Voice Without a Stage: Women's Memory and the Gendered Boundaries of Dengbêj Tradition

Drawing on a qualitative field study of 80 interviews on Kurdish memory following forced displacement, this article examines how women's memory work relates to, and is systematically excluded from, the institutionalized tradition of dengbêj oral performance. Eight interviews across three geographic axes — the historically Kurdish-majority region of Turkey, Central Anatolia, and the Western European diaspora — show that while men's dengbêj authority has been progressively staged and archived (in venues such as Diyarbakır's Dengbêj Evi), women's comparable memory work, largely carried through lament (şîn) and domestic narration, remains without an equivalent stage. Engaging Zumthor's concept of oral performance as "event" and Foley's account of oral-formulaic authority, and in direct dialogue with Schäfers's ethnography of Kurdish women dengbêj in Van, this article extends a single-site account into a three-axis comparative frame, arguing that the "stagelessness" of women's oral memory work is not incidental but a structural feature of how the tradition has been gendered, institutionalized, and, in diaspora, spatially dislocated.