Muslim Women’s Movement in Turkey - Gendering Social Movement and a Contribution to the Coalition-Building Approach

Since the 1980s social movements research has paid increasing attention to ‘identity politics’ for studying ‘new(er)’ social movements such as the feminist, black, environmental, and other identity-based (as opposed to class-based) movements in post-industrial societies claiming that political struggle has moved from the economic (focus on distribution) to the cultural (focus on recognition) realm. Feminist scholars have pointed to the blind spots of the ‘class- vs. identity-based politics’ dichotomy and have elaborated on the cause and effect relationship between redistribution and recognition in women’s and other gendered movements. On the basis of in-depth interviews with activists from contemporary Muslim women’s movement(s) (MWM) in Turkey this paper inquires about this relationship between class- and identity-based politics and the possible arrays of cooperation and coalition. It shows that the enduring gender regime has urged MWM to cooperate with other women’s movements (e.g. feminist, Kurdish, socialist) temporarily in case of an immediate opportunity or threat or build long-term cross-movement coalitions to achieve common political goals. The paper provides empirical evidence on how MWM activists move between different women’s and other gendered movements and under which circumstances these cooperation and coalitions are suspended or abandoned.