http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3322-4572
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ABSTRACT
Women’s political empowerment has emerged as a particular field of interest in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in Turkey. Women’s absence in many spheres of life, including the political sphere, has become one of the main references to discuss the patriarchal characteristics of the established regime. The AKP was founded in 2001 by those who claimed to distance themselves from the Islamist Refah Party. The AKP’s particular emphasis on the active roles and status of women within the party and their empowerment as active agents of politics was used as an important mark of distinction from earlier versions of political Islam. In this study, which focuses on the self-narrations of AKP female politicians nominated and elected in the 2009 local elections, the aim is to expand the discussion on how the AKP female representatives narrate their experience of this ‘political empowerment’ stressed in the AKP’s program and whether they subvert, transform or reproduce patriarchal authority.
Acknowledgements
This study is based on part of my dissertation and I would like to express my debts of gratitude to Prof Dr. Alev Çınar for her encouragement and excellent supervision and Prof Dr Dilek Cindoglu for her invaluable mentorship throughout the process of completing it. Responsibility for its content is mine alone.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Dr. Sezen Yaras received her Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Ankara. She currently works as a post-doctoral research fellow at Blickwechsel Contemporary Turkey Studies in the Institute for Social Sciences of Humboldt University Berlin. Her research interests include gender theory, constitutional politics, local governance and sociology of health and medicine.
ORCID
Sezen Yaraş http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3322-4572
Notes
1. Öniş, “Neoliberal Globalization,” 305.
2. Arat, Rethinking Islam, and Çakır, Direniş ve İtaat.
3. Keskin-Kozat, “Entangled in Secular Nationalism,” 197.
4. The RP is heir to two former parties, which are the National Order Party and National Salvation Party. These two parties were the first two parties with clear Islamist credentials in Turkey. They were banned from political activity and the RP was founded as the new representative of National Outlook (Milli Gorus) Movement in 1983 in the post-coup context. After the first elections in which it participated, the 1984 local elections, its popularity continuously increased. In the 1990s, its gained significant success. first in local elections in 1994 when it won the mayor’s seat in two largest cities of the country, Istanbul and Ankara, and then it gained almost equal votes as the two most popular center right parties in the parliamentary elections of 1995. Afterwards it became a partner of a coalition government together with the True Path Party in 1996. The Women Commissions of the Party, which was founded in late 1980s by Erdoğan, who was then the head of the Istanbul Party Center, played a very important role in the Party’s gaining such popularity by their daily door to door visits to the houses of the electorate. The number of women actively seeking votes for the party just in Istanbul was about eighteen thousand (Çakır, Direniş ve İtaat, 112). In 1998, the party was again banned by a military intervention, which is known as the ‘soft coup.’ It was replaced by the Fazilet Party (FP).
5. The FP tried to break the anti-women reputation and image of the party by adding women to the Central Decision Women Board. However, the women who were recruited in the party were again not the women who were daily working for the party in the field but upper class women such as Nazli Ilicak and Oya Akgonenc, which reproduced rather than changed the symbolic presence of women in the party. (Narli, “The Rise of the Islamist Movement,” 43).
6. Saktanber, “Whose Virtue Is This,” 71.
7. Keskin-Kozat, “Entangled in Secular Nationalism.”
8. Çıtak and Tür, “Women between Tradition and Change,” 456.
9. Yegenoglu and Cosar, “The AKP and the Gender Issue,” 184.
10. Kandiyoti, “Disentangling Religion,” 11.
11. The 2007 elections are critical in the sense that the balance of the votes between the so-called secularists and Islamists radically changed and the AKP won and ‘it was the first time in Turkish history that a political party with an Islamist background had come to power with half of the electorate behind it.’ (Arat, “Religion, Politics, and Gender,” 872).
12. Turam, “Turkish Women Divided,” 480.
13. Tür and Çıtak, “AKP ve Kadın,” 265.
14. Yabancı, “Populism as the Problem Child,” 604.
15. Foucault, “Questions on Geography,” 179.
16. Ayata and Tütüncü, “Party Politics of the AKP,” 368.
17. Müftüler-Baç and Keyman, “Dominant Party Politics,” 91.
18. Kaya, “Islamization of Turkey.”
19. Arat, “Religion, Politics and Gender,” 869.
20. Acar and Altunok, “Politics of the Intimate.”
21. Aslan Akman, “Rising Tide of Populism,” 5.
22. Knight, “Populism and Neo-Populism,” 226.
23. Coşar and Yeğenoğlu, “New Grounds for Patriarchy,” 556.
24. Şener, “Conditional Cash Transfers.”
25. Carlos, “On Hegemony.”
26. Whether we continue to live in a world of ideologies or are now in an age where they are no longer valid is subject to debate and is outside the limits of the study. For the purposes of this essay, the distinct characteristics of the AKP’s bringing together different ideologies, not always in a coherent way, is suggested to be worthy of acknowledgement rather than discussing it as a coherent program such as religious conservatism or Islamism.
27. Somer, “Turkey’s Democratic Breakdown,” 483.
28. Yabancı, “Populism as the Problem Child,” 596.
29. Somer, “Turkey’s Democratic Breakdown,” 483.
30. Ibid., 483.
31. Butler, “Gender is Burning,” 383.
32. The name of the project is ‘Gender in Local Politics: Women’s Representation at the Local Level’ (Project No:109K182).
33. The final list of the cities where the fieldwork was conducted is: Adana, Ankara, Aydin, Bursa, Diyarbakir, Elazig, Eskisehir, Hatay, Icel, Istanbul, Izmir, Kayseri, Kocaeli, Konya, Manisa, Mardin, Mugla, Ordu, Samsun and Trabzon.
34. The other project assistants were Dr. Selin Akyuz, who took part in the whole project; Dr. Senem Yildirim Ozdem and Dr. Sule Yaylaci who made valuable contributions to the fieldwork at its different stages.
35. Özyürek, Nostalgia for the Modern, 30.
36. Brown, Politics out of History, 25.
37. Verdery, The Political Lives, 38.
38. Brown, “Moralism as Anti-Politics.”
39. Kandiyoti, “End of Empire,” 262.
40. Yıldız, “Intellectual and Political Vestiges,” 45.
41. Such pro-West rhetoric significantly changed after the period that is covered in this article. Whether and how such a change was reflected in the narrations of women representatives of the party and its significance in terms of their overall framing of their role in politics is an important question the analysis of which necessitates gather additional data.
42. Çakır, “Neydiler Ne Oldular 11.”
43. My intention here is not to argue that no cases of corruption were conducted by the AKP members and representatives. Rather than the truth value of the claims of the interviewees, my aim is to trace the sources of their passionate attachments to the party and its leader. Their belief in the total innocence of the party headquarters were observed in other fieldwork as well (see Çıtak and Tür, “Women between Tradition and Change.”). Even questioning it is considered as an elitist reaction to the party. The anti-elitist characteristics of the neo-populist discourse of the party (Yabanci, “Populism as the Problem Child,” 593) as well as post-truth politics through the excessive control of pro-government media (Somer, “Understanding Turkey’s Democratic Breakdown,” 496) have been discussed in the literature. For the purposes of this article, suffice to say that whether corruption in the party actually exists or not is irrelevant to the article’s research question.
44. Şengül, “Yerel Devlet Sorunu,” 213.
45. Yaraş, “Over-feminized Local Governance,” 111.
46. Povinelli, The Empire of Love, 177.
47. Çınar, “Subversion and Subjugation,” 894.
48. Butler, Undoing Gender, 1–2.
49. Scott, “Fantasy Echo,” 290.
50. Bora, “Evet Uludere!”