Oriente Medio News.- Thank you very much for talking to us, Esra. We would like to start by learning a little about your biography, your academic career and main research topics.
Esra Sarioglu.- Thank you so much for the invitation. I’ll give a quick overview of my academic journey. I studied philosophy and modern history at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul before moving to the United States to pursue a PhD in sociology at SUNY Binghamton. Sociology program at Binghamton gave me a solid grounding in world-systems analysis and historical sociology, but it also allowed me to explore my own interests in labor, gender, and globalization, urban ethnography and neoliberalism, as well as feminist theory. My ethnographic work does not fall within the definition of world-systems analysis or a historical sociology, but world-systems theory still informs my thinking as well as the questions I ask. By emphasizing the combined and uneven development of capitalism, the world-systems approach, for example, cautions against homogenizing accounts of neoliberalism and global capitalism. As I went along exploring the gendered and class-differentiated scenarios that transpire in urban Turkey in the context of global capitalism through the lens of the body and emotions, I was aware that neoliberalism in Turkey as well as in the wider Global South, does not necessarily follow the pattern of the Global North, but rather reveals distinct trajectories of urban transformation, political change, labor formation, and gender formation. Upon receiving my PhD, I joined the faculty of political science at Ankara University. During the right-wing populist moment, our university campus was the first to be crushed by the AKP government and police. Currently, I work at the Center for the History of Emotions at Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin as a researcher. Most of the researchers here are historians, from whom I have learned a lot, and I now consider myself a sociologist of gender and globalization with a focus on labor, emotions, the body, and violence.
OMN.- Among your research topics, caught our attention your study on feminist theory that you link with Turkey, a country where there are several social, identity and cultural issues under debate. How would you describe the situation of women in Turkey, especially their political activism and their participation in resistance movements to authoritarianism and machismo?
ES.- The current situation is quite complex and there is a great deal of diversity and inequality among women. It might help to point out some turning points in the AKP government’s authoritarian rule, which has become increasingly oppressive and violent over the last decade. In 2015, the government carried out large-scale military operations in Kurdish cities, marking the failure of the Kurdish peace process. After a failed coup attempt in 2016, a state of emergency was declared, lasting until 2018. The period was marked by an extensive purge of civil servants, including left-wing academics and Kurdish politicians and office-holders, the de facto suspension of the rule of law, a strong sense of resentment and punitiveness in politics, the complete muzzling of the media, the forced suppression of political opposition, and one-man rule. In the same period, the AKP government’s anti-gender-equality politics ramped up, and women’s and LGBTI+ organizations pointed out an alarming increase in homophobia, transphobia, and violence against women.
During this turbulent time, there was an unexpected political development: the revival of women’s street activism and a rise in social media activism. Although protests and public gatherings were violently suppressed, women took to the streets and clashed with police. As a result of women’s activism, some of the AKP government’s plans to amend laws governing violence against women, divorce, and marriage were halted. During a time when no other collective movement could maintain its street presence, thousands of women and LGBTI+ people participated in feminist night walks held on International Women’s Day. Repression by the AKP government played a part in crushing organized political opposition in Turkey. In the absence of other political opposition, women’s mobilization gained momentum, giving the opposition fresh impetus.
Across Latin America and the Middle East, women are now leading resistance movements. In this regard, Turkey is not an exception. In recent years, many have pointed out the entanglements between authoritarianism and machismo. Clearly, the bond between authoritarianism and machismo is not new, but the widespread irreverence against masculinist authorities displayed by women around the world is. De-patriarchalization has become more pronounced in recent decades as gender hierarchies have dissolved following a series of large-scale socio-economic shifts and political changes. This has resulted in new generations of women who are unwilling to comply with older forms of masculinist control in work, family, and politics. For these women, resisting authoritarian political regimes that encroach upon their bodies and lives has become almost an automatic response, since they were born into a world (in its broadest sense) where machismo and outdated forms of masculinist control, which anchored today’s authoritarian governments, had already begun to lose their cultural appeal.
OMN.- You have a project called «New Woman and Moral Politics: A History of Women’s Feelings and Agency in Turkey.» Tell us a little about it and what some of your findings have been.
ES.- The new generation of women that I have mentioned; the women who appear less inclined to conform to outdated forms of masculinist control, intrigue me quite a bit. As I see it, this represents a new mode of femininity, which can be described as the New Woman. The term is not intended to be an identity category or self-identification, but rather an analytical tool for understanding an emerging mode of femininity in Turkey in the context of neoliberal global capitalism.
Demonstration on International Women’s Day in Türkiye
It is true that the New Woman existed in Turkey and elsewhere prior to globalization. There have been several vivid descriptions of the New Woman across the globe offered by scholars. Today’s New Women in Turkey come from a wide range of classes and are of various religious faiths. Nonetheless, New Woman’s singularity arises from her social origins: this new mode of femininity emerged in urban Turkey at a time when legal and social changes contributed to de-patriarchization. As a result of such a change, women’s bodies were released from the control of prevailing forms of masculinist control, resulting in new bodily capacities and new ways to live, especially for those without privileged backgrounds. The New Woman reflects these new affective capacities and embodied modes of being in the world at a time when some of the masculinist hierarchical social structures are fading.
This project examines the socio-political journey of the New Woman from the era of neoliberal global capitalism to the right-wing populist moment in Turkey today. My focus is on the New Women from the working classes and the lower-middle classes. I found that New Women’s daily bodily ways of being in the world, emotional orientations and habits, as well as interactional capacities made them desirable workers in the service economy that has expanded in the context of neoliberal global capitalism. However, a shift in Turkish politics toward authoritarianism has sparked a backlash against gender equality, placing New Women at greater risk of violence.
The phenomenon of the New Woman also explains, to a certain extent, the renewed appeal and popularity of feminism in Turkey, as well as women’s resistance to authoritarianism and violence against women in recent years. A staple of Turkish authoritarianism is gender politics. The AKP’s authoritarian rule presents a mix of anti-“gender ideology,” homophobic and transphobic politics, pronatalist and pro-family policies, all framed within an overarching anti-gender-equality politics. While the legal framework of gender equality is still relatively strong, the AKP government has persistently developed strategies to undermine it. The government utilized even postcolonial and decolonial discourses to brand gender equality as something alien, Western, and Christian, and thus incompatible with what they call the Turkish Muslim culture. The AKP government also used authoritarian measures such as criminalization of dissent and a gendered moralization strategy. Moralization often meant the revival of outdated viewpoints on modesty, morality, and decency. With moralization, the AKP government aimed its ire at large masses of women, including New Women, LGBTI+, and queer people who do not support the party. The moralization strategy was manifested in a variety of ways, ranging from Tayyip Erdogan’s hectoring attempt to shame women by calling them sluts publicly to the revival of moral vigilantism, where women are assaulted in public for nothing more than smoking, sitting cross-legged in public, or exercising in parks.
OMN.- In general terms, many of your academic papers focus on gender issues in Turkey. Two questions arise here. What is the role of women and the LGBT community in Turkey in the processes of Turkish identity reconfiguration? I think of the participation of women and homosexuals in the Gezi resistance, in Bogazici University, etc. On the other hand, what are the strategies of national and international visibility that women and the Turkish LGBT community have had and that are worth rescuing in your opinion?
ES.- In Turkey, political fault lines around religion and ethnicity are inextricably linked to people’s psyches, signaling Turkish identity’s complex legacy. Back in the first half of the 20th century when the Turkish republic was in the making, women were of great importance.
The integration of middle-class and patriotic New Women into the Turkish republican project was crucial to the constitution of Turkishness as a national-secular identity. Here, Kemalism, the official ideology of the Turkish Republic founded in 1923 by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, played a pivotal role. As a political ideology, it created a lot of space for women in society and politics while bringing feminine embodiment and subjectivity together with nationalist modernity, which is often viewed as being in opposition to Islam and traditions. Among the consequences is the exclusion of Armenian New Women and feminists, who were seen as threats to Turkish nation after the Armenian genocide, as studied by historian Lerna Ekmekçioğlu.
The Body Unburdened: Violence, Emotions, and the New Woman in Turkey
From the 1980s onward, feminists and women’s groups have openly challenged state-imposed authoritarian secularism and Kemalism, as well as modern nationalistic social forms. Kurdish women’s movement has had tremendous influence in opposing Turkish statehood and reconfiguring Turkish national identity in the past and continues to do so. Kurdish mothers’ long-standing activism on behalf of their children, who had been murdered or forcefully disappeared by the Turkish state in the 1990s, also disrupted traditional and familial understandings of motherhood. Kurdish women’s activism reconstituted motherhood as a political subjectivity to hold the state accountable. LGBTI+ and queer activism in Turkey, like feminist activism, is animated by anti-nationalist and anti-militarist agendas. Until now, homonationalism, in which homosexuals are complicit in national political agendas, has not been a political trend among LGBTI+ activists in Turkey. Women, feminists, and LGBTI+ groups are also at the forefront of the current resistance against the AKP’s authoritarian rule, transforming secularism away from traditional Kemalist, militarist, and nationalist entanglements while resisting Sunni dominance at the same time. It wouldn’t surprise me if there were more instances of queering national/sexual identities by women and LGBTI+ groups in the near future, contesting heteronormative nationalist Turkish masculinity.
OMN.- Your book «The Body Unburdened: Violence, Emotions, and the New Woman in Turkey» (Oxford University Press, 2022) was recently published. Tell us a little about the book and why it would be interesting for Latin American students and scholars to approach it.
ES.- The book is a feminist study of emotional and embodied dynamics of gender that invigorate the new urban economy, women’s sociality and activism within cities, as well as authoritarian politics in today’s Turkey. It uses emotions, particularly shame, embarrassment, and honor, as an optic of sociological analysis. By illustrating new emotional modalities of women’s agency and the affective intensities that authoritarian politics rely on, the book illustrates how these emotions and bodies have taken on immense political and economic significance. Latin American students and scholars might be interested in the line of analysis I develop in the book, which aims to revitalize scholarship on gender in the Global South, by suggesting an alternative direction for the study of gender and globalization in uncertain times. I trace the uneven relations between trade openness that neoliberal global capitalism is built on and bodily openness, by which human beings are simultaneously open to people and places, as well as to violence and hostility. This highlights the political-ontological bind that young urban working women from popular classes face in today’s Turkey.
Veiled Sentiments
Everyday embodiment, bodily habits and emotional ways of inhabiting the world are crucial to understanding new forms of women’s agency and the vulnerabilities attached to it in the authoritarian period. My approach is influenced by critical phenomenology, especially its feminist, queer, and anti-racist strands, which examine how bodies participate in social structures, whether by maintaining them or disrupting them. The New Woman’s body expresses new possibilities for women’s autonomy, grounding, and orientation that complex social and political changes in the global era lend feminine embodiment. This new embodiment expresses those abilities women have acquired in the global era in terms of forging a new relationship to their bodies, to the world, and to others. My term for this is a distinct orientation toward openness. New Woman’s embodiment in Turkey communicates this feminist vision. All the ideas reinforced and reiterated by the New Woman’s embodiment, embodied interaction, and sociality are, however, markedly at odds with the gender order that the AKP government wants to impose. This eventually has turned the New Woman into both a feminist icon of resistance and the target of violent hostility during the reign of the AKP government.
OMN.- The study of the body, emotions and feelings of both Middle Eastern men and women have, for the most part, been marginalized from academic and specialized studies. This is starting to change and your book is an example of this paradigm shift to how we approach the study of the Middle East and its dynamics. What is your opinion about this paradigm shift and how it enriches our understanding of what is happening in the region?
ES.- A landmark study on emotions and women in the Middle East, which has now become a classic ethnography in anthropology is Lila Abu-Lughod’s Veiled Sentiments, published in 1986. It set the paradigm for decades to come in many ways. The approach Abu-Lughod took to women in the Bedouin tribes of Egypt marked a shift from a particular understanding of cultural feminism to a post-structuralist feminist analysis. Furthermore, Abu-Lughod’s study of women’s lyric poetry as discourses that express women’s desires and agency within the framework of tribal, kinship, and religious social structures shook the dominant understanding of culture in the Middle East as static, unchanging, and ahistorical, which denied women’s agency in some way.
Two decades later, another book on emotions and women in the Middle East took the academic world by storm. Published in 2005, Politics of Piety, Saba Mahmood’s anthropological study on Salafi women’s piety movement in urban Egypt examines the cultural politics of Islamic revival. The book shows how Islamic women’s religious agency poses a challenge to secular and normative assumptions embedded in liberal politics. Based on my interpretation of this book, I situate it within the broader political context of the post- 9/11 period in North America. In the aftermath of 9/11, feminist arguments about women’s oppression were hijacked by political elites to justify the US military intervention in the Middle East. It was again common for Northern-Western media to depict Islam and so-called «Muslim culture» as wellsprings of women’s oppression in the Middle East. By focusing on Salafi women’s bodily and emotional piety practices, Mahmood disrupted the northern gaze. A key argument in the book is that Salafi women cultivate submissiveness and modest femininity as part of their religious agency in the service of God, not as part of gender oppression. Furthermore, Manhood wanted to challenge secular feminist assumptions about women’s empowerment, autonomy, and dependency by highlighting illiberal forms of women’s agency.
Contemporary studies on emotions and the body in the Middle East, unlike the early studies I just mentioned, move away from a focus on religion as the main site of scholarly inquiry on women. To the extent that scholars’ main motivation is no longer the disruption of the Northern gaze but opening up novel lines of critical inquiry by taking the Middle East as a departure point, contemporary studies on emotions and the body do indeed represent a paradigm shift. The new studies no longer analyze women in the Middle East merely in relation to religion but rather examine how women navigate everyday life as students, citizens, refugees, sex workers, laborers, consumers, revolutionaries, wives, young girls, urban residents, or welfare state beneficiaries facing a series of complex shifts brought about by wars, neoliberal policies, or disasters in the context of global capitalist restructuring. In these studies, gender, race, class, ethnicity, age, sexuality along with religion figure prominently. Scholars are interested in how the state and economic actors regulate different bodies and desires in multifarious ways. These studies, in a sense, normalize intersectional analyses.
A focus on the body and emotions has also opened up new venues for examining social hierarchies and inequality, transformation and change along with politics. Researchers examined war, violence, resistance, body politics, labor practices, and everyday life in the Middle East by exploring affective intensities, precarity, felt experience, bodily vulnerabilities, the sensory world, and embodiment. Studies such as these generate new ideas about politics, resistance, and coexistence.
OMN.- Reading your work from Latin America invites us to think about all the thematic intersectionalities between our region and the Middle East where there is a whole cultural revolution led largely by women (I think of Iran, Turkey, Afghanistan, the Arab world and even Israel) What would be your reflection on these intersectionalities and what windows of opportunity open for scholars and students from the Middle East and Latin America.
ES.- Thank you for bringing this up. I am also very excited about these thematic intersectionalities. As I see it, women’s demonstrations against the rise of the Global Right, feminist and queer opposition to anti-gender ideologies, alliances between feminist and LGBTI+ groups, massive protests against violence against women as well as women’s resistance to today’s authoritarian regimes show that women’s entitlement to their own bodies and to the world has become stronger and that feminism has gained popularity in both regions. Women’s, feminist, and queer activism, as well as scholarly studies in both regions, were successful in putting the powerful male actors on the defensive by speaking back to patriarchy, machismo, and authoritarianism. It would be great if we could emphasize this achievement more.
In addition, it might be a good time for scholars and students from the Middle East and Latin America to develop transnational theoretical frameworks that establish connections between the Middle East and Latin America. Feminist scholars have often criticized the ways in which gender metaphors function in the global system. A 2001 article by anthropologist Carla Freeman draws attention to the gendered association of femininity with the local and masculinity with the global. Two decades of monumental changes have altered how gender metaphors operate in global society. Global capitalist corporations are now seeking international legitimacy by supporting women’s rights. The feminist, queer, and LGBTI+ movements, on the other hand, have become transnational actors shaping progressive political agendas. In today’s world, femininity is no longer associated with the local. As scholars examine how this change is connected to power relations, they also highlight how it opens up new possibilities. In the course of this process, it is worth working on a transnational paradigm that connects the Middle East and Latin America.
A transnational paradigm based on the concept of the Global South might be useful for working across national borders.Within this framework, scholars examine gendered changes not as local or national processes, but as transnational processes articulated from the Global South. Scholars from the South have succeeded in disrupting the northern gaze, just as women have disrupted the male gaze. It is great, but I think we can do more to build south-south connections without being overly concerned with the northern gaze. As we attempt to rethink feminist potentialities in uncertain times, the Global South paradigm might help us connect current waves of women’s movement and the resurgence of feminism in both regions.