Internationalism and Europeanisation in the Struggle Over Gender Equality: Women’s Rights/Feminist Movement in Turkey

Intra-conservative Bloc Contestations on Gender Equality in Turkey – Norm Reception in Fragmented Normative Orders

“…The rejectionist voice was strategically marginalized. However, AKP’s shifting its position to radical conservative lines under the influence of external and internal factors, including the rising confidence coming from the successive electoral successes (Gümüşcü, 2013), worsening relations with the European Union (EU) and waning credibility of the EU as a role model (Aybars et al, 2019), paying more attention to different foreign policy routes as the alternative of the traditional predominantly Western-oriented perspective (Öniş, 2011), adapting a governance perspective combining Islamism with nationalism and showing an anti-Western and anti-European inclination (Colella and Kürüm, 2021: 30), rising influence of the neoliberal policies which are curbing the state’s role as care or service provider (Uzgören, 2021), emergence of a global climate of populism which is not conducive to the advancement of the gender equality (Kantola and Lombardo, 2020). This shift opened a window of opportunity for the rejectionist to take over the conservative agenda on gender in their favour.…”

“…Eslen-Ziya and Umut (2010: 321) identifies this great transformation process as the last chain of the Turkish modernization project. Reforms for EU membership carried out on the basis of gender mainstreaming approach (Uzgören, 2021: 118) and they clearly symbolized a new phase regarding women’s rights in Turkey, primarily with the changes in the legal framework, namely in the Penal Code, Civil Code, Labour Code, Family Law, and Municipality Law (Bozkurt, 2007: 24–25). A lot of progressive steps, such as the supremacy of men within family ended and the penalties given to the sexual offences were severed, were taken to eliminate the patriarchal norms from the existing legislation (Scotti and Roma, 2021: 5).…”