On the construction of identities: An autoethnography from Turkey

Abstract

In this article I analyze, on the basis of my personal experience, the discontents of contemporary Turkish politics; more specifically, neoliberal conservative hegemony, and its three manifestations: stability of instability; a religio-conservative gender regime; and anti-intellectualism. I illustrate how these manifestations are intertwined in the process of identity construction: how an individual’s identity as a citizen, as a woman, as an academic is being constantly constructed/de-constructed/reconstructed in a manner integral to the social and political context. The contribution of this article is threefold: it shows how personal experiences are a legitimate source of knowledge; it enables an understanding of how political identities are in a constant state of making; it challenges dominant conceptions of politics and the political through challenging binaries such as individual/social, personal/political, and emotional/rational.

Right-wing populism in New Turkey: Leading to all new grounds for troll science in gender theory

“…Via this new and alternative, the so-called scientific discourse 'regenerates the issues of family and marriage as an ideological battleground of contemporary cultural wars' (Kuhar 2015:90), where there is an ever-increasing intolerance to critical thinking. As Gençoğlu (2019) puts, this has:…”