The women’s movement in Turkey is struggling since the 1980’s to demonstrate the structural causes of gender violence and to obtain a legal framework to fight against it. In this presentation I will focus on women’s organizations who define themselves as “revolutionary” groups, fighting against patriarchy and capitalism. For them, legal reform and the implementation of the law are in no way an ultimate goal.
Studies on the relationship between social movements and the law have often looked at it as a unidimensional process: legal framing supports social movements by allowing them to « name » their grievances, to « blame » the responsible actors or institutions, and to « claim » action or redress by the authorities (Felstiner, Abel, and Sarat 2007). This process can imply progressive institutionalization of the movement, as has been the case for part of the women’s movement in Turkey in the 1990’s (Bora and Günal 2002). It is also based on the implicit understanding that feminist movements mainly target a better handling of gender violence by the state, and equal treatment under the law.
This presentation will look at the link between the legal framing of the struggle against gender violence (Pedriana 2006) and the revolutionary stance held by a large portion of the women’s movement in Turkey. My findings are based on a one-year ethnographic research among fifteen women’s organizations in Istanbul. They show that for these « revolutionary women », the legal framework is a « grammar to think injustice » (Agrikoliansky 2010, 225), yet it is only one of the areas of a multidimensional struggle for women’s liberation. I suggest that the term « organized self-defense » (örgütlü özsavunma) which is increasingly referred to by women and feminist groups in Turkey, is related to the tension between a staunch opposition to patriarchal state institutions, and the necessity to appeal to them in gender violence cases, through the law.
I will firstly analyze how revolutionary women’s groups in Turkey consider the legal framework to be the achievement of their own struggle. These legal provisions, currently being dismantled, thus become a language that encourages mass mobilizing in public space. Secondly, I will focus on how these women use the judicial arena as a space to produce a feminist counter-discourse on the law, to uncover the workings of « male justice » within the « patriarchal state ». Finally, I will conclude on the ambivalent aspects of the concept of organized self-defense.
Agrikoliansky, Éric. 2010. “11. Les usages protestataires du droit.” In Penser les mouvements sociaux, 225–43. Recherches. Paris: La Découverte.
Bora, Aksu, and Asena Günal. 2002. 90’larda Türkiye’de feminizm. İletişim.
Felstiner, William L. F., Richard L. Abel, and Austin Sarat. 2007. “The Emergence and Transformation of Disputes: Naming, Blaming, Claiming ….” In Theoretical and Empirical Studies of Rights. Routledge.
Pedriana, Nicholas. 2006. “From Protective to Equal Treatment: Legal Framing Processes and Transformation of the Women’s Movement in the 1960s.” American Journal of Sociology 111 (6): 1718–61.
