Hope with Qualms: A Feminist Analysis of the 2013 Gezi Protests

Abstract

In this article, I argue for the distinctness of the 2013 Gezi uprisings from other anti-austerity protests. With a materialist feminist eye on the third-term AKP government's conservative authoritarianism, I explore the causal links among patriarchal, racist biopolitics, heteronormative family values and increasing austerity measures. My broader analytical goal is to demonstrate the centrality of moral politics to uneven, security-based neoliberal regulations across markets, public spaces, and civic expression in and beyond Turkey. Second, I zoom in on the mothers’ rallies and gendered, ethnic acts of mourning to analyse the performative constitution of multiple publics during the protests. What exclusions have the participants produced in the name of inclusion? How can a performance paradigm help us understand the contradictory uses of space among and against the protestors, and more broadly, the relevance of embodied dissent to different visions of social justice? To deepen our intersectional feminist analysis, I suggest taking performances seriously, from human chains to soundscapes of resistance, stillness, and brutality; and from eclectic dance forms to architectural disruptions. Attending to the uprisings’ fault-lines and radical contributions, I also caution against ‘romancing resistance’. Hope with qualms is what remains.

Contextualising Feminist Global Justice Activism: A Case Study of the Gezi Park Protests

“…Family with the Ministry of Family and Social Policies in 2011 (Aldıkactı Marshall, 2013). Mothers become an essential part of these structural adjustment policies as the government relied on them to give multiple births and thus secure the continuity of a cheap labour force, which would strengthen Turkey's standing in global markets (Erhart, 2013;Potuoğlu-Cook, 2015). They were also responsible for compensating for the cutbacks in public services and mitigating the austerity measures by the intensification of their unpaid domestic work in households (Potuoğlu-Cook, 2015).…”

“…Moreover, Potuoğlu-Cook (2015) shows that Romani women also participated in the Gezi protests, opposing urban transformation and gentrification projects. These projects evicted poor Romani women, who mainly work in informal sectors as musicians, belly dancers, and sex workers, from their historic living and working sites in central Istanbul (namely, Sulukule).…”

The politics and practices of intersectional prefiguration in social movements: The case of Sisters Uncut

“…While accepting that point, our objective in this article is to examine how, in selfidentified prefigurative groups, where there is an explicit emphasis on enacting a different kind of politics and practice (i.e., non-hierarchical, utopian), both within the group and beyond, structural inequalities persist and how these are acknowledged and addressed. This is important as studies of recent prefigurative movements demonstrate, despite claims of inclusivity and the adoption of horizontal procedures and structures, such movements continue to reproduce inequalities and exclusionary practices found in society, as a result of which the voices and demands of women, as well as racial and ethnic minorities, become marginalised in organisational spaces limiting their ability to shape agendas of action (Athanasiou, 2014;Campbell, 2011;Choi-Fitzpatrick, 2015;Gamez Fuentes, 2015;Potuouglu-Cook, 2015). For instance, despite the claims that the Occupy movement was structured to 'give voice' to underrepresented people (Vallee, 2017), this was not necessarily achieved in practice.…”

“…Campbell and Choi-Fitzpatrick discuss the persistence of white privilege (Campbell, 2011) and the marginalisation of African American and Latino participants in Occupy Wall Street (Choi-Fitzpatrick, 2015) and elsewhere one of the authors has examined similar tensions in Occupy London (Ishkanian & Ali, 2018). Exclusionary practices were not limited to Occupy; Tadros shows the constraints on women’s participation in Tahrir Square, while Martinez Palacios and Gamez Fuentes illustrate how women’s voices and demands in the Spanish 15M movement were marginalised and silenced, and Potuoğlu-Cook examines exclusionary practices in Gezi Park (Martinez Palacios, 2015; Potuoğlu-Cook, 2015; Tadros, 2015).…”

Memories, stories and deliberation: Digital sisterhood on feminist websites in Turkey

“…4 These groups were reported to have left their mark on the protests, becoming the symbols of resistance. 5 The effects of patriarchy and governmental policies on the protests (Potuoglu-Cook, 2015), the subversive role of feminist and LGBTI presence (Acar and Uluğ, 2016; Canli and Umul, 2015; Korkman and Açıksöz, 2014) and the gendered and spatial aspects of the resistance have been discussed by scholars (Baydar, 2015). In this analysis, I wanted to see how women and LGBTI activists themselves wrote about, remembered and commemorated the protest.…”