Gender and Politics in Contemporary Turkey

Keynote Speaker: Prof. Yeşim Arat (Boğaziçi University)

Under the rule of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), women’s rights in Turkey as well as their status in politics, society, and economic life have gone through multiple changes and challenges. With 19 years in government, the AKP and its gender regime have become one of the most debated research topics in Turkey (among others by Kandiyoti 2016, Parmaksız 2016, Özkazanç 2019, Ünal 2021, Arat 2021). While the AKP’s gender regime is shaped and reshaped by the party’s illiberal and authoritarian turns and pro-Islamist stands, responses from feminist civil society organizations and other political parties are developed within the context of the AKP’s anti-feminist agenda, of which the withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention is just one of the recent examples. The recent economic, societal, and environmental crises both at national and global levels make the scholarly reconsideration of the gender regime in Turkey mandatory. Simultaneously, women’s political representation has been fluctuating and subjected to shifts within the larger political context and AKP’s gender regime. The drop in female MPs between the two legislative elections in 2015, the “record-setting” legislature of 2018 in light of the fading importance of Turkey’s national assembly, as well as the Good Party’s reversal of its initial commitment not to create women’s branches while being at the same time the least feminized party are some of the developments which require in-depth scholarly investigation. These trends also show that while women’s descriptive representation need assessment, the debate should also go beyond. Thus, promoting interdisciplinary approach, this workshop aims to provide new insights into the multi-actor and multi-faceted features of the gender regime and women’s political representation in the contemporary Turkish context. 

Within this framework, the workshop aims to convene submissions that focus on the following:

• Women/Gender/politics: conceptual debates in the Turkish context


• Methodological approaches: how to study gender regimes and women’s representation


• Gender regime and system change in Turkey


• Historical perspective on women’s representation in Turkish politics and how it’s relevant today


• Women´s involvement in Turkey’s contentious politics since 1960s onwards 


• Women in Turkish political parties from the local perspective 


• Women between politics and civil society: conservative and liberal


• New political parties and avenues for women´s involvement 


• Gendered challenges: gender-based violence, sexism, hidden challenges

Call For Papers

Please send a 300-word abstract and a 150-word bio to: sinem.kourou@yale.edu and lucie.drechselova@ehess.fr by 1st March 2022, using the subject “Gender and Politics in Contemporary Turkey.” The abstract should feature original research and specify the methodology and data used in the contribution. Selected participants will be informed by the 20th of March. They will be asked to send the full draft by 25th April 2022.

Organizers

Lucie Drechselová, Assistant Professor, CETOBaC, EHESS, lucie.drechselova@ehess.fr

Nur Sinem Kourou, Ph.D. student, Fox International Fellow, Yale University, sinem.kourou@yale.edu

Council of Middle East at Yale University

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