Ayşe Durakbaşa - Feminism in Turkey: History and contemporary agenda

By Dilip -
Turkey’s recent political history, under the increasingly authoritarian rule of the Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP), seems to shackle the republic’s foundational principles and its laicist regime. This development is fraught with extremely unfavourable consequences for women in Turkey. In what follows, I will give an overview of the historical background explaining different positions on women’s issues in Turkey today. I will then present the current state of research on women’s history in Turkey and the history of women’s movements there.

In the mid-1980s, a second wave of Turkish feminism triggered an increased interest in feminist academic research. Women’s studies and gender studies became an important area of research within both the social sciences and the humanities, initiated by feminist scholars and academics mostly educated in western universities. Until now, much of the literature has emerged from universities’ women’s studies programmes, as well as graduate programmes in the social sciences, mainly sociology, political sciences, comparative literature, and cultural studies.

My research on the feminist history of Turkish modernization has been inspired by studies on the relationship between the state, Islam, nationalisms, and women in the Middle East. In Gender and Nation, Nira Yuval-Davis showed that the discourse surrounding womanhood in Middle Eastern societies has been incorporated into nationalisms.....
https://www.eurozine.com/feminism-in-turkey/

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