Enmeshing the mundane and the political: Twitter, LGBTI+ outing and macro-political polarisation in Turkey

ABSTRACT

Examining the relationship between social media, anti-gender and everyday polarisation, this article identifies the ways social media platforms reflect the mundane amidst the interactions of users over social and political issues, showing how micro-stories can foreground macro-political tensions online. We examine a Twitter event over an outing that showed vigorous debates on issues pertaining to gender and its socio-political connotations in Turkey, employing textual and content analyses of reactions shared through hashtags and mentions. The outing involved a child custody battle in court and a secret recording, exposing the sexual identity of a woman popstar #Intizar. The paper shows how Twitter facilitated conservative, homophobic and patriarchal reactions that harnessed deep political polarisation between the AKP government's supporters and those declaring solidarity with LGBTI+ issues. A mundane divorce story exhibited the deep political tension in Turkey, which also exemplifies the depth of increasing online polarisation over gender on a global scale.

KEYWORDS:

• Online polarisation
• Twitter
• digital mundane
• ontological insecurity
• anti-gender
• online identity

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Olu Jenzen for reading an earlier draft of the paper and Cansu Ozduzen for her help on the research. The authors are also thankful for the two anonymous reviewers and the editor Priya Chacko for their aid in developing the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Ozge Ozduzen is a lecturer in sociology and communications at Brunel University London. Completing her PhD in media at Edge Hill University (2016), she was then British Academy Newton International Postdoctoral Fellow in the Institute for Diplomacy and International Governance at Loughborough University London and a Swedish Institute post-doc at the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies in Lund University. Her research lies in urban and political communication, digital humanities and social sciences and visual politics.

Umut Korkut is a Professor in International Politics at Glasgow Caledonian University. Umut serves Political Studies Association (PSA) as Trustee and International Lead, the International Political Science Association (IPSA) as Executive Committee Member and coordinates three EU funded projects. He is interested in how political discourse, aesthetics and visual imagery create audiences, following this theoretical interest across various empirical fields central to European politics such as gender and politics, populism and migration.

Additional information

Funding

This project has received funding from the British Academy (Newton International Fellowship, Grant NF170302) and European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme DEMOS (Democratic Efficacy and the Varieties of Populism in Europe) under grant agreement No 822590. Any dissemination of results here presented reflects only the authors’ view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.