Intersectionality and feminist/queer student activism in authoritarian Turkey

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores the emergent intersectional framework and forms of activism among feminist/queer university students against government policies that attack participatory democracy, citizenship rights, and spaces of freedom and solidarity in Turkey. An increasing number of student activists find it difficult to engage and mobilize around single-issue politics; instead, they tend to define social justice in its most comprehensive terms, build associations across diverse forms of disempowerment and struggle, and identify themselves with multi-issue politics and intersectional activism. Their youth, political, and feminist/queer subjectivity enables our 41 respondents to cultivate a predisposition toward intersectional understandings. The conscious, reflexive, and staunch agency of student activists can be productively understood through the intersectional lens of their collective refusal and struggles against the governmentality of the nation-state. Our findings show that the intersectional framework is employed by the respondents in two ways: (1) to internalize intersectional tenets and engage in intersectional activism, and (2) to dissociate themselves from the mainstreamed and professionalized aspects of that activism. This article unravels the variety and complexity around the concept, sheds light on the challenges that face feminist/queer student activists in contemporary Turkey, and considers how they respond by engaging intersectionality in multiple ways.