Thinking Women, Feminism, and Muslim Identity through Bodies and Space in Turkey

Abstract

The corpus of miriam cooke’s writing defines new frontiers in scholarship on women’s writings on war and violence, Islamic feminism, and the dissident politics of art and literature. cooke engages with double critique that writes against Orientalism and Islamophobia as well as indigenous forms of repression and injustice. Her emphasis is on the intersections of power and poetics, highlighting the aesthetics of political critique. Her work identifies the persistent agency of women writers and artist-activists in times of hopelessness and turbulence. Her scholarship, deeply grounded in several countries in the Arab world, generates questions about gender, politics, and everyday experiences in Turkey, where I have been conducting research since the 1990s. Women have been at the forefront of contestations over the terms of inclusion and exclusion in Turkey. They challenge prevailing hegemonies, provoked partly by the targeting of women’s bodies, dress, and subject positions by differently situated ideological groups, secular or Islamist, attempting to reconfigure the public sphere according to their vision.Women Claim Islam, which focuses on the rise of Islamic feminism in the Arab world, helps us understand how secular and religious women in contemporary Turkey respond to prevalent power structures and political ideologies. cooke (2001, viii) argues that dominant narratives of history, war, emigration, and exile have excluded women’s stories, leading Arab women writers to demand “to be heard and seen.” These writers have formulated complex identifications based on their multiple positionalities, criticizing global and national feminisms and Islamic power and knowledge systems that marginalize them (155).Much of the research I conduct in Turkey focuses especially on women who self-identify as devout Muslims. For much of the 1990s through 2010, the headscarf symbolized shifting ideological fault lines in Turkey (Secor 2005). During this period the state banned the wearing of this article of clothing in many government and public spaces. In other spaces, secularists maligned and marginalized women who wore it. From 1996 to 2013 I heard many accounts of how women’s practice of wearing the headscarf had initiated encounters and experiences that made them aware of the dominance of secular ideology not only on the streets but also in scholarship, in feminist activism, and with respect to their own bodies and family lives. All devised tactics to navigate the everyday geographies of secularism and several became actively involved in resisting this hegemony by producing alternative realities.In Women Claim Islam cooke (2001, ix) usefully defines feminism as “above all an epistemology”: “it is an attitude, a frame of mind that highlights the role of gender in understanding the organization of society.” Whether or not a woman self-identifies as a feminist, cooke argues that feminism “seeks justice wherever it can find it. Feminism involves political and intellectual awareness of gender discrimination, a rejection of behaviors furthering such discrimination, and the advocacy of activist projects to end discrimination and to open opportunities for women to participate in public life” (x). This emphasis on feminism as awareness, rejection, and activism is productive for thinking about how headscarf-wearing women have responded to opposing parties politicizing and instrumentalizing women’s dress and bodies in struggles for power and dominance. Pious women have strategically claimed identities as Muslim women while refusing to be depicted as the singular Muslimwoman—a term that cooke (2007) coined to criticize the erasure of differences among Muslim women and the emergence of an ascribed singular category where gender and religion become one. Turkish women, most of whom wore the headscarf, participated in demonstrations at the gates of universities and in city squares to criticize the headscarf ban from the mid-1980s. Realizing that most women’s rights organizations were aligned with secular state-sponsored feminism and did not consider the headscarf ban a violation of women’s rights, devout Muslim women either established new Islamic feminist organizations (Diner and Toktaş 2010, 42) or started working in human rights organizations. Several sued the Turkish state at the European Court of Human Rights, to no avail (Gökarıksel and Mitchell 2005).Focusing on the symbolism of the headscarf reduces this article of clothing to a representation of something else and erases the experiences of women and even the woman herself. Instead, the stories of women in my research illustrate how veiling is an embodied spatial practice that makes the body and shapes the experiences of women across the spaces they traverse (Gökarıksel 2007, 2009, 2012). In all cases, women’s stories reveal the intimate, embodied, and everyday workings of political power and the potential of women’s actions to expose and reconfigure that power. Indeed, women’s embodied practices, such as wearing the headscarf and identifying as devout Muslims, became crucial to their awareness of gender injustices. Their experiences helped many see and feel these injustices as products of secular nationalist political ideologies. This kind of awareness remains a critical element of their ability to challenge the reign of the Islamically oriented populist nationalism of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) regime as well.Women’s encounters with the state and broader cultural hegemony in public spaces produced a certain kind of feminist consciousness. For example, after deciding to wear a headscarf in college, Neriman found herself no longer able to pursue her university degree, disowned by her family, and rapidly losing her hair. Becoming pious and adopting a new style of dress and bodily conduct underscored for her an intimately felt sense of gendered injustice and initiated a critical approach to the making of bodies, everyday spaces, and the state (Gökarıksel 2009). Similarly, many Turkish women who wear the headscarf recount stories of feeling out of place in shopping malls (Gökarıksel 2007). Fellow citizens verbally and even physically assaulted such women at parks and on the streets because of their dress (Gökarıksel and Secor 2016).Pious Turkish women insistently claim their rights and seek belonging in the city and nation. Today headscarf-wearing women are increasingly and more comfortably visible in the media and on the street in Turkey. However, new lines of exclusion and unfreedom have emerged. For example, during a focus-group discussion with self-identifying devout women in 2013 in Istanbul, when one woman praised the AKP government for taking steps to address discriminatory acts against headscarf-wearing women, another questioned her claim of new freedoms, citing the crackdown on the Gezi protesters as an example (Gökarıksel and Secor 2016). This conversation underlines that while Islamic feminists have certainly developed deep criticisms of state secularism and associated feminist movements, they still can do more to criticize the masculinist, Islamic populist politics of the AKP regime as well as to stand up for the freedom of all women and other oppressed groups.A sea change occurred in Turkey at the beginning of the twenty-first century. A neoliberal, procapitalist, and increasingly authoritarian Islamically oriented government led by Tayyip Erdoğan’s AKP and a newly enfranchised Sunni Muslim middle class challenged secular hegemony over politics, economics, and public life. To an important degree, these Islamic political and economic elites have become the new hegemons. Their values, lifestyles, and ideologies have replaced the spaces, institutions, and cultural norms previously defined by secular elites. These drastic changes are especially visible in the cosmopolitan city of Istanbul, where the new elites constantly and sometimes violently contest the city’s pluralism. The 2013 Gezi mass protests were a significant flash point in the struggle over who has a right to the city and whose norms and values will govern it.Since the rise of Islamic government, pious and secular Turkish women have also had to develop tactics to live with and challenge the hegemony of Muslim nationalism (White 2013). Since the AKP lifted the ban against the veil, wearing the headscarf has ironically become almost an obligation in many places. Studies today find that women feel that they must cover their heads and publicly present themselves as observant Muslims to ensure access to jobs and for family social mobility and economic success (Toprak et al. 2009). Women who wore tank tops or short skirts reported being harassed on the street even during demonstrations to counter the military coup attempt on July 15, 2016 (Tahaoğlu 2016, cited in Korkman 2017, 182, and Başdaş 2017, 187).Islamic feminism developed a crucial voice against oppressive secular republican ideology and secular state feminism. Today Islamic feminists are uniquely positioned to oppose the new forms of Islamic masculinist hegemony of government that professes to represent the victimized devout Muslim majority. The AKP consolidated its power over a decade in government, moving it in a more religiously and socially conservative direction, especially after 2007. In late May 2013 a mass movement emerged to resist a government plan to demolish a central Istanbul park and its centuries-old trees, but it quickly spiraled into a widespread protest against the AKP government, its neoliberal policies and practices, its intensified imposition of an Islamic lifestyle, and its increasingly authoritarian tendencies. Similar protest sites developed in other cities throughout the country.In Istanbul many groups came together at Taksim Gezi Park, and some joined an encampment that lasted more than two weeks. Among them were anticapitalist and revolutionary Muslims, including women who joined the protests to reject Erdoğan’s efforts to present himself as representative of all pious Muslims. Photographs of such women circulated widely. In one, a headscarf-wearing woman carried a banner that ridiculed the Erdoğan government’s legislation restricting the sale of alcohol: “It’s impossible to stand you when sober” (Ayık kafayla çekilmiyorsun AKP). The poster held by the woman standing next to her (also wearing a headscarf) read: “Standing together against fascism” (Faşizme karşı omuz omuza) (festigan.blogspot.com/2013/06/direnis-degil-uyanis.html).The presence at the demonstrations of headscarf-wearing women whose Islamic orientation was visibly marked was significant because Erdoğan consistently tried to present the protests as a return to the “tyranny” of the secular establishment. To illustrate this narrative, he and progovernment media circulated apocryphal stories of headscarf-wearing women being abused in Istanbul during the Gezi protests. The presence of visibly pious Muslim protesters at Gezi complicated such representations. On June 7, 2013, about fifty headscarf-wearing women marched to protest the harassment of headscarf-wearing women on the street and expanded their concerns to include forms of violence that target all women. This march ended at Taksim Gezi Park, where the marchers noted a lack of harassment. They asserted ownership of urban spaces with banners that read, “Taksim is ours, Çarşı is ours, the street is ours.” They enacted “a politics that refused the alignment of the headscarf with unconditional support for the AKP government, and call[ed] for a broad feminist alliance to fight violence against all women” (Gökarıksel 2016, 236–37).Following Gezi and the corruption scandal that threatened Erdoğan’s close circle in the winter of 2014, the AKP government continued to amass power and suppress critics. The unsuccessful coup attempt of July 15, 2016, fueled a widespread government crackdown on its opposition facilitated by the declaration of a state of emergency. The government arrested and detained thousands of people and canceled the passports of many more. Most of these people were associated in some way with Fethullah Gülen’s Hizmet Movement, which the government accuses of orchestrating the coup. However, among the detained are also critics of the AKP, pro-Kurdish activists, academics who signed a peace petition, and members of parliament from the People’s Democratic Party (HDP). For years Erdoğan voiced ambitions to change the parliamentary system into a presidential system that gives the leader more executive power. After the coup the parliament proposed a referendum on this issue for April 16, 2017. The results are widely contested, although Erdoğan declared victory.Women’s voices, Turkish and Kurdish, were crucial leading up to the referendum. They challenged what they aptly called “one-man rule” and urged everyone to vote no. Among these were devout Muslim women who wore a headscarf and even the çarşaf. Their voices questioned ethnic and religious divisions that extend the ruling party’s power. They challenged the narrative that the AKP is ruling on behalf of all devout Muslims. They expressed a clear message that being religious does not mean supporting Erdoğan unconditionally and pointed to ongoing and expanding injustices. These women voiced their opposition despite strong measures to silence any dissent.cooke’s work on Islamic feminism opens up productive avenues for understanding women’s awareness, positioning, and activism. The work draws attention to the ways in which women who may not necessarily identify as feminist are indeed feminists—and may be uniquely positioned to expose and subvert masculinist narratives and ideologies. They do so even, or perhaps especially, in repressive environments where their bodies, dress, and everyday practices become targets of political ideologies and when cultural and political hegemony is manifest through their bodies. In Turkey such women have challenged secular ideology and encouraged moving away from authorized state feminism toward more plural feminisms. Today their voices are crucial for questioning the encroaching authoritarianism of an Islamically justified ideology.cooke (2007, 140) notes how central Muslim women have become to political discourses and cultural production about the Middle East and Islam:In the twenty-first century, Muslim fundamentalists, neo-Orientalists, Western feminists and Muslim and non-Muslim states are all arguing about what is right and wrong for the newly visible Muslim women. More and more Muslim women are joining the fray. Recognizing their centrality to their society’s self-conception, they are looking for ways to affirm themselves. Many are embracing and performing a singular religious and gender identity even if their lives are as varied as the innumerable cultures they inhabit.The increased visibility of Muslim women, cooke argues, generates a primary identity in which gender and religion become inseparable and gain ascendance over other identity categories. Such reductive labels serve conservative right-wing politics at home and abroad: “The Muslimwoman erases for non-Muslims the diversity among Muslim women and, indeed, among all Muslims. This erasure of diversity is mirrored within Muslim societies . . . where the Muslimwoman becomes the emblem of the purity of her community” (cooke 2007, 142).These dynamics continue to structure how others see and represent Muslim women as well as how they see and represent themselves. Identifying a diverse “Islamic culture industry” that includes fashion, literature, and products for Muslim women (Gökarıksel and McLarney 2010), cooke, Ellen McLarney, and I collaborated on the “Marketing Muslim Women” project, which examined the production, circulation, and consumption of images, commodities, and narratives concerning Muslim women in the early twenty-first century. The related JMEWS-sponsored conference led to the publication of a special issue of the journal that I guest-edited with McLarney. The essays focus on the negotiation and redefinition of what it means to be a Muslim woman “through or in reaction to the images, narratives, and knowledges about Muslim womanhood constructed in the marketplace.” We argue, “As Muslim women stake out their own positions, they actively engage with given Islamic practice and knowledge as well as with modalities of capitalism” (2). The political implications of this engagement continue to be crucial.cooke (2007, 153) encourages us to examine how women form and negotiate their gender and religious identities in complex times. Such a project remains important as the image of the Muslimwoman continues to circulate, even wrapped in the US flag in an iconic response to Donald Trump’s anti-Muslim and misogynistic rhetoric and policies. cooke’s research provides us with the critical tools we need to perform double critique that questions given categories, develops grounded understandings of agency, and recognizes the aesthetics of politics.