Waves of feminism in Turkey: Kemalist, Islamist and Kurdish women's movements

What is it about?

The article will deal with this subject under four sub-headings. In the first part of the article, we will focus on the foundations of an independent women’s movement in Turkey. This part will give a background to the readers on the development and dynamics of the feminist politics until the 1990s. The second part (political feminism) will reflect on the ideological tensions and cleavages that feminist activism has faced after the 1990s with the rise of Islamism and Kurdish nationalism. Both of these movements had pressurized feminist movement to develop a political position with respect to religious or ethnic interpretations of the ‘women’s question’. In this section, we will mainly deal with the identity/difference problematique within the Turkish feminist movement. The third part (project feminism) will carry the discussion from internal politics and local dynamics to supra-national and inter-governmental levels. This part will mainly focus on the perspectives of the European Union, UN (UNDP, UNFPA, etc.) and international rights’ organizations (i.e. International Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, WAVE, etc.) as well as the projects that these institutions support with their funds. We can talk of the ‘globalization’ or ‘professionalization’ of Turkish feminism as an amalgamated path through which local political feminism has been carried forward to. In the final part of the article, we will speculate on the future venues of Turkish feminist movement based on the arguments developed through out the paper.

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Why is it important?

This paper has two goals. One of them is to discuss how women’s movement in Turkey has evolved as a political movement after the 1980s whose founding epistemes were challenged and questioned by rising Kurdish nationalism and Islamism. Hence, we can talk of a Kurdish feminism and Islamist feminism within the spectrum of women’s movement in Turkey. This can be observed easily with the rising number of women’s organizations with different political agendas and priorities. One of the tasks of this paper will be to show how hegemonic Turkish feminism has been influenced and evolved with the rise of other identity politics. In other words, it can be argued that through out the 1990s the feminism in Turkey has come to be a movement which opposes, resists, and pressures the Turkish state. It negotiates with the state to pursue its political goals as it interacts with foreign women’s organizations or international institutions such as the EU and the UN. The second goal of this paper is to discuss the effects of the flow of funds from world societal, supra-national and inter-governmental organizations to support projects that aim “empowerment” of women in Turkey. We will analyze how this international support influences the political character of Turkish feminist movement. The effects of the professionalization of feminism can be observed with the increasing number of organizations, projects and personnel funded by these international organizations.