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Feeling with Others: Oppositional Political Affect in Turkey
Abstract
This paper explores how gendered feelings are put into circulation to coagulate oppositional political subjects. Over two thousand academics from Turkey signed a peace petition in 2016 calling the Turkish state to halt military operations in Kurdish cities and to pursue a peace process with Turkey’s Kurdish guerilla organization. When signatories were prosecuted for the alleged crime of terrorist propaganda, hundreds of them spoke out to defend themselves and reiterate their pro-peace positions in the courtrooms. This research focuses on over fifty of these court defenses in which gendered speaking positions were highlighted. Examining these defenses for various expressions of feeling, the research seeks to address research questions such as: How do particular forms of resistant action and repression facilitate flows of political affect? How are certain affective states claimed as grounds for certain moral/political positions? How are certain kinds of political feelings such as “feeling for others” and subject positions such as motherhood circulate in the political public sphere and get mobilized for variant political projects? The paper focuses the affective politics fostered by Turkey’s pro-peace academic activists who publicly highlighted their gendered identities as mothers and fathers to claim to feel (with) Kurdish mothers’ and children’s suffering during the conflict between state and the Kurdish guerilla organization and to render legible and legitimate their motivations for signing a peace petition. It situates this parental mode of feeling with others into the broader political field in Turkey where motherly feelings are mobilized by various political actors ranging from Monday mothers of the disappeared to the pronatalist government to argue for the versatility of familial and seemingly familiar political feelings.
Discipline
Sociology
Geographic Area
Turkey
Sub Area
Gender/Women's Studies