WOMEN’S WAR: GENDER ACTIVISM IN THE VIETNAM WAR AND IN THE WARS FOR KURDISH AUTONOMY

This paper discuss women’s activism in two contexts of war, focusing on their participation in the Vietnam War (1954-1975) based on a research carried out by Mariana M. Chaguri in the archives of the Vietnamese Women’s Museum in Hanoi2 and in the Kurdish struggle for autonomy, studied in the doctoral research currently being undertaken by Flávia X. M. Paniz, who is working with local and transnational Kurdish women’s organizations in London. Referring to women’s participation in these two wars − one of them still in course − immediately refers to the symbolism usually implicit in debates on wars, that is, an allusion to the idea that war is primarily masculine, waged by men, thus allowing women just to participate in it. Exploring a similar topic, Svetlana Alexievich reconstructs the memory of women’s participation in the Red Army during the Second World War (1939-1945), observing that


INTRODUCTION
This paper discuss women's activism in two contexts of war, focusing on their participation in the Vietnam War   Referring to women's participation in these two wars − one of them still in course − immediately refers to the symbolism usually implicit in debates on wars, that is, an allusion to the idea that war is primarily masculine, waged by men, thus allowing women just to participate in it. Exploring a similar topic, Svetlana Alexievich reconstructs the memory of women's participation in the Red Army during the Second World War (1939)(1940)(1941)(1942)(1943)(1944)(1945), observing that There have been a thousand wars − small and big, known and unknown. And still more has been written about them. But… it was men writing about men − that much was clear at once. Everything we know about war we know with "a man's voice". We are all captives of "men's" notions and "men's" sense of war. "Women's" war has its own colors, its own smells, its own lighting, and its own range of feelings. Its own words (Alexievich, 2018: 23-25, our emphasis). What it is at stake here is not essentializing and superimposing subject and origin by naturalizing categories of representation such as "male" and "female". Instead, the author draws our attention to how gender pervades what may be taken usually as an universalizable narrative about war. By adressing women's experience in war and their narratives about it affords the possibility of "redefining and enlarging traditional notions of historical significance" (Scott, 1986(Scott, : 1054. 3 This wider approach entails the theoretical and empirical articulation of "gender", "nation", and "war". Indeed, the literature on these topics 4 includes some substantial reviews, such as the book Feminism and war: confronting US imperialism (Riley, Mohanty & Pratt, 2008) 5 which tease out three basic perspectives on the articulation of these topic within literature, namely: (1) the contrast between masculinities and militarisms, symbolized by the use of force, and the correlation of femininity with pacificism as a premise symbolically representative of women, usually opposed to war; (2) the double role played by the rhetoric of women's rights and freedoms, used to justify foreign occupation of peripheral countries (and the work of international organizations in these spaces), and to justify discriminatory policies at domestic level; and (3) an ambivalence concerning racial and gender mediations, in which we find the American foreign war policy characterized on the one hand by the military actions of white men, and their respective rhetoric that support salvationist and civilizatory missions which liberate women of colour (black, brown, yellow etc.) in peripheral countries and/or women from ethnic minorities, and on the other hand, national domestic policies that criminalize and marginalize men of colour, defending white women's freedom as a main argumentative strategy.
Comparing the articulations among gender, nation, and war examined in this paper enables us to point our two distinct modes of representing and mobilizing the agency of peripheral women in war contexts that converge on a central point: women's agency in these contexts involves tensions and negotiations over the definitions of what is "public" or "private": within a nation.
Hence, in the dynamics of the struggle marked by gender activism (Badran, 2009), the correlation between the national and the domestic must be retought. In the case of Vietnam, for instance, the representation of the role of caring for the home and family becomes a synonym for caring for the nation.
In their turn, the Kurdish women involved in the war performed a double role through their dispute for symmetrical power and spaces of leadership within the Kurdish struggle itself, and its reorganization of collective life (again cor-897 article | mariana miggiolaro chaguri and flávia x. m. paniz relating the internal space of the nation with domestic space), and through their external activities in the armed militias on the frontline of combat with enemies (against ISIS, the Turkish Gendarmerie and other paramilitary groups operating in the region).
The results of our research show a collective endeavor to produce other narratives of visibility concerning the participation of women in the conflicts, shifting the role performed by them towards an effective contribution symmetrically equal to men's. To this end, at least two movements have been undertaken: (1) the enlargement of spaces for debates on gender in research, archives and museums on war contexts by making visible women's activities and demands; (2) the production of distinct narratives -theoretical, museological, literary and visual -about war, thus making it possible to observe how discussions on gender issues appear only when women's participation is mobilized.
However, it is not a case of "prov[ing] either that women had a history or that women participated in the major political upheavals of Western civilization" (Scott, 1986(Scott, : 1055, but rather of pointing out that their experiences, participations and demands lived for a long time on the fringes of the production of ideas and the ways in which nations were imagined. 6 Consequently, the first effort to break the silence must be in the theoretical dimension by expanding concepts and categories to cope with a heterogenous set of feelings, notions and ideas that mark women's participation and activisms. Moreover, there must be concepts and categories able to name different forms of violence (Das, 2007) and to offer new selective and differentiated framings about women and about wars themselves (Butler, 2015).
With this aim in mind, it is crucial to observe that a key element of the modes of perceiving, telling and making visible women's participation in wars are their shared experiences which makes it possible to explore processes of differentiation and identification, both central to the constitution of a collective action and of forms of activism. 7 Regarding this paper, the comparative analysis of different times, spaces and contexts of war will show how the reorganization of gender roles draws the meanings of wars and configures what we call a woman for the times of war, that is, a woman who moves across spaces of public confrontation, armed conflict, and domesticity. Also, in war contexts, the clash between the public and private spheres that defines the feminine differently (Perrot, 1998;Scott & Keates, 2004) are remade or repositioned -depending on the case.

WOMEN'S ACTIVISM IN VIETNAM
Here we reconstruct the mobilization and participation of Vietnamese women 8 in the Vietnam War and some earlier conflicts, as the French Indochina War (1946)(1947)(1948)(1949)(1950)(1951)(1952)(1953)(1954), through a set of manifold documents that ranges from posters, photos, newspapers of that epoch, to letters, diaries, and interviews. A major 898 women's war: gender activism in the vietnam war and in the wars for kurdish autonomy sociol. antropol. | rio de janeiro, v.09.03: 895 -918, sep. -dec., 2019 part of this material is in the collection of the Vietnamese Women's Museum, responsible for safeguarding the material and displaying part of it in a permanent museum exhibition. Both will be analysed throughout this paper.
The temporalities, spatialities, and demands that underpin these mobilizations are diverse, because they cross over wars, conflicts, and disputes that left thousands dead and injured, and marked the trajectories and experiences of families, individuals, the State itself and its territory. In what follows, many fronts and networks of women's activism converge indirectly and directly on countless battlefronts.
From the 1930s and on, different groups of women, schooled or not, established initiatives and funds for actions in areas including social welfare, political mobilization around a variety of entities like the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV), local community associations or professional orders, especially lawyers and journalists. This way, different anticolonial and, gradually, antiimperialist causes gathered together in organizations, such as the Women's National Salvation Group, Women's Association for Liberation, Women's Association for Democracy, Women's Association for National Safety, and Women's Anti-Imperialist Association.
A fundamental point of reference for the activism of this period is the foundation of the Women's Union (WU) in 1935. Linked to the CPV, founded just five years earlier, a significant number of the associations cited above converged on the leadership of the WU, which brought together a heterogenous set of women's associative activities, 9 fostering a gradual articulation for anticolonial struggle, communism and female autonomy. In particular, it created objective possibilities for the stabilization of a network of associations that supported the actions and struggles of women until (at least) 1975, when the country was reunified.
Over the years, although their activities remained diverse, one observes that women's demands increasingly orbit around three elements: people, sovereignty, and cultural heritage/legacy. Such notions have been disputed and reconstructed after 1975 when the Vietnamese nation became "imagined" primarily through the activism surrounding the CPV.
Regarding the issues discussed here, we suggest that gender and nation became disputed terms within this network of activisms. Both terms defined and problematized each other. Gender regards not only women, but also masculinities − which, in this case, entails the destabilization of the association among war, virility, and the defense of national sovereignty.
The polarity between gender and nation not only affords meaning to the terms gender and nation, but also converts them together into categories for the political mobilization of women insofar as it enlarges the meanings attributed to the notions of people, sovereignty and cultural heritage/legacy. In this manner, it promotes new axes of differentiation that, in a way, reposition gender roles. 899 article | mariana miggiolaro chaguri and flávia x. m. paniz Analytically, ideas regarding people, sovereignty and cultural heritage/ legacy also turn to be characterized by attributes like care, patience and perseverance, what rearticulated the shared experiences of women, whether peasants, workers or liberal professionals. Nay, their domestic roles as wives, daughters or mothers gain strength when shaping a woman for the times of war, because it means that they were the ones who provided patient and tenacious protection for the family and, at a large, for the defense of the nation.
In this sense, gender and nation come to qualify each other insofar as the latter also transforms into the extended family of all those involved in the war effort, amplifying the ties of solidarity, the possibilities and range of mobilization. There are two key contexts for this.
The first, between 1946 and 1954, known as the "period of civil resistance", 10 strengthened the networks of women's activism created in the previous decade, which spread over the north of the country through campaigns like 'Winter clothing,' 'Gold piece for saving the nation' and many other rice donation campaigns -most of them happened under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh.
During this period, woman used to raise, feed and dressing people, especially the men at the fronts. These key activities were characterized by gender roles associated with care. Although a significant number of women also took part in combat, 11 they performed just complementary roles. Thus, associations between feminine and care and, the masculine and force were common.
Nonetheless, women's activism also points to fairly unexpected dimensions in terms of the range and impact of this kind of collective action. In the case at stake, women carry out a network to convey objects, food, resources and information, which, in this particular context, had the unequalled capacity to articulate local and regional bodies with the national command. Thus, it enabled to create political and cultural spaces previously non-existent or quite invisible.
These spaces were fundamental to the mobilization and confrontation within conflicts and disputes that began in 1955 with the outbreak of the armed conflict with the United States.
A year earlier, in 1954, the Geneva Conference brought to an end the Indochina War (1947)(1948)(1949)(1950)(1951)(1952)(1953)(1954) and divided the Vietnamese territory into two zones. In  In the Cold War context, the political and military disputes between the two zones of the Vietnamese territory quickly escalated, aligning the superpowers of the USSR and the USA with the forces of the north and south, respectively. The conflicts steadily intensified and the US military forces began to fight on land against the national liberation forces organized in the north under the leadership of the CPV and Ho Chi Minh. 12 After that, the scope of women's activism and mobilization expanded significantly. This included not only their substantial participation on the battlefronts, but also the complexification of the previous network. The network grew beyond the earlier campaigns focused on caring for troops and it embraced political and cultural initiatives, as well as an international solidarity initiative driven by the attempt to challenge the (mostly) foreign narratives and perceptions about the war. 13 The robust chain of face-to-face contacts built by the earlier activism increasingly became associated with new kinds of mobilizations, led by a generation of women who were mostly training or had trained in universities. Women also started to join war because and their professional positions, what broadened the possibilities for competing for the production and circulation of ideas that helped ascribe meaning to the conflict and to issues and values at stake.
These women were students, journalists, lawyers, and teachers (mostly but not only) who organized associations analogous to local committees of women student's movements − one of the most prominent being the "Saigon movement". Other associations formed during the period were the Women's Committee for the Right to Live in Peace and Dignity, and the Vietnamese Women Demand Living Rights, as well as hundreds of local Women's Union committees. Even, editorial initiative has spread around, such as the Women's Voice and Speech newspapers, along with the production of propaganda material, books and leaflets especially designed to mobilize women (see Do Thi & Brennan, 2015). It is worth emphasizing, however, that the previous activism associated with the sphere of care did not vanish, but gathered momentum, especially through the strengthening of initiatives like the innumerable local and regional committees of the Soldier's Mothers Associations. 14 After 11 years of conflict, women's activism was reorganized and ac- The three responsibilities evoked in the movement's name were to: 1) fight against the enemy (by performing support functions or at the front), while also encouraging men from the family to do the same; 2) engage in agricultural or industrial production; 3) continue to provide care to the family, sup-901 article | mariana miggiolaro chaguri and flávia x. m. paniz porting elderly members, educating children and feeding family members (Werner, 2009) As indicated above, the Vietnam War was marked by the organization of a broad network of women's activisms through which letters, documents, weapons, ammunition, medicines, and food were conveyed (Giáo, 2008). It was in 1968, however, that the presence of women on the different fronts became widespread and they began to occupy the battlefronts in large numbers, as revealed, for example, by the actions of the Trang Liet Women's Guerrilla Group and the 8th March Women's Artillery Group, whose war efforts included shooting down US airplanes and retaking relevant territories (see the exhibition at the Vietnamese Women's Museum). Not by chance, by taking part in major acts of war like shooting down airplanes, for instance, the months of April and May 1968 became known in Vietnam as the Spring of Women (Giáo, 2008: 164).
According this paper's, we have indicated the main types of activism regarding the participation of Vietnamese women in the conflicts fought in their territories, especially between the 1930s and 1970s. We now turn to an analysis of aspects of conflicts linked to the Kurdish Question, in order to interpret these activisms and participations in a comparative analysis by laying full stress to a common dimension: the construction of an ideal of "woman for times of war". The time span covered by the analysis in this paper, however, commences in the 1970s, the period when women's protagonism began to be included as a topic of study and analysis within the broader context of the conflict's history. This does not mean women did not effectively participate in earlier conflicts, but it is from this period onwards that the silence about their participation was broken, and their activities became registered as effective within the militant spaces (Dryaz, 2011). In the document, Elphinston emphasizes what, in his view, were the qualities of the Kurds as a people, such as their own literary production, their own social, cultural, religious and political organizations distinct from other ethnic groups, and archaeological evidences that corroborated the historical presence of the Kurds in the region (Elphinston, 2009). 17 The disputes surrounding a representative idea of the Kurdish people are discussed in the study made by Strohmeier (2003), whose research showed how the production of this category enabled diverse reflections on political hierarchies and dynamics related to the access and representativity in the Kurdish publishing market, fomenting the critique of a supposed condition of Kurdish ethnic homogeneity.
The defense of the idea of a Kurdish people as a political movement is undone as the ethnic, cultural and religious multiplicity of the different Kurdish and non-Kurdish communities becomes recognized, along with the respective impacts of their relations in the region after the 1960s (Strohmeier, 2003;Yavuz, 2004: 126). Hence, the hypothesis defended here is that the debates on gender emerge as a possibility for reorganizing the common political agenda in the 21st Century, claimed by different women's collectives and organizations, which has enabled a new approximation between Kurdish communities that had branched out, especially from the 1970s onwards.
The production of a new relationship between gender and nation, which has been fomented within these collectives and organizations, is promoting a  (Heper, 2007: 114).
According to Heper, the latter organization, the PKK, was founded in the 1970s by a group of young left-wing intellectuals from Ankara, among them the political scientist and Kurdish activist Abdullah Öcallan, who also helped found the Kurdistan Liberation Front in 1984. After circa nine years of men and women disputing agendas within the PKK, the women from the party founded, in 1987, the Patriotic Women Union of Kurdistan (YJWK), which later adopted the name Free Women's Movement of Kurdistan (TAJK) (Dryaz, 2011). The women's movements thus grew from the denunciations of men's "sexism, patriarchalism and chauvinism" (used here as emic categories) by women from the PKK and their need to organize themselves in autonomous form (Mojab, 2001).
Gradually, women started to produce manifestos and organize meetings at  women's war: gender activism in the vietnam war and in the wars for kurdish autonomy sociol. antropol. | rio de janeiro, v.09.03: 895 -918, sep. -dec., 2019 According to the women, in the traditional agenda of the Kurdish political movements, predominantly organized by men, women's freedom was projected to a post-independence future. According to the study made by Mojab (2001), the women also pointed out that Kurdish men from the PKK made pacts agreeing to promote the re-Islamization of women during negotiation processes for the release of political leaders and campaigns in the 1970s. Thus, making women's political demands effective necessarily involved convincing men about their own needs. Tired of their causes being conditional on convincing men, and also concerned by the intensification of violence against women and children in the region, women recount that they decided to take up arms to defend their own bodies.
In this context, the base of the Kurdish national political cause has become reworked, and gender equality has turned into a foundational premise.

AND THE WARS OF WOMEN
Throughout this article, we have made some observations on the participation of women in the Vietnam War and the war for Kurdistan, highlighting the amplitude and variety of their forms of activism. Despite the significant contextual differences between the two cases, it is worth emphasizing a similarity between them: the polarity between gender and nation helped to shape how the wars were lived, perceived and narrated.
Even when fighting against the same enemy, the participation of women in the conflicts demonstrates that they move through a war that had its own temporality, traverses diverse spatialities and it is mobilized via a network of relations and activisms with a local diffusion and a transnational range.
Shared experiences of women in Vietnam or the different Kurdistan cantons and their diasporic communities are rearticulated by the conflicts, producing specific axes of differentiation that somehow reposition gender roles. 908 women's war: gender activism in the vietnam war and in the wars for kurdish autonomy sociol. antropol. | rio de janeiro, v.09.03: 895 -918, sep. -dec., 2019 This is evident, for instance, when we take the Vietnamese Three Responsibilities Movement or the Kurdish slogan Jîn, Jîan, Azadî (life, woman, freedom). In both cases, the intersection between the time of the front and the time of care craft the modes and meanings of the participation of women in war by organizing agency and producing experience. Similarly, the women who participate in war are permanently moving between spaces of public disputes, armed conflict and domesticity, whether in reference to direct care of their own home or of family members, or in a kind of domestic space remade on the fronts which involves caring for the injured, producing food, organizing arsenals, documents, uniforms and so on.
Both in Vietnam in the mid 20th Century and Kurdistan at the beginning of the 21st Century, the heterogeneity of spacialities and temporalities that marks women's activism by producing a "woman for the times of war" with specific moral obligations and attributes. It helps to produce a transnational movement.
By taking the first consequence, the "woman for the times of war", we observed that the Vietnamese women had three responsibilities during the war period: fighting, producing and caring. For that, they must gender roles that, at once, draw from the traditional associations between the "female" and "care", and highlighted the non-separation between domestic and public spheres. One can read this convergence as a contingency of the times of war, which enforce woman of all ages, family backgrounds and kinds of life to engage in the national war endeavour.
Coined by Ho Chi Minh, the movement's slogan, "good at housework and working for the state," provides an insight for reshaping gender roles in Vietnam under the CPV's leadership -that is, women equally available for the work at home or for the State. However, the equivalence in value between them, instead of entailing gender equity or an equal relationship, it indicates that fighting, producing and caring turn to be interconnected parts of the same responsibility that women had in relation to the nation. Finally, the activism of the Vietnamese and Kurdish women is also part of and influenced by various repertoires, struggles and disputes promoted by different women's movements around the world. While many committees of solidarity scattered across the continents proof the extense of this network, it is also important to lay full stress on the images and narratives of these women for the time of war conveyed transnationally aware the public to ceasefires at specific moments and in specific regions, and to the need of humanitarian corridors, for example (see Frazier, 2017;Nguyện, 2016).
Within the scope limit of the topics and issues here discussed, we concluded that making the participation of women in the war internationally visible was -and still is for in the Kurdish case -a strategy implemented by themselves through a broad and heterogenous transnational network of support and protection.
Comparing the two cases, especially in the United States and Vietnam war's case, helped catalyze and connect different feminist, anticolonial, antiimperialist and antiracist struggles in a movement that can be understood as a "manifestation of structural contradictions, aggravated by problems of conjecture" (Galvão, 2011: 112) -in this case, the war itself. In other words, by participating in the war as combatants, activists or intellectuals, women have ended up confronting, actively and interconnectedly, some of the central problems for the ideological organization of their societies.
Both cases challenge the opposition between equality and difference, making the concepts interdependent, albeit held in tension. As pointed by Joan Scott (1996), fighting for equality through the affirmation of gender difference is a key indication that women have only a paradox to offer. In this scenario, by connecting anti-systemic struggles, expressed in anti-war and anti-imperialist causes, to demands for the expansion of citizenship through recognition 910 women's war: gender activism in the vietnam war and in the wars for kurdish autonomy sociol. antropol. | rio de janeiro, v.09.03: 895 -918, sep. -dec., 2019 of women's rights, women activism's disputes worldviews and behaviors related to gender roles, as well as the political action related to them.
Thus, on the paths along which books, ideas and people circulate, the experiences in war are named, and the future beyond the war is imagined. Whether in local circuits or transnational networks, giving a name to acts of violence (including those that precede the outbreak of war) becomes primarily a collective practice, simultaneously a narrative and a concrete endeavour to review the substantive contents that support the imagination of the nation and the production of gender, one in relation to the other. 3 On this topic, see Hooks, 2017;Collins, 1993. 4 On this topic, see Lorentzen & Turpin, 1998;Elshtain, 1995;Waller & Rycenga,2004. Bringing together 28 researchers, both women and men, the event focused on the way in which gender issues had been mobilized in the 23 wars in which the USA had participated since the Second World War: "China (1945)(1946)(1950)(1951)(1952)(1953), Korea (1950Korea ( -1953, Guatemala (1954Guatemala ( , 1967Guatemala ( -1969, Indonesia (1958), Cuba (19591960), the Belgian Congo (1964), Peru (1965), Laos (19641973), Vietnam (1961-1973, Cambodia (1969Cambodia ( -1970, Grenada (1983) 6 Here we cite Benedict Anderson's definition of the nation as an imagined political community: "imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion" (Anderson, 2008: 6). In the author's argu-women's war: gender activism in the vietnam war and in the wars for kurdish autonomy sociol. antropol. | rio de janeiro, v.09.03: 895 -918, sep. -dec., 2019 ment, the notion of "simultaneity" must work to organize time. But as Chatterjee (1993) observes in his critique of this point of Anderson's argument, "simultaneity" cannot be interpreted as a synonym of homogeneity. Instead, it is essential to take into account the heterogeneity of processes and actors that contribute -or not -to imagining the nation.
12 The conf lict was extensive in time and space, occupying both territories of Laos and Cambodia. The impact of the conf lict on the US armed forces, as well as on its domestic politics, was pronounced. Official data produced by the US National Archive indicates a total of 58,214 soldiers (male and female) killed in combat in Vietnam between 1956and 1975(see National Archives, 2008. On the Vietnamese side, the statistics are less precise, but there is some degree of consensus on estimating, for the same period, the total number of deaths at 2,509,000, more than 1 million in the north (see Rummel, 1997). article | mariana miggiolaro chaguri and flávia x. m. paniz 14 An association in scope, constituted by diverse local community organizations initially dedicated to assisting mothers who had lost children in combat. As the war progressed, the networks of contacts and communications organized by the women were also used by troops, helping the circulation of information or facilitating their terrestrial advances (see Giáo, 2008: 134-136). This network also organized international collaborations with cam- 16 On this theme, see Taylor, 1999;Werner & Huynh, 2015. 17 The cited document, "The Kurdish Question", was found in na sequência, observam-se as variadas formas de participação e de ativismo de mulheres existentes nos dois casos; finalmente, são debatidas as interfaces entre a produção do gênero, da guerra e das ideias, percorrendo uma multiplicidade de narrativas, experiências e relatos que apontam para a dimensão heterogênea das guerras, das nações e, portanto, do regime de ideias que deve acompanhá-las.

Abstract
This paper debates women's activism in two events: the Vietnam War (1954-1975 and the historical Kurdish struggle for autonomy (known as "Kurdish question"). We hypothesize that the reorganization of gender roles during the conflicts marks the meanings of wars and configures what we call a woman for the times of war, that is, a woman who transits across the spaces of public confrontation, armed conflict and domesticity. The approach outlined here is structured into three parts: the first and the second ones present aspects of both conflicts by pointing to possible convergences and differences between them; we also present the variety of networks of participation and activism of women in both cases. In the third and final part, we discuss the interfaces among the production of gender, war, and ideas, crossing a manifold of narratives, experiences, and stories that reveal different dimensions of wars and nations, and the diversity of the regimes of ideas that attached to them.

Keywords
Gender; war; nation and nationalism; post-colonial feminism.