Standing Against Fathers, Husbands and the State: The Intertwined Repertoires of Women's Movements in Turkey

In this paper we intend to analyze four decades of women's movements in Turkey, with their various phases, diverse tendencies and the dynamic repertoires of action and discourse they built: from the left wing women's movements of the 70's, to the first and second generation feminists, from muslim women's identity movement to kurdish women's claims and finally to new solidarities between them as a major outcome of the Gezi Park Resistance. In this perspective, firstly we will briefly examine the emergence of these diverse but connected tendencies in women's movements history. In a second part we will elaborate the ways actors from groups claiming women's rights and/or feminism build their subjectivities and we will search for references to their counterparts, to their own past and also to international cases in this process. Finally we will try to start a discussion based on the role of Gezi Park and the Taksim Square as a public space were actors could learn in experience how to be political subjects -different but unified; a public space promoting dialogue and even complicity between these diverse tendencies, all of them fighting neoliberal politics, male domination and state violence. We will end the paper with a special emphasis on women's groups actions developed around the solidarity movement during and after the curfew in Cizre.