Galip and Halaleh Taheri for conducting excellent research interviews, all the mothers and children for sharing their perspectives and the anonymous referees, the editors, Parvati Raghuram and Christian Klesse for extremely helpful and generous comments on earlier drafts of this article.
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