‘We are not barbarians’: Gender politics and Turkey’s quest for the West

Abstract

Turkey’s policy-makers have historically aimed to position Turkey within the West by convincing the latter that Turkey meets the ‘standards’ of the West, that they ‘are not barbarians’. This article aims to offer a gender analysis of Turkey’s relations with the West by showing how ‘devalorization’ as feminization and hypermasculinization of the non-West becomes a source of insecurity for non-Western policy-makers. This gendered ontological insecurity is intensified when they face a military threat from a third party. The argument is that Turkey’s policy-makers try to benefit from military crises in order to represent Turkey as a state meeting Western ‘standards’ of masculinity, and therefore to address its gendered ‘devalorization’. The analysis aims to contribute to the literatures of postcolonial feminism and non-Western insecurities.

Desires, Fantasies and Hierarchies: Postcolonial Status Anxiety through Ontological Security

“…Postcolonial literature in IR is rich in conceptualising and demonstrating how race, gender and class work in producing international hierarchies (among others, see Anievas & Nisancioglu, 2015;Anievas et al, 2014;Chowdhry & Nair, 2003;Parashar, 2016;Persuad & Sajed, 2018). More specifically, Vieira (2017) points at race as to define what is valued and what it means to have a 'higher status' while Bilgic (2015Bilgic ( , 2016 explores the gendered and classed characteristics of hierarchies. In a symbolic order where race, gender and class differences/dichotomies determine the vertical hierarchies and produce the postcolonial subject as inferior, autobiographical narratives are formed to address such inferior subjectivity.…”