CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2016
| Author | Cinar, Sercan |
|---|---|
| Title | Between dissidence and hegemony: the formation of socialist masculinities in Turkey in the 1970s |
| Summary | This thesis analyzes the formation of a specific mode of masculinities, which I call socialist masculinities, in the period of the socialist movement’s explosive growth in Turkey between 1974 and 1980. It discusses the gender politics of the socialist movement in relation to the formation of political masculinities among socialist men. Additionally, the thesis investigates the ways in which socialist men appropriated a hegemonic form of masculinity while addressing the oppression of women as part of socialism’s political agenda. I take two radical left-wing organizations in Turkey during the 1970s as my case studies: the first one is named Devrimci Yol [Revolutionary Path] whose ideology was based on Marxism-Leninism but can be also defined as ‘left populism,’ and the second one is Türkiye Komünist Partisi [The Communist Party of Turkey, TKP], a pro-Soviet Union party that espoused the Marxism-Leninism advanced by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The sources I used included secondary literature, 1970s political publications, and oral history interviews. This thesis argues that large-scale contemporary political violence encouraged male bonding among the male socialist activists. Moreover, it points out the implications of the populist discourse, which reinforced hegemonic notions of gender differences, on the formation of socialist masculinities in Turkey in the 1970s. Lastly, it also examines the impact of a specific reading strategy of classical Marxist texts that can be regarded as one of the central components in the formation of the political identities of male socialists (in Turkey, as well as more broadly). I found that this reading strategy had a formative influence on the male socialist identity, because it produced a language of class priorities while tending to deprioritize “the woman question. |
| Supervisor | Francisca de Haan |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2016/cinar_sercan.pdf |
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