Conservative Women’s Organizations and their Approaches to the Women’s Rights from the Third Wave Feminist Perspective

Abstract

This study focuses on Islamist women's organizations as civil society actors. Although this research is based on a comprehensive field study covering all women's organizations and activists in Eskişehir, only the data gathered from interviews at Islamist women's organizations were analyzed for this study. The study investigates the position of Islamic women's organizations in women's movements in terms of their advocacy of women's rights and their stance against patriarchal domination in line with their understanding of the female body. The discourse of women's rights advocated in Islamist women's organizations is established concerning Islam. The discourse criticizes gender equality as a universal value and replaces it with gender justice because Islamist women believe that Western Feminism does not cover the reality of Muslim women. In line with the Islamic narration of creation, Islamist women advocate the distribution of justice according to the vital religious notion of created/given natural characteristics (fîtra) of the sexes. In addition, they do not see their bodies as their own but as God's trust and are thus against abortion. Therefore, within the women's movement in Turkey, tension is growing between secular women and Islamist women, between gender equality and gender justice, causing division rather than solidarity among women.