Between protest and resistance: A Radical Feminist desire to change everything and build new feminist futures in Turkey

• In Event: Decolonial and Feminist Resistance

Proposal

Drawing inspiration from feminist women struggles in Turkey, this article seeks to analyze the crucial importance of diverse feminists’ struggles in the making of new epistemic and ontological realities during their experiments in creating new political societies and constructing democratic governance beyond the nation state. Taking struggle as the starting point for analysis, and from the standpoint of the ‘Global South”, I will focus on the dynamic nature of struggle through reconceptualizing struggle as a space and mechanism with emergent possibilities to create new epistemic and ontological realities (new subjects, new knowledge, new practices).



I will do this by looking at those diverse feminist women’s movements who came together and united with other social movements (such as labor, religious and ethnic) under the umbrella of the Peoples Democratic Congress (HDK), a social movement that was formed in 2011. The paper draws on data collected during a three-year research project exploring the learning and knowledge-making practices of the HDK, and involved participatory research, , interviews and documentary analysis of key movement documents. I argue that the lessons emerging from these diverse feminist movements’ struggle are crucial for our understanding of the collective work of making an alternative and meaningful new form of life with a radical moral philosophy. In doing so, they provide new concepts/knowledge and practices, institutions and alternative visions of freedom, democracy and power.



I argue that through acting within the limits of impossibility framed by the intersecting forms of power (capitalism, colonialism, nationalism, patriarchy), struggle becomes a crucial mechanism not only enabling women to challenge multiple intersecting oppressions but also in providing women with the power to demand a new form of life outside and beyond the conventional spaces of work and life. In doing so they turn an abstract desire, into the possibility of action in the everyday struggles of the here and now.



Through recognition of the body in all its heterogeneity (memories, knowledges, wisdom), recognition of intersecting violent structures in the making of difference, the intersecting dynamics between various struggles, as well as the adaptation of intersectionality as a mechanism of social change, these feminists movements do not only demand new radicality, new relationality, new intersubjectivity and sociability and solidarity between diverse feminist bodies, they also create new strategic knowledge and concepts about the self, the collective and the world. All of this, not only defines the epistemological standpoint but also radically shapes those ontological new structures as they construct new and alternative forms of life.

Author

• Birgul Kutan, University of Sussex