Counteracting Anti-Gender Policies in Turkey Through Feminist Politics

Since 2010, anti-gender movements have increased in European countries such as Hungary, Poland, Germany, and France, among others. Although such movements in diverse settings have nuances depending on the local context, their focal point is to create a mobilisation against what they call “gender ideology”. The main argument of these movements is that the emphasis on the social construction of gender, gender equality, gender mainstreaming, and gender studies as an expertise, causes destruction in general moral values, family structures of societies, normative sexualities, and the “natural order”. A similar discourse can be seen in the case of Turkey, especially since the Justice and Development Party’s (JDP) neoliberal-conservativism has become visible after losing the momentum of EU membership in 2008. JDP’s leader Erdogan and the party underline strict traditional gender norms based on heteronormativity and prefers to use “gender justice” instead of “gender equality” to emphasise Islamic references to define women’s status in relation to the family. In July 2010, JDP’s leader Erdogan stated that he did not believe in the equality of men and women and claimed that because of the “biological and divinely ordained nature” of women, their primary place was “home”. The JDP government followed neoliberal-conservative policies that limited and condemned different lifestyles and restructured the social and cultural spheres with an emphasis on “morality” during the ongoing ruling periods. Limiting women’s access to safe abortions and recently pulling out of the Istanbul Convention (on prevention of violence against women), despite the increasing number of femicides in the country, to protect the cultural familial structure are indicators of the gendered public order of the current regime. As a result, traditional gender roles are glorified and any challenge to heteronormativity is polarised as threats to the moral structure of society. All these point to the anti-feminist political and cultural structure of the current government’s gender regime. In this axis, this paper aims to examine the efforts of the feminist women’s movements in Turkey to create a feminist counter-public against the present anti-gender discourses and policies. Counter-public can be defined as alternative areas where groups that are underrepresented in the public sphere and marginalised by the political power engage in policy-making activities in order to make their voices heard and improve their disadvantaged positions. Based on the thematic analysis of qualitative personal interviews with feminist activists from well-known feminist women’s rights organisations in Ankara and Istanbul, Turkey, the paper aims to explore the potential and limitations of feminist politics’ counter strategies to challenge anti-gender mobilisations. In particular, the paper examines the stances of feminist women’s rights organisations against the current anti-gender discourse and policies, their mobility strategies, forms of activisms through feminist women activists’ diverse positionings.