Beauty for Harmony: Moral Negotiations and Autonomous Acts in Diyarbakır, Turkey

In March 2014, lifting a worn-out, pale white curtain aside, I stepped inside Hümeyra’s beauty salon.¹ One side of the room was filled with standard coiffure decorations—the poster of a white blond woman, cosmetic products, two mirrors, styling chairs. The other looked like a living room, with two brown couches and two dingy Victorian-style armchairs positioned together in a circle with a small coffee table in the middle. The walls were hung with art that Hümeyra had made herself: a pencil drawing of Ayşe Şan, a famous dengbej singer later ostracized because of an illicit affair, exiting the walled historical city center of Diyarbakır from one of its large gates and leaving the city behind;² and a sketch of a heterosexual couple making love, the man on top with only the woman’s face visible, wearing an expression of pleasure. Both sketches gestured at immorality and the taboos around female sexuality. Yet despite its intimate female atmosphere, the place was marked by Kurdish politics: a Kurdish business name, a location in one of the most politicized neighborhoods of the city, an owner who had become an aesthetician as a runaway from the police. From that first day on, I would be privy to conversations in which Hümeyra and her customers would say quite unpleasant things about Kurdish politicians and their policies. It was in this space, I learned, that activist Kurdish women engaged in beautification practices and cared for themselves and one another at the same time as they crafted their political positioning in the new Kurdish political order. In such a highly politicized context as Diyarbakır, beauty could never remain apolitical. But what this space and those who frequented it made clear was that beauty had become a way of conducting politics.

Hümeyra’s salon was located in the crowded and chaotic district of Bağlar, unique in that most of its four hundred thousand residents had been forced over the past three decades to migrate to the city due to the armed conflict between the Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê (Kurdistan Workers’ Party, hereafter PKK) and the Turkish state. The young residents of Bağlar have grown up with the experience of displacement and political violence and are known to be rebellious, frequently blockading the neighborhood with burning tires and engaging in confrontations with the police. This location in Bağlar distinguished Hümeyra’s salon from the others I visited in the city center. The majority of her customers were women who either lived nearby and had thus been politicized as migrants or knew Hümeyra through their political networks. If it had not been for her sister, who worked at a pro-Kurdish organization I frequented during my fieldwork, I would most likely not have discovered the salon. Without such intimate connection, my best anthropological efforts would not have led me there.

This female sanctuary within the chaotic life of the city turned out to be a crucial field site where I would meet many Kurdish activist women from Bağlar and beyond. A veteran activist of forty-two, Hümeyra also had a political background herself—most of her customers were also her close friends—but she did not like to talk about it. NGO workers, lawyers, politicians, and grassroots activists frequented her salon and chatted back and forth about matters both personal and political. Casual in her black coverall, cardigan, and slippers, Hümeyra would invariably make Turkish coffee for her visitors and herself and then read their cups.

In the new era of Kurdish democracy and Turkish “peace process” stretching between 2009 and 2015, the beauty salon exemplifies a newly emergent space in Kurdish politics where women care for their bodies, their friendships, and their political selves. In these practices of care, “becoming beautiful” (güzelleşmek) gains new meanings and, as I argue here, opens up space for moral negotiations over such vital political questions as who belongs in the political community, how to transition from armed to civil struggle...