Civil Society Discourses of Kemalist and Islamic Women’s Groups in Turkey: Confrontational or Compromising Approaches?

While there remains a range of competing understandings of civil society, dominant approach to this political concept is gender-biased and neo-liberal in character. Feminist thinkers and commentators pay our attention to the gendered character of the theory and practice of civil society by mainly disclosing association of civil society with masculine traits and roles. Since the global revival of the concept in the 1980s, neoliberal version of civil society has also been dominant. In this regard, civil society is associated by the international organisations such as EU (European Union), UN (United Nations) with neoliberal policies intended to shrink the developmental and welfare state, bringing with it an emphasis on the delegation of key responsibilities to non-governmental organisations (NGO). Although this dominant gendered and neoliberal version of civil society is contested across the Middle East, including in Turkey, the question of how NGOs in general, and women’s NGOs in particular, can contribute to the field of meaning around civil society has not been widely discussed in the academic literature. In this paper, I aim to respond to this gap by focusing on the voices of eighteen women’s activists from the two Kemalist and Islamic women’s organisations in Turkey on civil society and its relations with gender and power and investigates in which areas they converge and diverge. On the basis of my analysis, I mainly argue that in terms of the civil society discourses, confrontation is apparent in the women’s interviews, as they directly refer to each other as pro-government or pro-system. However, what I found striking in women’s discourses is that the Kemalist and Islamist women have a similar approach to gender and power with respect to their civil society discourses even though they clash over their understandings of secularism, religion and women's issues.