The space between us: feminist conversations on genocide, survival and gender

Official URL: https://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9780429023163-16

This chapter is part of a book project, tentatively titled "Mirroring Lives Across the Armenian Turkish Divide: Feminist Conversations on Genocide and Racism" that is based on semi-structured, in-depth, and highly interactive conversations. We borrow the title of our article from one of the pathbreaking works of feminist scholar Cynthia Cockburn (1998), The Space Between Us, that brings forth the powerful stories of women activists who connect across borders and divides. In this article, organized around the keywords of genocide, survival and gender, we share a small portion of how our conversations tackle the “space between us,” the spaces that have formed us, as well as those we have created together across the Turkish Armenian divide, the US and Turkey, academia and activism, as well as our different positionalities as the grandchildren of the survivors, victims and perpetrators of the Armenian genocide. Bringing the personal and the political as well as the academic in intimate conversations, through critical storytelling (Hannah Arendt, see Disch 1994) and affective solidarity (Hemming 2012), our joint work aims to provide an intersectional feminist intervention into the debates about genocide and racism, as well as their complicated legacies in different contexts.