JINHA

AMED –This March 8, news agency JINHA, headquartered in Amed in Northern Kurdistan, will celebrate its fourth year of producing news by and about women in Kurdistan, Turkey and beyond.

JINHA is the only all-women news agency in Kurdistan and one of the few all-women news agencies in the world.A group of women founded JINHA in 2012 to address the under- and misrepresentation of women in media.

Today, JINHA provides news in Kurdish, Turkish and Englishfrom three parts of Kurdistan as well as Turkey. The agency has bureaus in Amed (Diyarbakır in Turkish), Wan (Van) and Istanbul and teams of reporters in Rojava; the Kurdistan Region of Iraq;Izmir;Êlih (Batman); Şirnex (Şırnak); Antalya;and Sêrt (Siirt).

JINHA's operative principle of producing news through women's solidarity, rather than competition, is designed to counter a capitalist and patriarchal system that individualizes women. From camerapeople to reporters to bureau chiefs, JINHA's news is produced entirely by women.

In their original statement, founding JINHA journalists said they were frustrated by images of women that ranged from the wretched to the monstrous to the pornographic, but consistently reduced women to an objectified position.

Four years later, the misrepresentation of women and especially Kurdish women remains an issue, with Kurdish women appearing widely in the world press due to their role in the Rojava women's revolution and the defense of Kobanê from ISIS.

University of Cambridge PhD student Dilar Dirik has critiqued Western and hegemonic Middle Eastern representations of Kurdish women fighters in her recent work.In a series of articles published on KurdishQuestion.com and Al Jazeera, Dilar has argued that patriarchal media representations of women portray them asoppressed victims or as sexually suspect. Sexualization and objectification of Kurdish women in the media is widespread, says Dilar.

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