Gender-Power Relations in Traditional and Transborder Kurdish Music

This study on Kurdish music, viewed through a gendered lens, is based on Parang Farazmand’s doctoral dissertation. Her twelve years of research span from the intimate spaces of East Kurdistan’s Mukriyan region in Iran to the global stages of the Swedish diaspora. Farazmand explores the links between gender, power, and musical practices throughout Kurdish history. Drawing on extensive ethnographic work, rare archival materials, and personal interactions with singers, instrumentalists, composers, and dancers, the study decribes how sound, performance, and embodiment are arenas in which power and authority are negotiated, challenged, and redefined across genders. In detailed case studies of female, male, and queer Kurdish musicians, and through transcription and analysis of traditional local genres, dances, and instruments, it reveals the constraints shaping Kurdish musical life, and the creative ways in which artists have overcome them. The author also examines how the environment of the Swedish diaspora has fostered the creation of an imagined, unified Kurdish nation, Great Kurdistan, and developed modern Kurdish feminism in Kurdish diasporic music. The study offers a nuanced view of Kurdish cultural expression, demonstrating how music shapes social identities and futures in both traditional and transnational contexts. It also explores how music reflects and transforms gendered experiences, emphasizing that sound, like identity, is fluid, contested, and inherently political in this setting.