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Feminist Movement and the Women of the Gezi Park
Abstract
Gezi Park was an unprecedented democratic protest that took place in the Republic of Turkey in the early summer of 2013. While much has been written on the protests, the relationship between the feminist movement in Turkey and the Gezi protests remains unexplored. Even though feminist movement as such and civil society associations that were at the heart of feminist organizing did not take part in the Gezi protests as NGOs, there were many women, even slightly more women than men, in the park. These women played critical roles in shaping the Gezi experience and the feminist movement was present in diverse ways throughout the protests. In this paper, I would like to address the relationship between women and Gezi Park and explore how the feminist movement of the past three decades that played a democratizing role in Turkish politics helped shape the Gezi protests. The paper argues that even though drawing causal inferences are difficult, one could trace the assumptions in the norms, values, modes of organizing and resistance the women that participated in the Gezi protested exhibited and the feminist movement in Turkey. Feminist movement was first of its kind in Turkey in organizing protests through unconventional means and with humour the way Gezi was organized. Images of women in the park became symbols of the protest. More critically, women in the park who had internalized feminist sensibilities consistently prevented the protests from falling into the trap of sexism that the feminist movement had so powerfully opposed. Finally, the heterogeneity of the feminist movement in Turkey was reflected in the park. Women from different backgrounds, including Turks and Kurds who played different roles, students, young professionals or mothers who were housewives, became part of the resistance as the feminist movement encouraged women to resist in pursuit of their choices. The paper willl be an interpretive examination of the question based on secondary literature including newspaper articles, journals and published interviews with women who participated in the Gezi park.
Discipline
Political Science
Geographic Area
Turkey
Sub Area
None