PERFORMING NEW FEMININITIES : Representations of YPJ female Kurdish fighters in the British news and in pro-Kurdish online media platforms.

Sammanfattning: The Syrian civil war has been one of the most complex armed confrontations in modern era. In thiscontext, the military participation of Kurdish female fighters of the YPJ Units has received globalmedia coverage. This thesis explores the gendered dimension of media representations of YPJfighters and the representation of the construction of their military identity. Firstly, it asks howBritish media represent their appearance and background, their ability to fight and their motivation.Moreover, it explores how pro-Kurdish media and on-line platforms represent the construction oftheir military identity and the way the YPJ is formed into a group. The data comes from 23 Britishand 8 pro-Kurdish media articles and is analysed with discourse analysis. The thesis finds thatBritish media representations echo the hegemonic discourse about women’s role as victims duringwar, while only the more liberal media represent motivations connected with a struggle againstpatriarchy, capitalism and the nation-state. Moreover, it finds that pro-Kurdish media represent YPJfighters as breaking stereotypical notions of femininity through a repetition of performativemilitary acts and about precarity being the condition of the group’s coherence. It also finds that thearticles function as interpellation to new fighters.