Gendering Political Power: Performing and Resisting Sovereign Masculinity This paper analyzes political power in Turkey through the analytical lenses of body and masculinity. Examining President Erdogan’s masculine statesman persona that is expressed through his bodily comportment, affective presentation, and language use, and projected through propaganda, masculinity is revealed to be a resonant cultural repertoire for the performance of political power. While President Erdogan’s incessant comments regarding women’s bodies such as his repeated calls for at least three children or condemnation of caesarian births do attract critical attention, Erdogan’s own embodiment of masculinity as a statesman is largely ignored. Actually, Erdoğan’s gendered political persona, a synthesis of Islamist and urban, tough masculinities, has been one of the main pedestals of his political charisma and career. Erdogan’s continuous insistence on passing judgment on and aspiring to control over women’s sexual and reproductive behavior is a central part of Erdogan’s performance of sovereign masculinity. This paper also posits that Erdogan’s masculinity is central to not only his exercise of political power, but also to the resistance against it. Discourse analysis of both feminist and popular masculinist opposition to Erdogan demonstrates that political opposition to Erdogan is articulated in gendered terms targeting his masculine sovereignty. Whether through feminist slogans that “divorce” the president and ask him to take his hands off of women’s bodies or through heterosexists swearwords that question his impenetrability, political opposition challenges Erdogan in terms of his masculinity.

Given the over-visibility of pious Muslim women and the veil in anthropological and sociological studies, the absence of research about men and masculinity in the Muslim world reflects the intertwinement of knowledge production processes with masculinist politics in sanctifying manhood by not questioning it or making it a subject of research. This paper aims to look at the visible and invisible changes the pious men of Turkey have undergone over the last decade, following the empowerment of the neo-Islamic (pro-Sunni) right-wing ruling party, the AKP. The invisible changes refer to the physical transformation men from Islamic groups in positions of power who, in the last two decades, removed the physical indication of their religiosity: they cut their beards, removed their silver wedding rings, and put on suits and ties. In a country where dress code has been an integral part of the country’s modernization project that has been defined primarily through female bodies, such a transformation is not a surprise. It was, after all, the same project that allowed men to avoid being embodied objects of modernization and secularization. By looking closer to the transformation of Islamic men in power, I aim not only to bring forward the invisibility aspect of the everyday lives of pious men, but also to look at the changes surrounding contemporary masculinity and piety in the context of a secular country. How do they make sense of these everyday contestations as they navigate between their visible and invisible selves? This paper delves into the overlapping and sometimes clashing perspectives of masculinity, secularization, identity, religiosity, invisibility, spirituality, and transformation using an anthropological lens. I answer the above question through Islamic terms, as the questions are also asked and discussed through these terms in men’s own groups. Thus, the Islamic ontological perspective is read vis-à-vis ethnographic material, through parallel study of major Islamic texts, ranging from Imam Ghazali to Said Nursî, observing how they interpret and discuss the mentioned link between clothing and edep (Islamic piety manners) in relation to “zahir” (external, physical shell) and batin (internal, spiritual content).

Male circumcision has been widely practiced for mainly religious reasons in Turkey. Surrounded by public rituals, male circumcision is an enormously important event for young boys. Along with compulsory military service and marriage, circumcision is culturally regarded as a rite of passage that prepares and shapes boys for manhood. Considering the absence of socially regulated and culturally coded rite of passage for girls, we can suggest that the celebratory nature of the event produces gender differences. The circumcised male body is furthermore a crucial part of the Turkish religious imagination. Although male circumcision is not compulsory in Islam, it is widely seen as a prerequisite for being a true Turkish Muslim. In other words, in Turkey, the circumcised body represents a site for inscribing both gender and religious differences. The Turkish state’s intervention in the custom in the 1960s was a decisive moment in the history of male circumcision. The state introduced new medical norms and modern techniques into male circumcision as part of the project of socialization of health services in the Post-World War II period. The goal of the project was to colonize, nationalize, and modernize the Turkish countryside, while simultaneously extending the state’s authority over the rural areas. This paper analyzes the Turkish state’s attempt to regulate male circumcision, and asks how the state problematized and de-ritualized the custom according to its own bio-political concerns regarding the well-being of children/boys in the 1960s. The Turkish state challenged families’ authority as it claimed to represent the best interests of their children, and aimed to replace circumcisers trained by apprenticeship with modern practitioners. By focusing on the two new circumcision techniques, local anesthesia and sutures that the new practitioners introduced, the paper examines the moral landscape surrounding male circumcision in the 1960s, and elaborates on the question of how the bodies of children became a site of conflicts, struggles and resistance between the state, circumcisers and families in this period.

Gendered analysis of the Armenian Genocide and the Kurdish conflict is characterized by a tendency of equating gender with “woman” or the universally feminized category of “women-children”. This work explores the male-gendered topographies of these histories of violence by tracing the politics of circumcision that have involved in their making since the late nineteenth century. Male circumcision is a formidably polysemic practice that seals group boundaries and hierarchies in the materiality of the body according to ever-shifting sets of outsiders across time-space. In the historical Ottoman East, the practice was observed by Muslims, Jews and heterodox communities as simultaneously a religious prescription and a ritual of phallic acculturation. With the late 19th century context of anti-Armenian antagonism “being uncircumcised” gained a meaning in-itself as sign of an irreducible Muslim-Christian alterity. During the Hamidian era Armenian men encountered circumcision as one distinguished threshold of their relation to life and death over the course of pogroms and mass conversions. Circumcision gained a novel nationalizing function under the reign of the secular Ittihadists: While invalidating Armenian conversions to Islam, the Ittihadists also pursued a systematic policy of circumcising Armenian and Kurdish male orphans of the Genocide and World War I as means to inscribe the mark of the Turkish father on their bodies following the murder of their non-Turkish fathers. The non-Turkish men’s ordeal with circumcision continues in Turkey in circulations of the sexist and racializing trope of “the uncircumcised terrorist,” coined by the Turkish state toward the legitimate murder or symbolic castration of male Kurdish rebels for the past three decades. By tracing the shifting political semantics of circumcision across these thresholds, this paper seeks to contribute to critical feminist scholarship on modern Turkish identity and sovereignty, and also the understandings of the affiliative genealogies between the Armenian and Kurdish issues from a yet unexplored terrain.