(iPoster) Kulturkampf around the “Holy Family” and Gender: The Crisis of Peoplehood

• In Event: Poster Session: Women and Politics

Abstract

The Turkish Minister of Family and Social Services, Mahinur Özdemir Göktaş, heralded the year of 2025 as the first "Family Year" of Turkey (Family Year Promotion Program Launch, January 13th, 2025). In a celebratory event dedicated to the “Year of Family,” the Turkish minister announced that the ministry had signed a bargain deal with the Turkish jewelry brand, Zen Diamond, for their personnel.
While the celebration of 2025 as the Family Year and the creation of the Population Policy and Family Institute upon two presidential decrees in December 2024 perfectly align with the AKP’s pronatalist and nativist turn since 2011, this picture is not idiosyncratic to Turkey. Quite the contrary, the 21st century is marked with ultra-right movements’ and governments' gendered rebranding and their aggressive turn to anti-gender discourses and politics across the Global North and South.
From Argentina to Hungary, from Poland to the US, from India to Turkey the first salient aspect of contemporary right-wing mobilizations and leadership is their attempt to overlap sex and sexuality with gender, denying the historical and social construction of the latter. In their outcry against sexual and gender equality, and gender as a historical construct, they handpick a single set of choices regarding sex, gender, and sexuality and elevate it to the preferred gender currency for all components of the society. With this act, the ‘proper’ or ‘preferred’ citizen and the family that is supposed to bring about this idealized persona of the regimes are painted with patriarchal, atavistic, heteronormative, and nativist tones. More and more the notion of the so-called “holy family” - which is under threat of external and foreign elements and internal enemies - has become the epicenter of social and political polarization and the kulturkampf between the reactionary and progressive forces of society. Hence, the notion of “holy family” becomes the linchpin where identity, nationhood, and polity (re)construction meet amidst deepening social, economic, and political fault lines.
In this piece I am exploring the resurgence of family in the discourse of contemporary right-wing, populist, and illiberal governance while using Turkey as a critical illustrative case. I seek answers to what kind of nation and polity is normatively aspired to by the right-wing and anti-gender politics, governments, and mobilizations by focusing on the conceptualization and utilization of the family in global anti-gender and anti-gender equality documents (for example, The Charter of the Rights of the Family, The Geneva Consensus Declaration Intermarium Regional Conference, Petition against the EU Accession to the Istanbul Convention, A Joint Petition for Europeans Say No to Redefining Parenthood). By chronologically tracing the pronatalist laws and regulations and the nativist discourses around the family, body, and female reproductive health in Turkey, I aim to pinpoint the flare ups of family discourse. This in return sheds light on the strategic instrumentalization of the holy family to create a “rally around the flag” impact.

Author

• Elif Savas, UMass Amherst