CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2018
| Author | Cagatay, Selin |
|---|---|
| Title | The Politics of Gender and the Making of Kemalist Feminist Activism in Contemporary Turkey (1946-2011) |
| Summary | The aim of this dissertation is to contribute to the understanding of the relationship between women's activism and the politics of gender by investigating Kemalist feminism in Turkey as a case study. The dissertation offers a political history of Kemalist feminism that enables an insight into the intertwined relationship between women's activism and the politics of gender. It focuses on the class, national/ethnic, and cultural/religious dynamics of and their implications for Kemalist feminist politics. In so doing, it situates Kemalist feminist activism within the politics of gender in Turkey; that is, it analyzes the relationship between Kemalist feminist activism and other actors in gender politics, such as the state, transnational governance, political parties, civil society organizations, and feminist, Islamist, and Kurdish women's activisms. The analysis of Kemalist feminist activism provided in this dissertation draws on a methodological-conceptual framework that can be summarized as follows. Activism provides the ground for women to become actors of the politics of gender. At the same time, the relations of power and systems of inequality that dominate the field of formal politics also infiltrate the field of civil society and women's activism thereof. Thus, women's activism is always-already marked by class, national/ethnic, and cultural/religious struggles; these struggles thereby become the constitutive dynamics of women's gender politics. Therefore, to account for the ways in which women's activism influences, reproduces, and/or challenges the politics of gender in a specific historical context, it is necessary to analyze the strategies women employ both to seek women's gender interests and to maintain a political framework for defining these interests that is simultaneously class-based, national/ethnic, and cultural/religious. A further objective of this dissertation is to explore the historical transformation of Kemalist women's politics into Kemalist feminism. By bringing to light the forms of activism adopted by Kemalist women, and the demands they raised—individually and collectively—to further women's rights in Turkey, the study suggests a rewriting of the history of women's activism with a focus on continuities, alongside ruptures, between different, namely the single-party (1923–1946), multi-party (1946–1980), and post-1980, periods. The dissertation is based on research on the print and online material provided by Kemalist women's and feminist activism and on interviews conducted with Kemalist feminists. The print and online material includes documents, interviews, reports, leaflets, booklets, articles, journals, books, edited volumes, biographical, and autobiographical works that were written or prepared by Kemalist women including Kemalist feminists, or written or prepared by other feminists (activists and scholars, in Turkey and abroad) about Kemalist women and feminists. In addition, semi-structured, in-depth interviews were conducted with 26 Kemalist feminists during 2011 in the cities of Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir. |
| Supervisor | Zimmermann, Susan Carin |
| Department | Gender Studies PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2018/cagatays.pdf |
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