Feminist, Ally or Outsider: Analyzing the 2019 "Un Violador En Tu Camino" Protests in Turkey As a Male Researcher

This research discusses the reflexivity and positionality of a male researcher working on a feminist case study while it explores why and how protests inspire other protests in distant places. Studies on the diffusion of protests and social movements stress the necessity of geographical, historical, organizational or cultural proximities between countries as the factors that facilitate the spread of ideas, frames, identities and repertoires of collective action from one country to another. Yet in the last two decades, the explosion of various protests across the globe and their mobilizing impact on each other challenged this established view. The 2019 "Un violador en tu camino" protests against the gendered violence and femicides in Turkey was a remarkable example of this phenomenon: While these protests were originally choreographed and performed by the Chilean feminist collective Las Tesis in November 2019 and became popular worldwide, Turkey emerged as the most contentious site of this protest wave despite absence of abovementioned proximity factors. Designed as a case study employing Grounded Theory methodology and in-depth interviews, this study introduces the concept of affinitive diffusion to explain that perceived similarities, attachment to a transnational identity and multi-layered resonance of a collective action repertoire may cause the cross-national diffusion of protests. Meanwhile, it also explores the limitations of being a male researcher to conduct such a case study and discusses the potential benefits of Haraway’s “situated knowledge” to navigate under such circumstances.