Networked misogyny beyond the digital: the violent devaluation of women journalists’ labor and bodies in Turkey’s masculine authoritarian regime

ABSTRACT

Following the conservative Turkish government’s political-economic capture of the news media, educated and pro-feminist women journalists have migrated online. Despite having more publicity across platforms, they face immediate prosecution based on the tweet of an anonymous troll, an informant citizen or a government official. While this is a common case of networked misogyny, inspired by Liz Kelly’s concept of the continuum of sexual violence, we argue that networked misogyny against women journalists is not simply technological but rather both interconnected across different spaces (online manosphere, masculine newsrooms, and authoritarian state) and intersectional feeding from nationalism, class, and anti-Western sentiments. This intersectionality renders networked misogyny against Turkey’s journalists different from liberal contexts because it operates not through illegality but suspicion (of terrorism, treason). Our focus on interconnections and intersectionality allows for theorizing networked misogyny beyond the digital, genders current perspectives on authoritarianism and reframes networked misogyny as a violent war targeting women’s intellectual labor and public visibility, both significant threats to authoritarian regimes across the globe. The interconnected and intersectional stories of networked misogyny from Turkey point to how fighting against this form of violence is also a fight against the post-truth regimes of authoritarianism and fight for democracy.

KEYWORDS:

• networked misogyny
• authoritarianism
• sexism
• journalism
• intersectionality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Pro-government media frames the Convention as a foreign plot to undermine the Turkish family mainly because this document used definitions such as sexual orientation and gender-based discrimination and violence.

2. This gender inequality permeates Turkey’s media industries. According to Press Announcement Institute (Basın İlan Kurumu), of the 7,593 intellectual workers, only 2,414 are women. Only 10% of the editors-in-chief of Turkey’s newspapers are women. This percentage rises to 16,6% in websites and 31% in news websites. Only 26% of editorial positions in newspapers are women, whereas this is 39,5% in the websites of newspapers and 46,6% in news websites (Tuna 2021, 86). According to the 2017 data of TUİK (Turkish Statistics Institute), 10708 men and 4,862 women work for the publication departments of newspapers, whereas 14,407 men and 11,178 women work for the publication departments of magazines (TGS 2019).

3. A kahvehane is a traditional coffee shop frequented by men.

4. Mahalle kanalı (neighborhood channel) is an implied reference to mahalle karısı (neighborhood woman), and that evokes the category of a woman that shows no class.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ergin Bulut

Ergin Bulut received his Ph.D. from the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Currently, he works as an Associate Professor at Koç University’s Media and Visual Arts Department. He researches in the areas of political economy of media and cultural production, videogame studies, media, affect, and politics, and critical theory. He is the author of “A Precarious Game: The Illusion of Dream Jobs in the Video Game Industry” (Cornell UP, 2020). His work has been published in journals including Media, Culture & Society, Triple C, International Journal of Communication, Communication, Culture and Critique, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Television and New Media, Communication and Critical-Cultural Studies. In 2019-2020 academic year, Bulut was a visiting researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton and faculty fellow at Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication at UPenn. He is now working on questions of creative and cultural labor within masculine authoritarian regimes.

Başak Can

Başak Can holds a PhD in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania and is an associate professor of sociology at Koç University. She is a medical anthropologist with an interest in the intersections of human rights, political violence, forensics, politics of care and body. She is currently working on her book Forensic Fantasies: Doctors, Documents and the Limits of Truth in Turkey. She has previously undertaken research on gendered work relations, care work, reproductive health, forensic documentation of torture, and triaging of care among dialysis patients in Turkey. Her research has appeared in journals such as American Anthropologist, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness, New Perspectives in Turkey, Reproductive Health Matters, Communication, Culture & Critique and Media, Culture & Society. She secured research grants and fellowships from institutions such as Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, Raoul Wallenberg Institute, Blickwechsel: Contemporary Turkey Studies at Humboldt University of Berlin, Wenner-Gren Foundation.