Blurring Boundaries – ‘Anti-Gender’ Ideology Meets Feminist and LGBTIQ+ Discourses
edited by Dorothee Beck, Adriano José Habed and Annette Henninger
About the book
‘Gender’ is a catch-all term: it is used in discourses on women’s and LGBTIQ+ rights, gender equality, sexual education, gender studies – and by the anti-gender movements. The book offers an analysis of the blurring boundaries between political positions known as ‘anti-gender’ on the one hand and feminist and LGBTIQ+ strands on the other, starting from the hypothesis that there are discursive bridges between both camps which go beyond the exploitation of emancipatory attitudes. Rather, there are linkages which originate in mainstream feminist and LGBTIQ+ positions. The volume sheds light on these linkages in order to make the case for the need for alliances and dialogues to more effectively counter crusades on women’s and LGBTIQ+ constituencies.
Reading sample from pp.149-156
Anti-Feminist Mobilization and Popular Feminism in Turkey as Anti-Politics: Moralizing versus Psychologizing Social Wrongs[1]
Funda Hülagü
1. Introduction
Two distinct yet connected social phenomena have been growing in Turkey since the early 2010s. The first of these is the emergence of an organized anti-feminist movement that seeks to advance so-called men’s rights and organize reactionary forces against women’s and LGBTQI+ rights; the second is the rising popularity of popular feminism, particularly among women and some self-described pro-feminist male knowledge workers. Since the early 2010s, social conflicts have been more intense in Turkey’s political-gender system, which has tightened the connections between these two largely separate phenomena. The anti-feminist mobilization targeted, especially in its initial stages, professional women of urban origins, many of whom also participated in masses in the Gezi Uprisings in 2013 against the repressive rule of the AKP.[2] The popular feminist bloc is distinct from anti-feminist mobilization not only concerning views on gender equality and emancipation but also in relation to society and politics in general. Many knowledge workers that hold popular feminist ideas advocate for a secular and democratic political system, in contrast to the anti-feminist bloc’s ideologues who spread a political Islamist/conservative imagining of society and politics. This article uses the term ‘knowledge worker’ to refer to white-collar employees whose main duties include data analysis, product development, and consumer profit-making solutions for major corporations.[3]
This paper aims to display how these two seemingly different blocs conceive the gender order in Turkey, especially in its current alterations. The fundamental question is how and to what degree popular feminism and anti-feminism differ from one another when it comes to describing gendered harm in Turkey. The initial premise is that the radical difference in views and political positions between these two blocs shall not overshadow the discursive entanglements between them.
To study these entanglements, this paper focuses on one important theme that crosscuts anti-feminist mobilization and popular feminism: ‘men in crisis’. According to both, men and women in Turkey, as social groups, are differentially affected by modernization. For anti-feminists, modernization is synonymous with Westernization, which is conceived as a politics of eradicating native customs, cultural norms, and ways of being a man (understood as the primary privileged sexual ability without which biological reproduction is impossible): father, husband, and ‘respected’ community/family member. For popular feminism, it is the personal journey whereby one learns to study her own traumas and bad survival habits and can develop a more self-friendly life strategy as a result. Accordingly, whereas women are more successful in facing their traumas, men, also due to ‘epigenetic differences’, fail to do so. Whereas anti-feminists want to establish a divine ordered gender hierarchy they call ‘living in accordance with fıtrat’ (Eng. nature/creation) to solve this crisis, popular feminism diffuses the idea that men’s crisis is a matter of psychological maladaptation and an individual spiritual and behavioral disorder. These seemingly opposed and even polarized positions seek comfort in transcendental and/or pseudo-scientific explanations.
To demonstrate those arguments, this paper will focus on two different sets of texts. One set includes parliamentary commission reports. In 2016, the Turkish Grand National Assembly decided to establish a commission to investigate ‘The Incidents Negatively Hampering the Familial Unity’, also known in the public sphere as the ‘Divorce Commission’. The commission members invited experts, civil society representatives, and academics as part of this familialist investigation. Among the invited, the groups and individuals who are known today to be the harbingers of an anti-feminist mobilization were also present. Their participation in these commission meetings has provided them with further access to the state organs and a chance to connect to one another and to the ruling bloc. Another set of texts includes proliferating books, blogs, and podcasts where lately popularized names of the Turkish alternative cultural scene discuss the current predicament of men in Turkish society. To deepen the data generated out of these blogs and podcasts, a small number of interviews conducted with women knowledge workers who are receptive to the ideological inputs of popular feminism are referred to as well.[4]
The paper is structured around four main parts: the following part expands the methodological perspective and the Gramscian theoretical framework adopted in the paper. Theoretical references will be further refined during the subsequent discussion. The essay briefly covers the primary gendered and social wrongs caused by the recent changes to Turkey’s capitalist social formation and households in the part that follows. The next two sections show how these social wrongs are reconstructed by competing forces, and the final section discusses the power implications of these various discursive reconstructions and their relational characteristics along with a brief suggestion for a third socio-political dynamic in Turkey, namely the feminist resistance. The feminist resistance is composed of several groups and networks of feminist and women’s rights organizations, each with its own political programs and ideological priorities. Although discussions regarding the most effective resistance approach are not entirely absent, the resistance has obtained a uniform strategy since 2019: to prevent turning back the clock on Turkey’s legal gender regime.[5]
2. Critical Discourse Analysis and the Gramscian Theory of Ideology
As stated earlier, the purpose of this article is to conduct a critical discourse analysis of the two opposing groups—the anti-feminist mobilizers and the pro-feminist/anti-patriarchal young men and women knowledge workers. An emphasis will be put on how each group makes sense of the gendered social wrongs associated with the Turkish capitalist social formation during the AKP Era. The concept of social wrong is utilized in the way that critical discourse analysis defines it (CDA)—“as aspects of social systems, forms or orders that are detrimental to human well-being and could in principle be ameliorated if not eliminated, though perhaps only through major changes in these systems, forms or orders” (Fairclough 2013:13). Reconstructing social wrongs through certain discourses does, according to CDA, always have certain power implications, the first of which is de-politicization. De-politicization is usually defined as the strategy and/or act of placing socio-economic issues of direct political nature and significance outside of the political sphere and societal deliberation (Fairclough 2009). But as will be further discussed in the concluding part and following Ellen Meiksins Wood’s (1981) historical materialist methodology, this study shows that de-politicization may also be understood as a deliberate or non-deliberate process of concealing and/or obscuring the links of causality or determinacy between different layers or phenomena constituting social reality. In that sense, de-politicization can also happen via forms of (re)politicization (Bedirhanoğlu 2022). It is indeed a process of evacuating a social or political phenomenon from the very socio-historical substance that constitutes it. Discourse is the semantic means through which this abstraction/evacuation happens.
Following Gramscian theory, it can be argued that the specific form an act of de-politicization takes (e.g., via mis-politicization of social problems by right-wing populism or technicalization of them as was prevalent during the early globalization era) is dependent on two things: first, on the everyday opinions held by the popular classes and the very structure of those opinions, and second on the wider socio-political context of ideological struggles, where different discourses collide and become entangled—either by contrast or rhyme. To reveal the particular de-politicization effect, the Gramscian theory is attentive to both the semantic and argumentative components as well as the nature of dialectics between various or even diametrically opposed discourses.
2.1 Everyday Views of Popular Classes: Common Sense
Gramsci was motivated by the Italian setting to consider the contradictory aspects of the ordinary worldviews of the common classes. He sought to comprehend the fascist re-signification of the everyday beliefs held by the popular classes throughout the interwar period as well as the Left’s incompetence to engage with these beliefs. For the Italian philosopher, different class realities create sui generis cultures that are experienced as “completely natural in the eyes of those who inhabit them” (Crehan 2011:275), and these forms of naturalized but class-dependent forms of consciousness include feeling-passions or intuitions (Patnaik 1988). These intuitions have a double character; on one hand, as each person is a philosopher of her own life, she has an innate understanding of the flaws in life (Robinson 2005); on the other hand, immediate experience falls short of encompassing the totality of all social encounters and what is problematic about life. Hence, common sense is an amalgam of both progressive and regressive elements, an incoherent unity of both to-become-submissive (or even conservative) and to-become-emancipatory thought fragments.
Popular feminism in Turkey, I would argue, is such an ambivalent common sense which includes both emancipatory insights and regressive aspirations in relation to (gendered) social arrangements. Women knowledge worker’s perception of what is wrong with life as such has been determined by their immediate experiences and/socialization. Many of the materials Turkish Popular Feminism has produced clearly focus on the difficult experiences urban professional women knowledge workers have had as mothers. Another immediate experience that has fostered the popular feminist intuition has been the unequal division of labor in double-income households, where even the so-called en lightened male partners fail to go beyond “helping their partners in daily chores” (e.g., cf. Doğan 2022:17). However, liberation from undervalued care work is reduced to a personal protest of “let the home stay untidy and read a book instead of doing chores” (according to the book cover Doğan 2022). This is true even if care work is recognized as a key social reproductive task and its devalued position is resisted. The “contrast” between their statuses at work and in society, as described by one woman engineer respondent who is a project manager at one of the major transnational firms headquartered in Istanbul, has been a similarly impactful experience (T.D., personal communication, August 26, 2021). Accordingly, women feel more secure and empowered in their workplaces than in non-work environments, where they are still vulnerable to diverse forms of gender-based discrimination, violence, and/or defamation.
However, these emancipatory intuitions do not necessarily point to ‘what’ life’s problems really are. They are rather under the influence of the inputs of the transnational neoliberal labor regime. Hence, as in the case of the Global North, popular feminist common sense is largely based on an individualist, self-help ideology of success, girl power and feminine determination that have significant neoliberal affinities (Banet-Weiser, Gill, and Rottenberg 2020; Calkin 2016). This regime’s Turkish version has also recently advocated for feminine leadership to achieve “better corporate performance and health” and to recruit “talented women” for acquiring “company success” (McKinsey and Company 2015:3). The resistance to male-dominated workplace culture, the establishment of women’s professional networks, and fostering women’s leadership with the help of so-called ‘sister-coaches’ are all part of this regime.[6] All in all, popular feminist common sense provides several insights on (gender) injustices dominating all of society, including the workplace (Hülagü 2023). Yet at the same time, it entrenches the idea that everybody is responsible for her own (mental and financial) liberation. Plus, liberation is defined as a ‘power over’ rather than ‘power to’; personal power over the individual mind, body, and old-fashioned business rather than political power to change unequal social relations.
2.2 The Struggle in and against the Hegemony
Gramscian theory-based critical discourse analysis should pay close attention to contextual issues since the balance of ideological and political fights within the larger society determines which discourse will prevail and have what sort of societal impact. Similarly, the function of counter-hegemonic forces (i.e., feminist resistance), particularly in how they work to forge connections between themselves and common sense, matters insofar as this relationship may or may not work to forge a true counter-force to the succeeding acts of depoliticization. Establishing intellectual links between the widespread sensuous passion-sensations that express that something is wrong with society as it is and the social processes that lead to these feelings would be a key component of an effective counter-hegemony (Patnaik 1988; Crehan 2016). As a result, the overall balance of forces within a society determines the precise political influence or function of such discourses. Regarding the significance of balance of power in Turkey’s current political environment, which has prompted me to compare not any other but these two discourses—the anti-feminist and the popular feminist ones—on the nature of gendered harms in Turkey, two imminent conundrums can be mentioned:
First, a very limited and small-scale far-right mobilization has succeeded in exerting a greater degree of control over the regime’s policy decisions despite the vast and varied forms of resistance to Turkey’s recently upgraded authoritarian gender regime. Erdoğan’s withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention, of which the former AKP regime was proud to be the first signatory country, has been forced by the anti-feminist bloc. Additionally, this bloc is about to force Erdoğan to amend the Turkish Constitution concerning a range of permissible marriage arrangements.[7] Furthermore, this mobilization has been successful in overturning the neoconservative-neoliberal gender regime framework of the women’s rights organizations connected to Erdoğan, which was another practicable policy path for the ruling regime in terms of gender arrangements (on these organizations’ gender regime proposal, cf. Çelebi 2022).
These organizations had been milder in their anti-feminism and were critical of the men’s rights groups on the grounds that these were irresponsible and irrational fundamentalists. They were also afraid of alienating Erdoğan´s female voter base and proponents of a more constructive gender regime that ideally could hold women upon a pedestal and include them by way of positive role models from the history of Islamic civilization (e.g., tradeswomen/women entrepreneurs). Therefore, other contextual factors should have played a key role in why there was an increase in the ability of anti-feminist mobilization to define the political agenda at the expense of both oppositional and regime-coalitional forces.[8]
This study merely illuminates the role of the ideological context in Turkey and raises the possibility that the inherent flaws of the popular viewpoints within the pro-feminist camp may also contribute to the fact that this relatively ‘marginal’ social force sets the agenda.[9] Gramscian theory explains that even while common sense has progressive features, it is more likely to align with hegemonic beliefs in the absence of counter-hegemonic dynamism. Because of this, popular feminism likewise fails to challenge the hegemony (e.g., the claim that social wrongs such as domestic violence are behavioral problems), even though the anti-feminist propaganda of the so-called fringe forces is scarcely hegemonic. Hegemony does not, in fact, specifically refer to the AKP’s ideological influence. In this study, hegemony is defined as transnational governing bloc programs that advance in relation to the widely held feminist common sense by creating “pedagogic relationships” (Gramsci cited in Patnaik 1988:8) with the regressive/conservative segments of the same common sense.[10]
The second conundrum that motivated this study is that, despite the rise of a prominent anti-authoritarian feminist resistance in Turkey against the anti- feminist mobilization, it appears that the resistance has not (yet) eschewed the subalternization dynamics that “trap it in a tautological relationship with [political] power” (Demirovic 2017:38). By subalternization, I refer to the mechanics of political power which deprive the feminist movement of its strategic goals and/or emancipatory vocation.11 Resistance has so far failed to establish itself as a counter-hegemonic power; “a collective will in which a multitude of different emancipatory practices connect with each other” (Demirovic 2017:42). Recently, the women’s rights defenders’ resistance against the alimony rights prioritized defending the legal gains of married or divorcing women as their main strategy. This defensive strategy indefinitely postpones the task of politicizing the wider and harm-producing transformations of household structures and the heterosexual-couple-based conjugal arrangements due to Turkey’s financialized capitalist development.
Therefore, it is of crucial importance to look at the non-organized but pro-feminist segments of society and to check and sort out the ideological thought-frames which are available to those groups and the segments of feminist consciousness that are reproduced by them. This can not only help to dissect the feminist resistance’s reception by and impact on young professional women and men in further studies but also the existing impediments and prospects for the establishment of a new collective counter-hegemonic will in Turkey. As it is, Turkish popular feminism, which is a compound of both very progressive and regressive ideals of societal gender arrangements, now wants counter-hegemonic projects and yet is left to the mercy of self-helpist and pseudo-scientist scruples of neoliberal market society to make sense of social wrongs. The following section includes some broad-brush descriptions of social wrongs generated by the transformations of social formation in Turkey under financialized capitalism. The descriptions that follow are meant to serve as a starting point for future discussions rather than to condense them.
[1] I would like to heartily thank the editors and the reviewer for their time and valuable remarks that helped me to improve the manuscript. The usual disclaimer applies.
[2] Before the 2013 Gezi Protests began, a young professional women’s anti-authoritarian movement had already existed in Turkey. For instance, in 2012, the management of Turkish Airlines (THY) requested that a law be swiftly issued to prohibit the strike that their workers had organized. The strike was organized in protest of excessively long workdays (over nine hours), condensed weekly breaks, and wardrobe demands, particularly towards female employees. Women workers rose to prominence as the forerunners of a national movement of agenda-setting opposition to this AKP-instigated ban, and their opposition was not just to neoliberalism but also to the AKP’s neoconservative government.
[3] The idea of knowledge work was mainly created by Peter Drucker in the literature on Bus ness Administration Studies in the 1960s to emphasize the transition from an employee society to a knowledge society. Recently, white-collar professionals have started to frequently use the word to describe themselves. This identification also confirms Nancy Fraser’s (2016b) definition of “knowledge society” or “cognitive capitalism” defined by niche production, declining unionization, increased female labor-force participation, and a new constellation for the forces of emancipation. Accordingly, unlike previous decades, forces of emancipation akin to this knowledge society do not necessarily rely on politics of redistribution but on recognition, which mostly coalesces with forces of marketization.
[4] These interviews were conducted from August to December 2021 within the limits of research I conducted on the nexus of feminization of knowledge work, authoritarian politics, and the rise of ‘neoliberal feminism’ in the workplace in Turkey since the early 2000s. Four of the participants whose views are considered in this paper were highly educated women in their mid-30s working in managerial positions at international corporations. Each worked in a different sector: aviation, consulting, beverage, and food. One participant was more tenured regarding her work experience and after years of hard work in the automotive industry, is currently engaged in business coaching, with a specific focus on women’s success in business life. The names of the interviewees are anonymized upon request.
[5] The platforms for women’s resistance also band together with LGBTQI+ organizations and show solidarity despite serious ideological obstacles preventing sincere cooperation. These largely relate to the limited, heterosexual couple-based notion of family that some of the most influential organizations fighting for women’s rights have accepted (Akı 2020). For instance, in accordance with this constrained viewpoint, the withdrawal from the Convention was based on false presumptions and charges (specifically, the moralist/religious counter-discourse of the far right that the convention encourages same-sex marriages).
[6] Turkish Women’s International Network is a network that serves as one of this regime’s institutionalized representatives in Turkey (Turkish Win). This international group of businesswomen, originally founded by a well-known member of the Istanbul bourgeoisie to increase the gender ratio in business, claims to unite ‘like-minded women’ and support women in their professions through a network-based ‘sisterhood support’.
[7] In late October 2022, Erdoğan introduced his plan for a constitutional amendment to protect families from what he called ‘perverse trends’, aiming at global same-sex marriage laws. The amendment proposal also includes some very controversial formulations under the pretext of ensuring civil rights for women wearing headscarves.
[8] For the regime-specific dynamics explaining the rise of populist, nativist anti-gender politics in Turkey cf. Kandiyoti 2016; for transnational contextual dynamics, differences, and similarities cf. Özkazanç 2020, and Eslen-Ziya, and Bjornhold 2022; for a critical political economy perspective, cf. Hülagü 2021.
[9] The term ‘marginal’ has been widely used by the women’s rights defendants to portray the social weight of anti-feminist mobilization. The emphasis is both on quantity and on the fringeness of the arguments used by the mobilization.
[10] On transnational ruling blocs and their corporate-based gender equality programs e.g., cf. Roberts 2015; Prügl 2015.
***
Would you like to read more?
You can purchase the book as a print book or download it in our shop:
Blurring Boundaries – ‘Anti-Gender’ Ideology Meets Feminist and LGBTIQ+ Discourses
edited by Dorothee Beck, Adriano José Habed and Annette Henninger
