Zîlan Diyar: My Feelings about Jineolojî

Zîlan Diyar, from the Jineolojî Committee Europe, wrote an article for The Kurdistan Report about her feelings after ten years of developing the science of women.

Diyar wrote that “Jineolojî, which we define as the science of women, life, society and as meaning, has been trying to intervene in the field of social sciences for more than a decade.In this period, it challenged the mentality that was created by the capitalist modernity and which is the center of attention and contradictions. All those who were interested in and concerned with Jineolojî in this period of time – myself included – have, in my opinion, gained the power to define life, have learned to find in themselves what was sought in the distance, and “feel”, when life is considered as a whole, how everything now makes sense.”

She argues that she does “not see any problem in using the term “feeling”, because Jineolojî also challenges science which is largely devoid of feeling in terms of content. Just this term, which exceeds the limits of the mental models given to us and opens a door to a new science, fits to what I want to communicate. However, only “feeling” is not enough. The Jineolojî has supported the claim to define seeing, knowing, meaning, searching and analyzing adapted to life as a science of its own. In this text I will try to explain which way the Jineolojî has travelled in the course of about ten years to come closer to the claim of becoming a separate branch of science.”

She also underlined that the distance that Jineolojî has traveled – as in any other science – can be attributed “to the effort to establish itself conceptually, theoretically and institutionally. First and foremost, as in any social science, it was a matter of developing a scientific understanding of basic factors such as existence, knowledge and methods. It was based on the fact that the role of women and their knowledge had almost no place in the social sciences or that this place was very distorted, which only deepened the social problems. In a way, she dared to shout a truth that in the past many researchers who had tried to analyze the system had concealed. Thus, we knew where to place the missing pieces of the puzzle in our hands.”

Making a balance of the last 10 years, Diyar wrote: “Undoubtedly, there are many more practical results from the last ten years. The truth that is revealed is much more important to me. In this respect, the emotion I expressed at the beginning is significant. The transformation that every woman who engages in Jineolojî experiences is the most lasting result for me. To recognize the mental pitfalls that the male-dominated system lays for women, to embrace the ethical-aesthetic values that come through female connectedness, to gain consciousness to define one’s existence, to gain aspiration to overcome the knotted social problems, to realize one’s own potential, that is, to feel the jinergy, to gain strength in the struggle against the system – these feelings have appeared in every woman who got acquainted with Jineolojî and participated in the studies carried out on the basis of jineological thinking and living. This is the first position that we won against the way of thinking that tries to separate the thoughts, knowledge, feelings and intuition of women. Being able to arouse emotions while producing thoughts and relying on our intuition while pursuing knowledge.

The practice achieved during this time is very valuable. It is a necessity to make these values visible and to understand these results as a prerequisite for a science and as the beginning of a long march. It is only with such scientific output that it will be possible to change the information that today defines human memory.”