Rethinking the Relationship between Feminism and Republicanism at the Start of the Second Centennial the Republic of Turkey

As the Republic of Turkey heads off to its second centennial in a context of increasing authoritarianism, democratic backsliding and anti-gender mobilizations that threaten gender equality and feminism, scholarly debate evaluating the first hundred years of the republic from gender perspectives is taking the scene. However, feminist scholarship in Turkey been predominantly focusing on republicanism as a political system and paying scant attention to republicanism as a complex body of political thought which has found critical reception among feminist political theorists. As Anne Phillips argues, feminist political theorists have been largely skeptical of republicanism; and when they engage it, they have predominantly engaged the civic republican tradition, particularly focusing on Hannah Arendt’s work in search for a feminist politics that transcends the public/private binary and complex subject questions. Feminist scholars studying Turkey also had due reason to be skeptical of early republicanism of the modernizing regime which was very much influenced by the republican motherhood paradigm offering limited room for women’s political agency. Yet, the predominant focus on freedom as only realized in grassroots political action and the skepticism of institutionalism rendered an incomplete engagement with the complexity of republican political theory. At the cusp of the second centennial of the Republic, this paper invites a rethinking of republicanism vis-à-vis feminist political theory with a focus on the neo-republican conception of freedom as non-domination. The paper suggests that neo-Roman republican thinking provides critical insights for feminist politics particularly at a time when rising anti-gender mobilizations aim at restoring the power of arbitrary interference in women and LGBTI+ choices on multiple arenas such as the family, university, workplace and politics. Feminist republican thinking provides insights to envision much needed connections between formal and informal political participation, and ways to overcome arbitrariness on multiple levels and institutional domains of governance. Thinking with and through scholarship in contemporary feminist political theory that critically engages with Phillip Pettit’s republicanism, the paper suggests ways to overcome some of its limitations via insights from feminist deliberative democracy and feminist institutionalism.