“My Body, My Decision!”

Abstract

This article examines the discourses and strategies used by reproductive rights activists in Turkey to counter the state’s antiabortion policies. Drawing on a critical genealogical analysis, the article first traces the concept of “bodily autonomy” in feminist mobilizations against sexual and ethnoracial violence from the 1980s to the first decade of the 2000s. It then focuses on the slogan of the 2012 abortion rights mobilizations, “My body, my decision!,” which relies on bodily autonomy as the central trope of claim making. The article argues that the slogan is limited, not because it draws on a liberal, individualistic framework but because it represents the bodily autonomy of the white reproductive subject, assuming that it is an ethnoracially unmarked, universal subject. In doing so, the article demonstrates how feminist strategies that build on bodily autonomy obscure the state’s stratified reproductive policies, which have historically promoted a Turkish majority at the expense of non-Turkish lives.