CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2024
| Author | Becerir, Ayca |
|---|---|
| Title | Grief, Affective Politics, Affective Injustice |
| Summary | The Saturday Mothers is Turkey’s longest civil disobedience movement composed of the families of the forcefully disappeared people and human rights activists. There is a considerable amount of literature on the Saturday Mothers examining the “improper” grief processes and emphasizes that the members of the group experience endless grief and also face police violence and meeting bans during their peaceful sit-in protests (Alpkaya, 1995; Karaman, 2016; Şanlı, 2018). Yet, none of the studies investigate the experiences of the Saturday Mothers within the frame of affective injustice. Affective injustice is a relatively new concept that has been attracting increasing attention, especially in philosophy. Its significance relies on its promise to illuminate affective aspects of oppression within the frame of injustice. Considering these, the thesis reconceptualizes affective injustice by focusing on structured oppressive affective politics to reveal the affective aspect of oppression and power hierarchies, and to use it as a conceptual tool for analyzing “improper grief” processes and sit-in protests within the context of the Saturday Mothers. By elaborating on Iris Marion Young’s (1990) conceptualization of injustice, this study argues that affective injustice emerges as a result of oppressive affective politics and institutions embedded in these politics so that a group of people exercising and developing their affective capacities is inhibited or harmed. Drawing on this understanding of affective injustice, the thesis unpacks the experiences of the Saturday Mothers within the framework of affective injustice. It argues that the state’s oppressive affective politics lead to the inhibition of performing proper grief rituals which is one way of exercising and developing affective capacity. Also, it claims that the Saturday Mothers experience an inhibition of expressing emotions through which affect circulates and reveals its political potential during the sit-in protests. The thesis also explores the affective aspect of the dominant discourse on the Saturday Mothers and reveals how the discourse of traditional motherhood harms the political significance of the movement. By analyzing the political transformation of mothers, the thesis emphasizes that the Saturday Mothers are not passive victims of oppression, but rather active political agents. The study contributes to the current affective injustice literature by reconceptualizing the concept and also to the literature on the Saturday Mothers by examining their experiences within the frame of affective injustice. |
| Supervisor | Eszter Timar and Nadia Jones-Gailani |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2024/becerir_ayca.pdf |
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