Panel Description
The panel seeks to foster a provincializing of the affective turn in social sciences and humanities (Clough and Halley 2007 ) by highlighting non-Western conceptual and sources to think affect with. In conversation with a growing body of scholarship on affects and feelings that has been predominantly informed by Euro-American contexts and canons (Ahmed 2014; Berlant 2011; Cvetkovich 2012; Stewart 2011), this panel draws upon the recent turn toward affect in Turkish studies and affiliated fields (Açıksöz 2019; Biner 2019; Gill 2017; Parla 2019; Stokes 2010). The panel further seeks to contribute to feminist analysis within studies of affect with focused attention to the gendered evocations and circulations of public and private feelings. The papers collectively inquire how femininities and masculinities that take shape at the intersections of Turkish nationalism, militarism, neoliberalization, Islamism, misogyny, and homophobia are felt affectively on the surfaces of everyday life. Traversing the life worlds of feminist and peace activists who mobilize anger and empathy to forge solidarity, Kurdish women who navigate the landscape of a gendered war “spaced out” with antidepressants, Armenian mothers who carry on the affective weight of loss and continuity with their lullabies, and Kurdish gay men who broker racialized intimacies in an hostile urban landscape. Together these papers highlight how the circulation of affective genres and embodied practices as diverse as feminist manifestos, court defenses, lullabies, cruising, and intoxication conjure diverse gendered subjects, relationalities, and collectivities.
Açıksöz, Salih Can. 2019. Sacrificial Limbs: Masculinity, Disability, and Political Violence in Turkey. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Ahmed, Sara. 2004. “Affective Economies.” Social Text 22 (2): 117–39.
Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Biner, Zerrin Ozlem. 2019. States of Dispossession: Violence and Precarious Coexistence in Southeast Turkey. University of Pennsylvania Press.
Clough, Patricia Ticineto and Jean Halley. 2007. The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Cvetkovich, Ann. 2012. Depression: A Public Feeling. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Gill, Denise. 2017. Melancholic Modalities: Affect, Islam, and Turkish Classical Musicians New York: Oxford University Press.
Parla, Ayşe. 2019. Precarious Hope: Migration and the Limits of Belonging in Turkey. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Stewart, Kathleen. 2011. "Atmospheric Attunements." Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29 (3): 445-453.
Stokes, Martin. 2010. The Republic of Love: Cultural Intimacy in Turkish Popular Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Disciplines
Participants
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Prof. Yael Navaro
-- Discussant
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Ms. Melissa Bilal
-- Presenter
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Ms. Zeynep Korkman
-- Organizer, Presenter
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Dr. Nisa Goksel
-- Presenter
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Emrah Karakus
-- Presenter
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Dr. Umut Yildirim
-- Presenter
Presentations
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This paper explores how gendered feelings are put into circulation to coagulate political subjects. In particular, I explore the affective politics fostered by Turkey’s pro-peace academic activists who publicly highlight their gendered identities as women, mothers, and/or feminists to articulate political feelings and stake claims legitimate political action. “Academics for Peace” is the colloquial name of the over two thousand academics from Turkey who 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 and feminist speaking positions were highlighted. Examining these defenses for various expressions of affect/emotion, including feeling empathetic, responsible, helpless, and heavy, 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 being a woman, mother, and/or feminist are mobilized to wield certain affective states and moral/political positions? How is affective solidarity that interrupts militarism and racism gendered?
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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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Ms. Melissa Bilal
As an Armenian woman from Turkey who has been conducting research to understand the past and present experiences of Armenians in her native Istanbul community, in this paper I draw on ethnography and autoethnography to critically engage with the gendered and affective constructions of Armenianness or the Armenians in Turkey’s public discourse. I specifically focus on narratives in the media, academic scholarship, literature, and performative arts that intend to shape a certain affective orientation towards the past. I use gender and affect as analytical tools to decode the political economy of sentiments that stigmatize, marginalize, and thus micromanage the articulation of certain emotions. By putting these hegemonic representations in dialogue with the expressed or suppressed modes of feelings during my interviews with Armenian women in Istanbul, I aim to address the significance of decolonizing affect in developing intersectional feminist methodologies.
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Emrah Karakus
This paper takes the question of “what can a Kurdish face do?” as a window to explore how the widespread counter/insurgency and surveillance in Kurdish Turkey affectively and intimately generate queer and transgender subjectivities. Based on a 9-month of ethnographic study in Diyarbakir and Istanbul, I suggest that queer and transgender Kurds become the subjects of political violence in two prominent ways: They adopt and often shift the meanings of already existing communal practices informed by what locals call “party” ethics, referring to the ideals and practices influenced by the socialist ethics of the PKK. These practices include notions of “bedel” (debt) and “coming face to face”, often used when solving their everyday disputes. Secondly, they develop multiple strategies to adapt and/or disorient racialized desires and counterinsurgent fantasies for a Kurdish face/look, by constituting a self and ethics of versatility, or what they call becoming “chameleon,” where one’s adaptability to the situated contexts and changing circumstances provides more benefits and power over others.
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Dr. Umut Yildirim
Taking the encounter of a Kurdish mother with trauma-medicine in Diyarbakır/Amed in Kurdistan in Turkey as its object of inquiry, this paper analyses a political index of feeling otherwise through the affective state of feeling gej (“spaced-out” in Kurmanji). In colonial settings of continuous emergency, spaced out states refer to a fugitive form of political expression that needs not to be organized, collective, or even resistant by any standard to have significance as illustrative of critique. These seemingly inchoate articulations of colonial wounding reveal not only the constitution of a medical space of economic experimentation and governmental intervention, but also a fugitive state through which the Kurdish subject actively undertakes her own constitution and engages with decolonial political imaginaries to sustain mental health
