Abstract
Feminist activists throughout the world are responding to the global rise of authoritarian regimes wielding antifeminist rhetoric. This paper investigates the strategies that activist women have developed in authoritarian Turkey. How do women’s organizations mobilize effectively amidst repression? How do feminist women deploy anger as a political tool for uniting women at local and transnational scales? Under what conditions are emotions such as anger deemed “destructive” and “violent,” mobilized as a means of nonviolent protest, and with what lasting impacts? Extreme conditions of war, civil unrest, and violence against women prevail in Turkey, and feminists have narrowly survived an authoritarian crackdown to become a highly visible oppositional group. This paper focuses on two recent feminist campaigns in Turkey, one of which focuses on killings of women, and the other of which focuses on killings by women in self-defense. I will analyze the ways in which both campaigns voice women’s anger and invite other women to share and publicly express their anger. I examine the ways in which these campaigns and organizations have shifted the framework of violence against women by severing the naturalized link between anger and violence and rendering this emotion as a righteous means of political expression. I suggest that women’s politics of anger creates a new ground of activism against violence, as it translates women’s notably violent expression of anger (as when women kill their abusers) into a nonviolent protest tool. Methodologically, I rely on my participant observations in Turkey (2013-2015), where I was active as a feminist peace activist during the same period that I was researching Kurdish women activists; and as well as on the initial survey I have undertaken of written documents (such as the public statements and written work of feminist and women’s organizations). My work contributes to scholarly and popular conversations about anger and solidarity between women begun by the #MeToo movement. These conversations are beginning to move beyond the dichotomy of women as victims and men as perpetrators in cases of violence against women, but discussion has focused on the U.S. and Europe. My study shifts the lens to the upwelling of women’s anger politics in the Global South, and the Middle East in particular.
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