Legal Reforms as Authoritarian Technologies: Sexual Violence, Punishment, and State Feminism in Turkey

• In Event: Violence, Policing, and Criminal Law

Abstract

How do authoritarian states implement gender reforms while consolidating power and constraining feminist agendas? This paper examines Turkey’s 2005 sexual assault law, tracing how feminist demands were selectively incorporated, modified, or excluded in the reform process. Drawing on courtroom observations, interviews with judges, prosecutors, lawyers, and activists, and analysis of case files and legislative documents, I show that the reforms—while introducing key gains such as the criminalization of marital rape and elimination of discriminatory distinctions—operated through patterned inclusions and exclusions that depoliticized sexual violence, emphasized punitive and medico-legal interventions, and reinforced heteropatriarchal norms.

Building on the concept of state feminism, I argue that these reforms reflect a contemporary reconfiguration in which the Turkish state positions itself as protector of women and children while consolidating moral authority and expanding mechanisms of control. Rather than treating authoritarianism and gender reform as contradictory, this case demonstrates how feminist claims can be absorbed into state strategies, narrowing the political terrain for contesting gender inequality. Ongoing debates over medical castration and capital punishment illustrate how punitive expansion continues to structure the governance of sexual violence.

This analysis contributes to sociology of law scholarship by highlighting the paradoxes of feminist legal engagement under authoritarian or hybrid regimes: formal legal reforms can secure symbolic gains while simultaneously extending state regulatory power, pathologizing perpetrators, and depoliticizing structural critiques. Turkey’s experience underscores the dual role of law as both instrument of social justice and technology of authoritarian governance.

Author

• Tugce Ellialti-Kose, University of Guelph