‘Men in crisis’: Similarities between Anti-feminist Mobilization and Popular Feminism in Turkey

Funda Huelague analyses two seemingly contrasting interpretations of gendered harm in the discourse around ‘men in crisis,’ highly popular in today’s Turkey: one promoted by the increasingly organized Turkish anti-feminist movement and one advocated by the popular feminism of urban knowledge workers. Drawing on a Gramscian framework, her paper shows that, to solve the perceived crisis of masculinity, anti-feminists aim at re-establishing a divine gender order by calling on individuals to live in accordance with the Islamic idea of fıtrat (nature/creation). By contrast, popular feminism interprets men’s crisis as a matter of psychological maladaptation. Hülagü argues that these two positions, in spite of being seemingly opposed, overlap in their individualized treatment of the issue at stake, either by moralizing or by psychologizing the ‘men-in-crisis’ trope. Both discourses, Hülagü concludes, are instances of anti-politics, as they de-politicize the complex social transformations in Turkey as well as the power relations underlying them.