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ABSTRACT
The women’s movement has become increasingly entangled with the “secularism versus Islamism” debate in today’s Turkey. While secular feminists believe that escalating authoritarianism and Islamic revivalism threaten gender equality and the gains of the women’s rights movement, Islamist women contest the “western/secular” ideal of gender equality on account of its being antithetical to the Islamic canon. The mutual marginalization by feminists and Islamists, mainly fueled by partisan politics, harms the much needed solidarity among women’s groups to solve the problems women face in Turkey, such as violence and unequal political participation. Moreover, this polarization has the harmful effect of reinforcing patriarchy: men, therefore face no challenges and simply continue to remain the sole producers and controllers of socio-political policies and epistemic resources. Hence, there seems to be a pressing need for secular feminists and Islamists to start a dialogue and focus on problems and issues they share in common, so as to seek urgent solutions to them. This article inquires into the viability of such an alliance through the proliferation of deliberative platforms where civil society organizations can meet at a safe distance from partisan politics and enter productive dialogue and generate policies to resolve the crucial problems women are facing in Turkey.
ABSTRACT IN TURKISH
Türkiye’deki kadın hareketinin siyasi platformda gerçekleşen sekülerlik ve İslamcılık tartışmalarından gittikçe daha da çok etkilendiği gözlenmektedir. Seküler feministler, otoriterleşmenin ve İslamcı politikaların toplumsal cinsiyet eşitliğini ve kadın hareketinin kazanımlarını olumsuz yönde etkilediğini düşünürken, bazı İslamcı kadınlar “Batılı/seküler” toplumsal cinsiyet eşitliği idealinin İslam düşüncesine uygun olmadığını öne sürmektedir. Seküler feministler ve İslamcı kadınlar arasındaki ayrılıklar siyasi kutuplaşmadan etkilenerek derinleşmekte ve bu durum, kadınların kadın oldukları için karşı karşıya kaldıkları şiddet ve kamusal hayattan dışlanma gibi ortak sorunları çözmek için ihtiyaç duyulan dayanışmayı zorlaştırmaktadır. Dahası, kadın hareketi içindeki kutuplaşma, ataerkil düzenin daha da güçlenmesine ve gerek sosyal politikaların, gerekse epistemik kaynakların erkekler tarafından yönetilmesi durumunun sürekliliğine dolaylı da olsa katkıda bulunmaktadır. Bu sebeplerden ötürü, seküler feminist ve İslamcı kadınlar arasında ortak sorun ve amaçlara yönelik diyalogun tesis edilmesi ve sürdürülmesi büyük önem arz etmektedir. Bu makalede, sivil toplum kuruluşları arasında Türkiyeli kadınların ortak sorunlarının çözümüne yönelik böylesi bir ittifakın, temsili siyasetinin kutuplaştırıcı etki alanının dışında ve müzakereci demokrasinin esaslarına uygun olarak tasarlanacak diyalog ortamlarında tesis edilebilmesinin olanaklılığı tartışılmaktadır.
Notes on contributors
Hulya SIMGA is a professor of philosophy at Maltepe University/Turkey and the vice-director of the Experts Committee for Gender Equality, National Commission for UNESCO of Turkey. Her research and writings focus on gender equality with an emphasis on the ethical foundations of women’s human rights. Email: [email protected]
Gulru Z. GOKER is a researcher at Sabanci University Center of Excellence for Gender and Women’s Studies. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the City University of New York Graduate Center in 2011. Her research focuses on participatory politics, women’s movements and the politics of motherhood. Email: [email protected]
Notes
1 “Islamist” is used to refer to an ideological position, denoting variants of political ideologies that make a reference to Islam in explaining political visions. In this article, we use the term “Islamist women” loosely as Yeşim Arat (1998, p. 123) refers to a heterogeneous group of women who are either active in political parties with a conservative, Islamist ideology or supporters of the Islamist political ideology. It does not refer to a private religious system or one's identity as a believer.
2 A similar debate took place in Tunisia in 2012 following the fall of the Ben Ali regime when the Islamist party Ennahda proposed to include in the constitution the term “complementarity” to refer to women in relation to men. See Charrad and Zarrugh (Citation2014).
3 KADEM, founded under the leadership of Sümeyye Erdoğan (the daughter of the current president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan) is the most prominent conservative women's NGO now in Turkey.
4 It is important to note that the criticism of the “western” roots of the idea of gender equality is part of the Islamists’ larger anti-western discourse whereby they accuse secularists of having “alienated the polity from its authentic roots” by adopting “Western culture as a global framework” and thereby “allowing the cultural colonization of the country” (Arat, Citation1998, p. 126).
5 Turkish President Erdoğan says gender equality “against nature.” (2014, November 24). Hurriyet Daily News.
6 First lady: The principle of social justice must be benchmark of the equality of women and men. (2015, December 11). Website of the Presidency of Turkey.
7 See for example, Çağlayan, 2015; İlkkaracan, 2015; Ozan, 2015.
8 Martha Nussbaum's “capabilities approach” is especially relevant to substantiate this aspiration. She says that “human capabilities, i.e., what people are actually able to do and to be” is “informed by an intuitive idea of a life that is worthy of the dignity of the human being” (Nussbaum, Citation2000, pp. 222-223). In the same vein, secular feminists ask that both genders be given the same opportunities, freedoms and rights so that women too can lead lives where they can realize themselves through what they choose to do.
9 The new minister Fatma Betül Sayan Kaya assumed office on May 25, 2016.
10 As of 2015, Turkey is ranked 130th out of 145 countries listed in the World Economic Forum (2015) Global Gender Gap Report.
11 According to research conducted by the Ministry of Family and Social Policies and Hacettepe University Institute of Population Studies (2014), in Turkey, 38 percent of women who have married at least once are subjected to physical and/or sexual violence by an intimate partner.
12 Turkey is ranked 105th out of 145 countries in the political empowerment scale of the World Economic Forum (2015) Global Gender Gap Report. Currently, women constitute 18 percent of Turkey's parliament. For the percentage of women in political parties that are represented in the parliament, see the report by Kadın Adayları Destekleme ve Eğitme Derneği “Less Than 20 percent Women in Parliament? That's not True Democracy!”
13 For feminist standpoint accounts of the value of women's experiences for the struggle against male-domination, see Brooks, Citation2007; Harding, Citation1986, Citation1991; Hartsock, Citation1983; Heckman, Citation1997.
14 For a discussion of women's movements in the Ottoman and the early republican years, see S. Çakır, 1994; Toprak, Citation2015.
15 In fact, women in Turkey were granted suffrage in the 1930s, well before many western countries. For an account of the reforms concerning women's status in the early Republican era see Hacımirzaoğlu (1998).
16 First coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw (Citation1989), “intersectionality” is an analytical concept as well as a methodology for studying the connections between multiple dimensions and modalities of social relationships and subject formations. Standpoint feminists benefited from the insight inherent to “intersectionality” to show that the actual experience of oppression and sexism is intimately related to the “intersectional” relationships between multiple forces of identity such as gender, class, sexuality, ethnicity etc.
17 Not being directly relevant to our topic, Kurdish women's activism will not be discussed in this article.
18 The “headscarf” issue that pre-occupied the political scene for almost two decades is a canonical instance of the alleged discrimination. The decision banning the headscarf in universities by the Council of Higher Education in 1982 was protested by Islamists in general. The ban was lifted in 2013 during the rule of the AKP. For most secularists and devoted Kemalists (derived from the name of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Republic of Turkey, Kemalist refers to the staunch supporters of the founding modernist, secular ideology and the early republican reforms) the headscarf is not merely an accessory but denotes a religious ideology, antithetical to the modern and secular ideals of the Republic.
19 In 2005, AKP appointed a woman for the newly found “Ministry of State responsible for Women and Family Affairs” that was replaced by the “Ministry of Family and Social Policy” in 2011. The change in the name of the ministry indicates an unambiguous reference to the natural “place” of women, namely, the family: “Within the religio-conservative world of AKP, women are simply, basically and most crucially mothers” (Ayata and Tütüncü, 2008, p. 378).
20 As Arat (1998) states “Turkish women had to move into the political realm in a patriarchal society” (p. 20). Even though we did not come across research on the “dissenting” women's voices in CHP, we cannot thereby assume that they do not exist.
21 We refer to deliberative democracy as an approach to public debate and policy-making, and not necessarily as a form of government.
22 We find it important to note that the paper does not imply that Islamism is antithetical to feminism or that one can be a feminist only if one is also a secularist. Indeed, a “feminist spirit” inspired alliance between the “secular” and “pious” women aspiring to deconstruct patriarchal hegemony has potential to break down the ideological polarization between secularism and religiosity and bring women together in the struggle against male oppression. That women can be devoted Muslims and also advocate gender equality and women's rights is evident in the example of “Sisters-In-Islam,” a controversial NGO in Malaysia. Moreover, there are Islamist women in Turkey who self-identify as feminists. However, the current political situation in today's Turkey makes it quite unlikely for such pious “feminist” women to openly raise their voices.
23 For some well-known examples of mini-publics see (Dryzek, Citation2009; Fishkin, Citation2011; Lukensmeyer and Jacobson, Citation2007).
24 Sanders (Citation1997) and Young (Citation2002) argue that deliberative democracy favors a white, western, educated, male norm of reasoning which, failing to account for the communicative practices of marginalized groups, can also result in the exclusion of women. However, as the very aim of the deliberation that we suggest is to foster alliances among women, we believe the participants will be sensitive not to let communication be sacrificed to "hermeneutical marginalization." (Fricker, Citation2007). Fricker (Citation2007) uses this term to refer to "a moral-political" notion, indicating subordination and exclusion from some practice that would have value for the participant" (p. 153).
25 By ‘mutual marginalization’ we refer to the way in which partisan politics shapes feminist and Islamist women's mutual attitudes of rejecting each other as allies.