KADEM’s vision of gender justice and neopatriarchal masculinity in illiberal Turkey

ABSTRACT

Women’s and LGBTI + rights have always been under attack in Turkey, but recent developments in AKP’s attempts to consolidate a pro-family, pro-birth, and Islamist gender regime based on the ‘moral’ regulation of women and LGBTI + creates an atmosphere that must be examined in detail. KADEM, a women’s GONGO established in 2013, plays a crucial role in this anti-gender backlash context, positioning their line of action as a challenge to the global feminist attempts to impose Western standards on Turkish society while advocating for women’s rights from a culturalist position. We analyse KADEM’s construction of men and masculinities in the materials on their website to understand their strategies of legitimisation of a form of neopatriarchal masculinity along the traditional ‘family values’ to see how KADEM serves as a transmitter of an Islamic neopatriarchal culture, with its implicit justifications of men’s patriarchal roles and duties in a neoliberal society.

KEYWORDS:

• Neopatriarchy
• gender backlash
• gender justice
• Turkey
• KADEM
• masculinity

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 “Countering Backlash: Reclaiming Gender Justice” is led by the Institute of Development Studies, IDS and funded by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) (Grant reference: 13498).

Additional information

Funding

This work is part of a broad collaborative research led by Institute of Development Studies, IDS and funded by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA, Grant reference: 13498).

Notes on contributors

Çimen Günay-Erkol

Çimen Günay-Erkol works on Cold War anxieties, masculinity, and trauma. Currently, she is associate professor of Turkish Literature at Ozyegin University and a member of the Initiative for Critical Studies of Masculinities (ICSM). She co-edited Turkish Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2020) and two volumes of Dictionary of Literary Biography (GALE), consisting of bio-bibliographical essays on writers of Turkey. Her book Broken Masculinities (CEU Press, 2016) focuses on the Turkish 1968 and her recent projects target gender backlash in Turkey.

Nurseli Yeşim Sünbüloğlu

Nurseli Yeşim Sünbüloğlu is a Visiting Faculty in the Core Program and the Director of the Women and Family Studies Research Centre at Kadir Has University in Turkey. She has published peer-reviewed articles and chapters in edited volumes focusing on masculinities, disability, militarism, gender backlash, and nationalism. She edited a volume in Turkish [Erkek Millet, Asker Millet] on militarism, nationalism, and men/masculinities in Turkey (2013, İletişim Publishing). She is a member of the Initiative for Critical Studies of Masculinities (ICSM). She has coordinated projects entitled ‘Non-Violent Masculinities Workshops Manual’ (2020-1), ‘e-Gen (Equality Generation) Module for Young Men at High Schools’ (2022-3) and has been a researcher in other research projects focusing on GBV, gender backlash, and institutionalisation of gender equality.