Gender and Genre: Women’s Performance Practices in Dersim

Abstract:Significant numbers of ethnographic studies from different parts of the world emphasize lament as a women’s genre, with cross-cultural analyses indicating that women predominate among the genre’s performers. These performances are often signified by ritual wailing, but researchers typically overlook how the genre is given ritual form through mundane activities in everyday life. Everyday experience and ritual experience are often cast as contradictory. Everyday speech and poetic discourse have been mainly separated in the literature. Rather than positing two distinct selves opposed to each other in everyday speech and in performance, it makes more sense to argue that the poetic self may contain contradictory statements. Focusing on the women’s performance practices in Dersim, a region in eastern Turkey, where Zazaki- and Kurdish-speaking Alevis live, I consider how classification of genres relates to gender and power. Rather than associating the possibility of raising one’s voice with resisting the social order, I attempt to explore the genre’s contextualization process and its connections to women’s agency.