In the last decade, discourse on sexuality has proliferated more than ever in the political realm in Turkey. The discursive utilization of women's bodies and sexualities has appeared as the main tool to consolidate a conservative gender regime and the heterosexual family with children is promoted as the basic unit to reinforce hegemonic moral values and norms. This article aims to disentangle the intricate patchwork in the Justice and Development Party's (JDP) gender politics, which is geared towards ensuring pervasive control of women's bodies and sexualities. Within this framework, this article investigates the proliferation of the discourse on women's bodies and sexualities in Turkish politics by delving into the constitutive factors of the JDP's hegemonic gender politics and examining the narrative lines in recent public debates on women's sexualities.

This paper discusses the gendered nature of reproductive citizenship in contemporary Turkey through reading the abortion chronicles and exposes the utilization of women's bodies and subjection of women to demographic state policies. To this end, we focus on recent abortion debates originating from Prime Minister Erdoğan's statement on May 25, 2012 that suggested that "every abortion is a murder". Our paper is a qualitative analysis of the arguments of the members of the parliament following PM's statement on abortion. We documented and contextualized the recurrent themes; (1) abortion as a rhetorical tool, (2) trivialization of abortion, (3) medicalization of abortion, (4) abortion in the cases of rape, (5) abortion as an economic imperative. As a result, we unravel the gendered discursive limits of "pro-abortion" arguments in Turkey and reveal the frameworks within which the political debates are shaped when women's bodies, sexualities and reproductive capacities are at stake.

This paper presents the findings of a qualitative study on pious women columnists' negotiation of feminist self-identification in contemporary Turkey. Given the rise of the anti-feminist gender politics under the pro-Islamist AKP (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi) [Justice and Development Party] rule, it discusses how pious women columnists as crucial intellectual figures in the public sphere interpret feminism, Islamic feminism, and feminist self-identification. In this frame, the main aim of this study is to put forward the complexities of pious women columnists' positions in the public sphere and how this positionality affects their narratives about feminist self-identification in contemporary Turkey. Making use of the theoretical perspective provided by concepts such as "positionality" and "situatedness," this study concludes that negotiation of identity categories always takes place within the frame of reference, the contours of which is mapped out by one's position in the power configuration in society. Moreover, it brings into the open that the dialectical openings of Islamic feminism in pious women columnists' narratives can enhance the feminist coalitional politics in contemporary Turkey.

This article presents a qualitative analysis of profeminist Islamic women public figures’ discourses in the abortion debate in Turkey in 2012. The aim is to reveal the possibilities and limitations of achieving an intersectional and egalitarian profeminist collaboration on the Islamic-secular axis in contemporary Turkey. Drawing on recent feminist scholarship on coalition politics, the article exposes the fluctuations of meaning and the shifting frames of reference in these women's narratives and relates this hybrid, dynamic narrative quality to profeminist Islamic women's unique social location. It also elaborates on the blockage points in these narratives that hinder coalitional ways of thinking. Within this frame, this article suggests that in a social and political context that has witnessed a striking upsurge of antifeminist gender politics in the last decade, the building of coalitional profeminist politics beyond the Islamic-secular divide can be facilitated by shifting the focus from the apparently irreconcilable character of ideological positionings and lived experiences toward coalitional rhetorical strategies and intermediary narrative lines in profeminist subjects’ accounts.

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