A series of demonstrations shook Turkey with an unprecedented force, resulting in early elections scheduled to take place in July 22nd, 2007. These were the largest demonstrations of the country’s modern history. Furthermore, they were organized by women, presented by women, and mostly attended by women. Not many women in the world could gather such a political power, even triggering a process that brings a government down.

These developments were called “Women’s Revolution” by many observers from Turkey, a country caught in the middle of the East and the West, and still the only Muslim and secular democracy in the world. Feminists should better understand the dynamics of such “revolution,” for the future of Global South’s feminism seems to be hidden in the logic that brought these women together.

These demonstrations grasped the attention of even my ten years old son. One day he asked “What is Kemalism?” Sometimes he poses questions so unexpectedly that I am caught off guard. I answer, “Exaggerating the task of loving Ataturk.” Realizing my evasive maneuver, he gently changes the subject. How could I have addressed the question?

Kemalism as the official ideology of the country has been central to almost all public debates concerning politics since the founding of the republic in 1923. Being critiqued by even those who critiqued each other, Kemalism resisted various alternative projects in diverse political contexts, yet not without change. Its plastic nature ensured its hegemony in corporatist, Keynesian and even neo-liberal times. One wonders whether Kemalism would survive the Liberal Conservative times of Neo-Islamist AKP (Justice and Development Party).

AKP was founded by the younger generation of activists who have been a part of Milli Görüş Movement, an early Islamist movement led by Necmettin Erbakan. Displacing the earlier cadres of the older generation, the new politicians representing Neo-Islamism carried AKP to political power, securing the party an undoubted victory in the last general elections that took place in November 2002.[1] Despite such a stunning victory however, AKP failed to nominate its leader Tayyip Erdoğan as the president of the country and even failed to elect Erdoğan’s right hand Abdullah Gül as the president. Such a failure was in part due to a series of large demonstrations that were called by some as the “Women’s Revolution.”

The first demonstration took place in Ankara on April 14, 2007. Bringing together around one million people, this first meeting incited a series of gatherings that were called “Republic Demonstrations” or at times “Flag Demonstrations” by the organizers. Ataturkist Thought Association (ADD), run by a retired general with inclinations to organize a coup, and the Association in Support of Contemporary Living, put together by Kemalist women, were the co-organizers of theses meetings. Drawing on Kemalism these meetings created a social context and a political dynamic that ended up with the governments call for early elections. Can we really argue that modern women resisted and stopped an Islamist party in the name of modernity? I don’t think so.

In his “Emancipation(s)” Ernesto Laclau develops an important concept: the empty signifier.[2] “An empty signifier is, strictly speaking, a signifier without a signified,” he writes (p. 36). Describing the ways in which empty signifiers work, he writes, “The only possibility for a stream of sounds being detached from any particular signified while still remaining a signifier is if through the subversion of the sign which the possibility of an empty signifier involves, something is achieved which is internal to significations as such” (p. 36). Systems that draw on mechnisms of exclusions cannot attach meaning to themselves by the positivity of a signifier. Thus, they have to be built on empty signifiers: “...any system of signification is structured around an empty place resulting from the impossibility of producing an object which, nonetheless, is required by the systematicity of the system. (p. 40)

The various “Flag Demonstrations” we have witnessed this year have made visible the quality of Kemalism as an empty signifier--a system of thought, perception, and style constituted in a void. My emphasis on the nothingness in this space does not imply that a multiplicity of perspectives would bring together the content of the messages of these demonstrations. Rather, I am referring to the singularity of nothingness, cloaked by the materiality of a flag enveloping the emptiness.

The ideological content of the slogans chanted during these demonstrations makes visible what the flags make invisible: the function of the emptiness. This emptiness works to produce meaning for a system that has been constituted to exclude the different. This becomes apparent in the slogans chanted by the masses. These condemned the Justice and Development Party as bigots and put down Shari’a, the European Union, Kurds, boors, and the ignorant. Many of these points were discussed by others in Birikim and other journals and newspapers. Here, I want to focus instead on the idea of a “Women’s Revolution,” a theme that has been frequently voiced since the first demonstration that took place on April 14, 2007 in Ankara.

These demonstrations were, among other things, indeed women’s demonstrations. Many observers argued that the women who organized these demonstrations were the mouthpieces of other men with other agendas. But if we shift our attention from the speakers to those who make the women speak, we cannot understand the spirit of this movement. Women were behind these demonstrations. Furthermore they represented themselves as “the guardians of the Republic.” What kind of a system of exclusion and inclusion does such a process entail if one approaches it from women’s vantage point?

Chambers of Inclusion and Exclusion

We have to address several dimensions of this question. We can locate the first with reference to a symbolic example: Two organizers of the demonstration, Nur Serter and Necla Arat, received their invitation from the Republican People’s Party, the founding party of the republic, now headed by Deniz Baykal. These two will run as RPP candidates in the upcoming elections scheduled to take place on July 22, 2007.

Professor Serter is the architect and director of the “Persuasion Chambers” constructed in 2003 at Istanbul University to dissuade students from wearing the headscarf. We remember the violence embedded in these chambers. A minority was convinced. The rest were expelled from the university.

Professor Arat was behind the prosecution of Eren Keskin, a human rights activist and well known feminist. Arat organized a campaign against Keskin and has formally applied to the public prosecutor’s office, accusing Keskin of dishonoring the army. Keskin had spoken of cases of rape under military custody and charged that soldiers were responsible for these crimes.

These two examples make visible the trajectories of exclusion and inclusion in Turkey. The excluded are not ordinary women; they are agents active at the heart of politics, presented as threats to secularism and the national unity of Turkey. Such exclusions cannot be regarded merely as a case of “women against women.” We need to understand what kind of womanhood was produced here and what kinds of exclusions and inclusions this construction entails. In other words, we need to understand exactly what “secularism” and “national unity” mean.

The secularism that these Kemalist women support does not rely on freedom of thought and belief. The “national unity” slogan that they frequently chant does not draw on a unifying political stance. Their agenda is based on excluding “other” women by either “liberating” those who wear the headscarf or silencing those who make visible rape in the army. We cannot argue that these women are the mouthpieces of men with other agendas just because these Kemalist women’s agenda shares a vocabulary with contemporary nationalism in Turkey. Their deeds are an extension of the specific construction of “women as the guardians of the Republic.”

One can argue that such a politics strengthens patriarchy. Yet such a politics concurrently empowers and reproduces a politics of femininity. Rather then being (trans)formative and inclusive, their romanticized notion of “The Girls of the Republic” entails an exclusionary and conservative understanding of womanhood. It can liberate neither bourgeois nor middle and working class women. All these women can manage to get is a privileged place in the RPP’s list of candidates, joining the chorus of the least progressive and most militarist political party in the country.

Life Styles

The second dimension to explore for an understanding of women’s contribution to the Flag Demonstrations concerns the perception that a certain “lifestyle” is now under threat. Women are always interested in “life style” for we know that the borders of such a style pass through women’s bodies. This is why the headscarf is central to the politics of exclusion and inclusion. It symbolizes the border of “life styles.” The fear of trespassing such a border is not only related to Shariaphobia or fear of political Islam. Anti-EU slogans were constructed around the concept of “complete independence.” What could the EU and political Islam threaten simultaneously? What kind of a singular fear could these two strange bedfellows produce in Turkey? How can women be afraid of both?

We can make sense of this elusive fear by incorporating class into our analysis. The Republic’s promise to middle class women was to be “almost equal” middle class citizens if they chose to be virtuous mothers, self-sacrificing girls, and hardworking fellows of the nation and their homes. Such a hierarchy implied that such women would even carry a higher status than lower class men. Turkey has more academic women than many other western countries. It seems that this promise has been partially fulfilled.

Yet women in Turkey seem to be divided in two. On the one hand, we have well educated middle class professional women living lives distant from the undereducated and underemployed subaltern women who are themselves many steps down the ladder of development compared to the men from the same class. This is precisely why the privileged middle class women are partially right when they claim during their trips to EU for lobbying that “Turkish women are not the women you know; we are modern, powerful, and working women.”

On the other hand, since the 1980’s the profile of the elite women has changed significantly, signaling a weakening of the “Turkish Woman.” As the women and men of the periphery have moved toward the center at a fast pace, the old elite women have begun to lose their political and cultural hegemony to the new elite men. These conservative men from the periphery, almost all following AKP, were hungry for power. So the change in the class profile of the elite is gendered.

The coexistence of these “sister” developments in class and gender suggests that the emergent interest of elite women in the “Woman Question” was not only informed by the success of feminism. It should not be a surprise to find other articulations of such a “Feminism in Suits” in the short run. So far we have become familiar with a form of feminism that aims at liberating oppressed women by enlightening them. As politics on the ground get tougher, the discourse deployed gets more sexist and exclusionary.[3] Those who critique Nur Çintay[4] by calling her a “fat chick with a husband who cheats,” seem to be wearing flags, not suits! But their style is the same. Let’s destroy the nest of the chick if she flies without saluting my flag![5]

These women of privilege were not the only ones struck with fear of change. The institutionalization of neo-liberalism and the transformation of the nation-state resulted in deteriorating conditions for women of all walks of life. Women’s unemployment increased, insecure working conditions became widespread, and the public sector hired less and less skilled female labor. Thus, workers’ “life styles” were also threatened. Women are located in a specific space in this last group. Although Turkey has never had a proper welfare state, the state nevertheless worked as a mechanism in the redistribution of economic resources, lending itself to be deployed by subaltern classes through various forms of clientelism. Furthermore, the state raised the living conditions of lower classes through various forms of social spending in education and health. As a result, these classes had looked to the future with some hope.

As social spending decreased, the emergent deficit was filled in by further exploitation of women. Transferring the burden from the state to the family meant in reality that women had to shoulder the burden more and more. Consequently, women began to look after the sick and the old more frequently, moving away from the formal labor force, especially after having children. These tasks were represented as women’s traditional responsibility. Yet during that short period when people still believed in the social welfare state, it was still plausible to hope that things would become better: there were cheaper kindergartens in state enterprises and municipalities, there were health centers, free medicine and healthcare… All these positive developments affected people’s projections of their future. Yet as neo-liberalism moved further, they lost their hope to overcome some day…

These developments gave rise to a shared fear produced by different sources: The fear of change. Some were afraid of losing their privileges; others were afraid because they did not know what change would bring about. Yet others felt that the future would not bring anything positive to their lives. Whatever the fear, all joined the demonstrations.[6]

Courageous Grounds for Communicating Fear

These demonstrations were organized by two sister NGOs: Ataturkist Thought Association (ATA), run by a retired general with inclinations to organize a coup, and the Association in Support of Contemporary Living. Blessed by a variety of symbols such as Turkish flags and Ataturk buttons, these demonstrations presented themselves as fearless grounds for communicating fear. There was no risk of being attacked by the police, nor any chances of being detained or gassed. It is ironic that such difficult political objectives such as preserving the nation from decay can be pursued so easily… (Sometimes one wonders whether everything really repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce!)

Some observers see a civic potential, a glimpse of hope, or a sign of resistance in such marching masses. Sometimes people see what they want to see. It is strange that people’s discontent regarding a threat to secularism is expressed with symbols such as Ataturk buttons, flags, head bands with inscriptions like “Ataturk, it is you who we follow.” Some confuse these expressions with left politics in Turkey. It seems as if chanting slogans such as “complete independence” is enough to qualify you as a socialist. There are even those who think that one becomes a leftist if one equates struggle against fundamentalism with struggle against imperialism. These stances sadly make visible what little is left of left politics in Turkey.

I think those who label these demonstrations a “Women’s Revolution” are making fun of us. Even if one forces oneself to locate a barely visible potential to change anything in these demonstrations, it is just a bit of hope for restoration of what was. The hope embodied in these women is a nightmare for feminists. Remember, all the references to the spirit of 1968 that they incessantly parrot have turned into an empty slogan of “life style” in their elite hands.

The empty signifier of these demonstrations seems to have created a center of attraction for those who are full of fear. Yet it continues to signify only if it reproduces not only fear but also loathing in Turkey.

[1] For AKP policies and history see Koray Çalışkan and Yüksel Taşkın, 2003, “Turkey's Dangerous Game,” Middle East Report Online, March 2. and Koray Çalışkan and Yüksel Taşkın, 2003, “Litmus Test: Turkey's Neo-Islamists Weigh War and Peace, Middle East Report Online, January 30.



[2] Ernesto Laclau. Emancipation(s). London: Verso, 1996.

[3] I could have written a whole essay on the ways in which the Emancipation of Women was discussed in sexist language!

[4] A liberal writer with the left leaning Radikal newspaper.

[5] “Feminism in Suits” used the headscarf as weapon against the new elite women. As they pursue feminist politics they do not hesitate to produce a class elitism, and even racism, even finding leftist supporters for their bizarre politics. The headscarf debate produced such a violent and tough discussion that it became hard to appreciate the multi-layered nature of the problem. The reaction of the new elite women towards the old (from liking to resistance) and the way this conflict reshaped gender relations were not discussed at all. I don’t think that the question of headscarf is about subaltern women. Taking up the veil or refusing to wear it belong to two separate contexts; it is misleading to think of these two acts as two sides of the same coin.

[6] Women followers of political Islam had their own fears too. But they do not politicize fear as much as seemingly secular elite women in suits.