Discursive Activists or Patriarchal Bargainers? Religion, Gender, and Neoliberal Governance in the “New” Turkey

Abstract

Abstract This article aims first to contribute to discussions on both the agency of religious women and feminist transversal politics, and second, to emphasize the need to build solidarity coalitions to resist interlocking oppressive structures. It examines the intellectual mobilization of religious women in Turkey (2010–2016), drawing on an ethnographic study of an Istanbul women’s organization. It explores the way religious women contextualized Turkey’s socio-political transformation and analyzed earlier initiatives, and analyses their struggle to challenge the perceptions of them as outsiders vis-a-vis the secularist Republican state patriarchy and Islamist neoliberal patriarchal state. The study concludes that national socio-political transformations curtailed their discursive activism and that broader solidarity networks, transversal politics, and feminist coalitions are necessary to resist such oppressive structures.