The National-Religious Structure of the Turkish Gender Regime: the re-introduction of the Turkish-Islamic synthesis through a gender perspective

Author: Raquel Fernandes Co-Author: Isabel E. Carvalhais The construction of a «New Turkey», in the 2000s, by the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the current President of the Republic, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, results from the national-religious structure of the re-introduction of the 1980s Turkish-Islamic Synthesis that leads the interrelation between Turkish nationalism and the Sunni Islam in the country. Initially regarded as an ideological space where the family protects the morality and the religious reactionary undertakes the order, establishing the link of national unity and promising to fill the gap between the centre and the periphery, after AKP's first term ended, the nationalism has gained a new breath and the country has regained its religious identity. Today, Turkey is an autocratic, populist, nationalist and religious-conservative political regime, and a "dividing line", in Ergun Ozbudun's words, which results from the integration of binomial political, social and cultural structures, is now one of the narrative marks of the Turkish one-man government. As a result, this authoritarian-national-religious stance influenced Turkish gender policies and had consequences for women's political citizenship and the role of women in Turkey. Here, the patriarchal national unity shares the focus on the family as a moral basis, accuses the West of attempts to dissolve the traditional Turkish values and raises questions about a possible ironic withdrawal of Turkey from the Istanbul Convention. This instrumentalization of women, traditionally a propagandist channel of the Islamic parties' political agenda in Turkey, establishes the gender as a reference of Turkey's current national-religious framework, where the pious woman, the symbol of the Ottoman cultural heritage and the ideal type of national authenticity, contrasts with the progressive, secular and western woman. This paper debates the institution of a «New Turkey» from a gender perspective and argues that it is a right-wing conservative gender regime that politicizes gender issues and matters associated to the women's bodies, imposing codes behavioural and limiting women's rights in Turkey. To this end, it relies on a national-religious structure that, through a religious re-interpretation of Turkish nationalism, is opposed to the western defence of gender equality and the (foreign) terminology of gender. Key words - Gender; Islam; Nationalism; Political Regime; Populism.