“Are You God? Damn Your Family!”: The Islam–Gender Nexus in Right-Wing Populism and the New Generation of Muslim Feminist Activism in Turkey

Abstract

This article examines young Muslim women’s dissident mentalities, practices, and subjectivities that confront the epistemological conditions whereby right-wing populist (RWP) gender politics operates in Turkey. Relying on frame theory in social movement research and the Foucauldian approach to resistance, dissent, and protest, it explores Muslim feminist critique of RWP gender discourse mainly with a focus on the following issues: (i.) Instrumentalization of the headscarf, (ii.) familialist policies, and (iii.) violence against women and the Istanbul Convention (the Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence). As a result, it demonstrates that young Muslim women’s dissident mentalities and subjectivities generate a new “political project”, i.e., a set of new meanings and social goals directed at bringing about social change, which comes into being through the act of resistance against RWP gender grammar and carves out new forms of knowledge reclaiming the Islam–gender nexus for a progressive feminist agenda.

Gender Politics under Autocratization and Two Decades of Women's Movement in Turkey

“…More recently, a younger generation of Muslim feminists have come forward to challenge the use of Islamic references to justify violence and discrimination against women (Unal, 2022). Learning from the Muslim feminist mobilizations in Malaysia, Egypt, and the broader Middle East as well as in Europe, they have argued that Islam does not create an ontological gender hierarchy.…”

Analyzing the Justice and Development Party’s changing discourse on the headscarf issue as the constitutive part of its drift toward authoritarian politics in Turkey

“…20 Since then, the JDP politicians have referred to this political symbol whenever they needed to construct social opposition and transform social problems into moral crises and outrage. Unal (2022) described this change as the elevation of the 'victimhood narrative', which is resentful subject formation of Turkish Islamist identity that casts pious Muslims as victims of ultra-secular policies, 'to a new level where populist antagonisms transgress the "secular versus pious" dichotomy and operationalize an "us versus them" mentality to vilify the opponents of the political regime' (p. 2). The way it has been employed by the JDP can be exemplified by an incident that occurred during the Gezi protests, which started in Istanbul in 2013.…”

“…‘AKP also discredited headscarved women’, Ilke Haber, 24 December 2011 in https://www.ilkehaber.com/haber/akpde-basortulu-kadinlari-itibarsizlastirdi-20048.htm. Later, based on such critiques, a group of veiled Muslim women started a campaign, which the JDP labeled as an ‘improper’ bargain (see Unal, 2022).…”