Third ISA Forum of Sociology (July 10-14, 2016)

JS-44

Democracy in the Squares: Global Resistence Movements and Women

RC48 Social Movements, Collective Actions and Social Change (host committee)
RC47 Social Classes and Social Movements

Language: English

A new wave of protest movements has emerged everywhere in the world, ranging from the Middle East, to the European cities, as well as Brazil and Ukraine. These movements follow transnational dynamics, while the domain of politics remain at the national scale. Citizens of the world elaborate new democratic imaginaries. A new public culture of contestation appears with art becoming its intrinsic dimension. These movements that we want to examine contribute to the enactment of forms of citizenship in the public square redefining the political subject. Especially female activists’ struggles in the global resistance movements reveal the emergence of new subjectivities through the act of resistance. 
While sociologists believe in the existence of a rupture between these newly emerging struggles and the heritage of the past social struggles, there are also remarkable continuities. The rupture women activists in the Tahrir Square created with patriarchy can only be understood with reference to Egyptian feminism. While Kurdish, Turkish, nationalist, leftist and Islamist female activists developed a sense of sisterhood during the Gezi movement in Istanbul, this sisterhood has been developing since the 1990s, along with the evolution of Turkey’s feminisms. Women in resistance movements experience a dual suffering and have to challenge both the authoritarian/neoliberal regimes and the patriarchy that pervaded the movement along with the society. We will try to understand the new subjectivities constructed by female activists of these global resistance movements as a mixed consequence of the experience of resistance and the feminist heritage. Posters: