Radical Democratic Iterations: Gender and Sexuality within Social Movements

How are ideas about democracy and inclusion transformed within social and political movements in light of universal norms? While there is a rich body of scholarship on how democratic meanings and norms within particular polities transform and are subject to contestation and reinterpretation, we understand less well how this process plays out within social movements. Building on Seyla Benhabib’s theory of ‘democratic iterations’, which was focused on liberal democratic polities, I suggest ‘radical democratic iterations’ as a framework to analyse how understandings of democracy and inclusion, particularly with regards to gender and sexual identities, are transformed within social and political movements.

In this paper I explore two case studies drawn from my ongoing research to illustrate this framework: first, gender inclusion and women’s participation in democratic politics, focusing on the transformative redefinition of gender roles within Turkey’s Kurdish public sphere; second, Kurdish LGBTI+ organizing and politics, highlighting their significance on multiple levels of political and democratic culture. My reconceptualization treats these cases as interconnected and mutually constitutive, while attending to the broader intersecting exclusionary structures surrounding politics of gender and sexuality, such as racism and class, in modern Turkey.

A key finding of this research is the importance of attending to how social and political movements understand gender and sexual rights. Doing so facilitates our reading of their democratic visions, as well as the current state of democracy within which they operate. Through these examples, I argue that the framework of “radical democratic iterations” offers a valuable lens to understand how democratic visions can transform within and among social, political and ethnic movements, and their ability to influence “strong” publics, such as by pushing for legislative changes even within a nation-state they are critical of.