Welcome to the Rayel Kurdish Women Collective! We a vibrant community dedicated to empowering and uplifting Kurdish women through collaboration, support, and shared experiences.
Join us celebrating our culture, fostering connections, and creating a brighter future together. Your journey begins here!
We Work On
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Podcast
Rayel Podcast is a feminist, multilingual space where Kurdish women share stories of resistance, migration, labor, and everyday life.
Rooted in intersectionality, we speak from the margins — and for each other.
Reports
Networking
Rayel Reports is a feminist documentation and analysis initiative developed by the Rayel Kurdish Women Collective. This project focuses on producing critical reports that center the experiences, struggles, and political agency of Kurdish women across various contexts, with an intersectional lens grounded in gender, ethnicity, statelessness, and class
Rayel Networking is a transnational initiative of the Rayel Kurdish Women Collective, designed to build sustainable and feminist solidarities across geographies, generations, and movements.
About Us
As RAYEL, we are a collective of Kurdish women committed to building resilient networks and relations of solidarity. Our name encapsulates the strength, connection we seek to foster within Kurdish women's struggles and between global movements. Rayel means strong and hard wire in Kurdish, metaphorically referring to the network we are trying to build between women. We strive to unite the stories of Kurdish women in Kurdistan and the diaspora and weave them into the broader tapestry of women's resistance, especially from the Global South. Our mission is to illuminate the shadows of oppression with the transformative light of collective knowledge and action.
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Politics
The organization's guiding principles reflect our commitment to dismantling systems of oppression through an intersectional lens. As Kurdish women, we experience the overlapping effects of patriarchy, capitalism, and racism in our daily lives, reflected in war, displacement, economic exploitation, and social marginalization. Recognizing that these systems are deeply interconnected, we take an intersectional approach to address the complex nature of oppression across race, gender, and class lines. Our mission is to question and resist these unequal, hierarchical structures in order to build a democratic future.
Aim
An important pillar of our work is to document, gather and amplify the fragmented experiences of Kurdish women across Kurdistan and the diaspora. Through oto-ethnographic research, collecting personal narratives, uniting related research and analysis and organizing visual archives, we aim to create a comprehensive record of our struggle. This archive will serve not only to expose the systematic patterns of oppression Kurdish women face but also to serve as a basis for sustaining collective narrative.
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RAYEL clearly understands of the interconnected nature of Kurdish women's resistance and the broader Kurdish political movement. Kurdish women are fighting against patriarchy, capitalism and national freedom. We stand in solidarity with Kurdish men in resisting colonialism and state violence. At the same time, we challenge the patriarchal structures that perpetuate gendered oppression. This dual commitment underscores the political depth and collaborative nature of our struggle.
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