Enmeshing the mundane and the political: Twitter, LGBTI+ outing and macro-political polarisation in Turkey

Abstract

To capture the relationship between social media, anti-gender and everyday polarisation, this article identifies the ways social media platforms reflect the mundane amidst the interactions of its users over social and political issues. The paper employs textual and content analyses of reactions to ordinary events shared through hashtags and mentions. We examine a recent case of Twitter phenomena over an outing that showed vigorous debates over issues pertaining to gender and its socio-political connotations in Turkey. The outing involved a divorce and custody court case as well as a secret recording, exposing the sexual identity of a woman popstar #Intizar. It showed how micro-stories can foreground macro-political tensions online. The paper shows the ways in which Twitter facilitated conservative, homophobic, patriarchal and Islamist reactions that harnessed deep political polarisation between the AKP government's supporters and those that declared solidarity with LGBTI+ issues. The article follows how a mundane divorce and custody case exhibited the deep political tension portraying the depth of increasing polarisation over gender on a global scale, exemplified by a Turkish case.

Establishing networked misogyny as a counter movement: The analysis of the online anti-Istanbul convention presence

“…Via these misogynistic tweets, the anti-Convention supporters not only construct the political environment but also set the grounds for distinguishing themselves from the so-called others. This in turn enables the spread of what Ozduzen and Korkut (2020) refer to as mundane polarisation where polarisation on social media curtails from the everyday interactions of people.…”

“…As argued by Ozduzen and Korkut (2020), such online polarisation is both a consequence and response to the anti-gender mobilisation of misogynist groups. In fact, the online platforms like Twitter, while sharpening the polarisation between anti and pro Convention groups, at the same time allows these groups to confront each other.…”

‘Refugees are not welcome’: Digital racism, online place-making and the evolving categorization of Syrians in Turkey

“…Turkish state's actions (see Somer, 2005;Yesil, 2014). Although political polarization and hate speech towards Kurds and/or other dissidents and minorities are consistent on social networking sites (Ozduzen and Korkut, 2020;Ozduzen and McGarry, 2020), extant racism on digital platforms exploded during the occupation (see Graphs 2 and 3). This article retrieved #Syrians hashtag for this period, when it hit Twitter trends for Turkey as the number one item.…”

Job Satisfaction and Sexual Orientation in Britain

“…Owing to heteronormative culture and practices in workplaces (Benozzo et al, 2015; Ozduzen and Korkut, 2020) and anticipated discrimination (Prati and Pietrantoni, 2014), many LGB employees choose not to disclose their sexual orientation; a process not experienced by heterosexual employees. Stenger and Roulet (2018) described a variety of ways that concealing one’s sexuality can be damaging.…”