The Science of Woman, Life, Freedom: Jineolojî

The Science of Woman, Life, Freedom: Jineolojî

Targol Mesbah connects Iran’s 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising, sparked by the killing of Jina Amini in morality police custody, to Jineolojî, the “science of woman” developed within the Kurdish freedom movement. She presents Jineolojî as a framework that challenges patriarchal, capitalist and colonial systems, treats women’s lived struggles as a source of knowledge, and questions the idea that social life can be fully captured by quantitative measurement.

Drawing on Abdullah Öcalan’s account of the origins of the state, the essay treats patriarchy as the first form of domination from which other hierarchies grew. Mesbah describes how these ideas take shape in Rojava, through women’s councils with veto power and Jinwar, a women’s village organised around ecological and communal principles.

She argues that Jineolojî can help keep movements like the Iranian uprising from being absorbed into liberal feminism or state politics, and presents it as an unfinished, collective and international project that invites women everywhere to recover and theorise their own histories of autonomous organising.

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