A feminist-phenomenology of women’s activism against hydropower plants in Turkey’s Eastern Black Sea region

Abstract

Taking a feminist-phenomenological perspective of the body, this article provides an empirically grounded analysis of the embodied subjectivity of women in the movement against hydropower plants (HPPs) in the culturally and spatially specific context of the Eastern Black Sea region of Turkey. Informed by a feminist engagement with Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of ‘the body-subject’, ‘the flesh’ and Einfühlung, the article places subjectivity within a relational ontology of sentience and intelligence in which corporeal experiences, senses and affects condition cognitive and agential processes. Bodily senses and affects are thus treated as media of subjectivity. The relationship between water and identity, established through memory, heritage and history, is also produced and/or conserved by the embodied relation between women’s bodies and bodies of water, within the connective ‘flesh’ of the physical world. The case of the Eastern Black Sea demonstrates how political subjectivity of women in the movement against HPPs is conditioned by an intimate embodied relationship with river waters that is sustained by a series of sensory-affective experiences. Their statements emphasize, over and over again, an interconnectedness with the rivers, which makes the cause of anti-HPP struggle vital and urgent for them. This feeling of urgency is a source of women’s radicalism in opposing HPPs. The article maintains the female subject as embodied and transversal, and stresses the centrality of corporeal experience, sense and affect in formation of political subjectivity. By developing a body-centred feminist-phenomenological approach to political subjectivity, it introduces a novel way of analysing women’s activisms within and beyond environmental movements.

Keywords:

• Embodied subjectivity
• feminist phenomenology
• Merleau-Ponty
• Turkey
• gender and environment
• water and hydropower

Acknowledgements

I’d like to thank Einstein and Gerda Henkel Foundations for research scholarships, Nancy Fraser for consistently and strongly supporting my project, GSNAS Freie Universität Berlin and Collège d’études mondiales FMSH - Paris for hosting my research and Serhat Karakayalı, Erdem Evren, Pamela Moss, Lynda Johnston, Nur Yasemin Ural, Nihan Bozok and anonymous reviewers for their extremely helpful comments on earlier drafts. I’m grateful to Stephanie Alexander for her careful proof-reading.