Becoming a young woman through a feminist lens: young feminist women in Turkey

ABSTRACT

Drawing on findings from 15 focus group interviews held with 65 young (aged 18–25) women university students in Turkey who describe themselves as feminists, this paper attempts to reconcile gender and youth studies and introduces social generation as a theoretical tool. The paper demonstrates how these feminist university students, as the members of a generation who had lived all their lives under the Justice and Development (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi- AKP) governments, articulated the difficulties of being young and a woman at a specific conjuncture in Turkey during which the gender regime has been going through a period of deterioration. They discussed their process of transition from childhood to youth, and expressed how in this process they became aware of a social gaze that repositioned them as ‘young women’ and thus forced them to face the social and political challenges of being a young woman at this specific conjuncture. Feminism did not only empower them to confront these challenges but also turned them into subjects of opposition in a political regime which had adopted an anti-gender agenda and which at the time of the research decided to withdraw from the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combatting violence against women, also known as the Istanbul Convention.

KEYWORDS:

• Feminism
• social generation
• transition
• youth
• gender
• Turkey

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. A survey carried out during the protests by a leading social research institute, KONDA, with 4411 participants provides a good overview of the profile of those present in the Gezi Park protests in Istanbul (KONDA, 2014). According to KONDA, the average age of the participants was 8 years, 37% were students, and 52% were employed, mostly in highly skilled jobs.

2. The team was composed of two senior researchers, Ayşe Akalın and Demet Lüküslü, and 2 research assistants, Deniz Erol and Elif Oğuz.

Additional information

Funding

This research has been supported by the 2020 Şirin Tekeli Research Award granted by Sabancı University Gender and Women’s Studies Center of Excellence.

Notes on contributors

Demet Lüküslü

Demet Lüküslü is a Professor and Chair in Sociology at Yeditepe University, Istanbul, Turkey. She received her PhD in Sociology from Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, France in 2005. She has expertise in qualitative research and is particularly interested in youth studies, social movements and sociology of everyday life and gender studies. She has experience of EU funded projects on youth participation such as PARTISPACE (Horizon2020 2015-18), PARTIBRIDGES (Erasmus+ 2019-2021) and OUYE (Erasmus+ 2021-2023). She recently worked on a book project (with Batsleer & Rowley) (2022) Young People, Radical Democracy and Community Development (Policy Press). She published various book chapters and journal articles in Journal of Youth Studies, Young, Youth & Society, New Perspectives on Turkey and Turkish Studies.She also published extensively in Turkish. She is the author of Türkiye’de “Gençlik Miti”: 1980 Sonrası Türkiye Gençliği (The “myth of youth” in Turkey: The post-1980 youth in Turkey) (Lüküslü, 2009); Türkiye’nin 68’i: Bir Kuşağın Sosyolojik Analizi (Turkey’s 68: The Sociological Analysis of a Generation). She is also the co-editor of the edited volume in Turkish as Gençlik Halleri:2000’li Yıllar Türkiyesi’nde Genç Olmak (The States of Youth: To be young in Turkey of the year 2000s) (Efil Yayınları, 2013).