Politics of Intimacy in Turkey

Abstract

I do not believe in gender equality!” (Phillips 2014). “Do not delay marriage! Do not be too picky in choosing a spouse!” (“Evlilik konusunda çok seçici olmayın” 2014). “Have at least three children!” (Çetik, Gültekin, and Kuşdemir 2008). “Abortion is murder!” (“Erdoğan: Kürtaj bir cinayettir” 2012). These are the words of the previous prime minister and current president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, whose blunt statements on gender issues have become a characteristic of the Turkish political landscape of the twenty-first century. Erdoğan’s comments are part of a contentious array of government discourses and policies around gender, sexuality, reproduction, and family developed particularly in the later years of conservative Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (Justice and Development Party, AKP) rule in Turkey. Yet Erdoğan’s comments are often dismissed as mere discursive maneuvers intended to change the political agenda and distract from “real” politics. I argue that dismissing Erdoğan’s comments as distractions reduces the politics of intimacy to a lower significance and creates three obfuscations that hamper critical political analysis and coalitional politics. Dismissal of Erdoğan’s comments denies their vital significance for the lives of women and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people; hides the centrality of the politics of intimacy to the economic and political governance of the country; and obscures the gendered nature of political rule at large and the value of feminist and queer politics in the exposure and challenging of this gendered rule.During the rule of the AKP for over a decade, a seemingly promising if mainstreaming inclusion of gender and even feminist perspectives into state discourse and policy early in the first decade of the 2000s has transformed or perhaps matured into a state-sponsored familialism in the 2010s, illustrated by the replacement of the Ministry of Women and Family Affairs with the Ministry of Family and Social Policy in 2011. The most vocal and powerful mouthpiece of this increasingly antifeminist gender discourse has been Erdoğan, who first introduced his pronatalist agenda on March 8, 2008, International Women’s Day, when he recommended that women have at least three children. Subsequently, Erdoğan has continued to prescribe women’s reproductive decisions in increasing detail, recommending early marriage and having multiple children while condemning abortion, cesarean birth, and birth control at venues ranging from wedding celebrations to an international population conference.Coming from the highest profile speaker of an emergent neoconservative gender discourse, president Erdoğan’s comments are perceived as seeking and promoting governmental influence and controls over women’s intimate lives. As such they created and continue to create much indignation among those with feminist, secularist, or liberal sensibilities. Curiously, this indignation is regularly met with caution by many in the left or radical wing of the opposition to the AKP, ranging from columnists to parliamentarians. These voices warn in omniscient solemnity that Erdoğan’s scandalizing comments on intimate topics are tactical maneuvers designed to change the political agenda, and they imply that responding to these comments misdirects oppositional political focus and energies. In the archetypal incident for this model of political interpretation, Erdoğan, at the International Conference on Population and Development in 2012, explicitly conflated the 2011 military air strike and massacre of thirty-four Kurdish civilians in the border town of Uludere (Roboski in Kurdish) with abortion. He repeated the antiabortion statement at the AKP women’s congress the next day and challenged those critical of his earlier comments, claiming that “every abortion is an Uludere” (“Başbakan: Her kürtaj bir Uludereʾdir” 2012). These words were widely decried as an agenda-changing maneuver in the parliament (“Kürtaj polemiği” 2012), the op-eds (Barasu 2013), and the social media (“Her kürtaj bir Uludereʾdir” 2012), notwithstanding more nuanced feminist analyses (Kalıntaş 2012; Özinanır 2012). This event and its widespread interpretation set for the opposition a model of reading Erdoğan’s comments on intimate topics as a distraction from “real” politics. For example, when in 2014 Erdoğan claimed that promotion of birth control in Turkey was a betrayal of the nation (Tahaoğlu 2014), several opposition figures pointed out that his comments were strategically timed to distract from a corruption scandal involving multiple AKP ministers (“Parliament Acquits Four Ex-Ministers on Corruption” 2015). Following Erdoğan’s statement and the flood of critical responses addressing it (“Erdoğan kadın düşmanı” 2014; Esmeray 2014; Mutluer 2014), numerous news and commentary sources (Aşık 2014; Bozkurt 2014; “Erdoğanʾdan Gündem Değiştirme Çabaları” 2014; Oral 2014; “Sözcüʾye Göre Erdoğanʾın Yeni Hedefi Prezervatif Lobisi” 2014), humor websites (Diazepam 2014), and social media users (Güldür n.d.; “Yıllarca bir doğum kontrolü ihaneti yaptılar” 2014) pointed out that Erdoğan’s words were intended to shift the conversation at a time when the political agenda was focused on a topic that rendered him and the AKP vulnerable. Even those critiquing Erdoğan from a feminist perspective emphasized that they recognized the aim of the conversation (“Ankara Barosu” 2014).Granted, the emphasis on the agenda-shifting function of the president’s comments is politically savvy. Erdoğan regularly and successfully determines and changes the political order of the day except in times of political crises, which are signaled precisely by his inability to do so. Indeed, his command over the political agenda is both a product and itself productive of his political hegemony. Under this hegemony, political opposition, including feminist and LGBTQ movements, often finds itself in the reactionary position of responding to Erdoğan, limiting its capacity to prioritize counterhegemonic agendas, such as ongoing campaigns against femicide and transgender murders and mobilizations around peace, labor, urban, and environmental issues. In such a context the opposition is understandably compelled to question who initiates and controls the political agenda and to what effect.From a feminist perspective, however, the emphasis on the agenda-shifting function of the president’s comments feeds into a masculinist understanding of politics. This is because while Erdoğan’s every speech act can (and perhaps should) be analyzed as a tactical move, those widely perceived as such are usually the ones concerning women. For example, in an insightful article the liberal Left analyst Tanıl Bora argued that Erdoğan’s hegemony is derived from his capacity to control the political debate and urged the opposition to break from its reflex of replying to the president and instead find its own language. To demonstrate his argument, Bora provided two concrete examples of Erdoğan’s agenda-shifting moves, arguing that his comments on abortion were a distraction from the military massacre of Kurdish citizens in Uludere and his comments on gender equality were a distraction from the court orders against a major urban development project he supported (Bora 2014). While Bora’s examples were meant to demonstrate the purpose of Erdoğan’s comments, the fact that the chosen examples concerned gender and reproduction was neither random nor inconsequential.The ease and frequency with which Erdoğan’s comments are recognized as agenda-changing tactical moves when they concern gender, sexuality, reproduction, and family reflect an unquestioned gendered assumption about politics. The assumption is that issues pertaining to gender and sexual minorities are not the true terrain of (hegemonic or oppositional) politics. The “real” politics supposedly happen elsewhere, in a masculine realm where politicians and statesmen debate and rule over serious political issues that actually matter. As Bora’s examples above unfortunately suggest, ethnic, military, legal, and economic issues are assumed to be the “real” terrain of politics, while reproductive, sexual, and gender issues are not. The latter issues are often perceived to be secondary, superficial, “merely ornamental or a distraction from ‘real’ politics,” a perception that Lauren Berlant (1997, 9) identifies in the dismissive attitude of many left or radical thinkers concerning the politics of intimacy characterizing the Reaganite conservatism of the post-1980 United States. Gender, sexuality, reproduction, and family are, from this perspective, “pseudo” political agendas that hide and distract from the “real” ones. The emphasis on the agenda-shifting functions of Erdoğan’s comments reduces the politics of intimacy to a secondary order of significance and creates three highly consequential obfuscations.First, the suggestion to dismiss commentary on gender, sexuality, reproduction, and family as agenda-shifting implies that these comments are just empty words uttered to keep the opposition distracted from engaging with other, more timely and pertinent political issues. However, such words have dire effects, as they express and justify attitudes and (planned or ongoing) policies that shape, limit, and even directly threaten women’s and sexual minorities’ lives. As women, trans, and queer activists have said time and again, such commentary legitimizes the oppression of those who do not comply with heteropatriarchal gender norms and materializes as violence against them. The increasing rates of murders of women, against which feminists in Turkey have successfully organized (Hakkımızda n.d.), attest to the urgent and vital significance of critically addressing the emergent neoconservative politics of intimacy. In a society where, as Nükhet Sirman has observed (Çubukçu 2015), hegemonic masculinity has become less attainable, more contested, and thus increasingly in need of violently (re)asserting itself, the politics of intimacy à la Erdoğan articulates this crisis of masculinity and fuels, in the words of Deniz Kandiyoti (2013), a project of “masculinist restoration” to which gender-based violence is essential.Furthermore, far from being mere words, such propaganda is translated into governmental/state policy. For example, in 2013 Erdoğan, then prime minister, commissioned the ministers of family and social policy, health, and finance along with his deputy to come up with policy recommendations to support his pronatalist agenda (“Turkish PM Pushes for ‘Three Children Incentive’” 2013). In 2015 the new prime minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu, under the presidency of Erdoğan, who remains very vocal about the issue, announced a financial incentives package encouraging early marriage and childbirth (Buchanan 2015). On the restrictive side, there are serious limitations with regard to access to reproductive health services. For example, even though a planned proposal for legal limitations on abortion rights was retracted after successful feminist mobilization, there are ongoing practical limitations to access to abortion in public hospitals (Tahaoğlu 2015). It is well-known that such limitations threaten women’s lives, particularly the lives of poorer women who cannot afford private health care providers.Therefore downplaying the politics of intimacy as distractive is vital, or rather deadly, for those whose lives are its object. This holds true even when such words are uttered and timed strategically to shift the conversation. Dismissing these issues as secondary obscures their burning urgency and significance from a feminist perspective and represents feminist critique as a blurring, diluting influence over “real” oppositional politics.Second, the emphasis on the agenda-shifting role of commentary on intimate issues artificially separates them from “real” politics. Feminist scholars have long questioned the private-public dichotomy that relegates intimate issues to the supposedly apolitical realm of the family and have emphasized the political consequences of framing gender and sexuality as personal issues not fit for inclusion in the realm of the political (Fraser 1990). Even if the terrain of politics is defined narrowly and conventionally without heading to this feminist intervention, the artificial separation between “real” politics and the politics of intimacy obscures the centrality of “family policies,” to borrow from the AKP’s vocabulary, to producing and maintaining economic and political rule. For example, as Erdoğan himself is eager to explain, encouragement of marriage and childbirth is part of an economic rationale that connects population increase to economic growth (“Erdoğan endişeli” 2012). This governmental strategy is premised on the continued provision of a young, ample, and cheap labor force, which is expected to equip Turkey with a competitive advantage in the global economy. Through interlocking neoconservative gender ideology with economic neoliberalization, as Feride Acar and Gülbanu Altunok (2013) argue, a new “politics of the intimate” was set in motion in Turkey late in the first decade of the 2000s. The contemporary politics of intimacy in Turkey seeks to regulate the realms of sexuality and reproduction in line with the intersecting rationales of neoliberalism and neoconservatism (Korkman 2015). The state seeks to secure economic growth and profitability and thus neoliberal capital accumulation by making labor abundantly available at a low cost and, as I discuss at length elsewhere (Korkman 2015), to subsidize this process by increasing the rate and efficiency with which reproductive labors are appropriated in and through the patriarchal family. Pushed into compulsory motherhood through limited access to reproductive health services, naturalized as mothers and wives through the promotion of dominant gender ideologies, and encouraged through social assistance programs that channel their labors into domestic care work, women as the bearers and caretakers of workers of the future, present, and past are key to this plan. Social policies and assistance are distributed in alignment with patriarchal gender expectations instead of universal rights-based entitlements, thereby encouraging female family members to provide care for the children, elderly, and disabled in the family and redirecting poor women seeking state assistance back to familial sources of support (Yazıcı 2012). Furthermore, through charity- and municipality-based distribution networks, social assistance helps manage the (potential) socially and politically destructive effects of economic precaritization and even translates these effects into allegiance to the party through clientelism (Buğra and Candaş 2011). In this context downplaying gender issues as secondary obscures the fact that governing the population and its productive capacities by regulating gendered bodies and their sexual and reproductive behaviors is central to the (narrowly defined) political and economic fields, as Michel Foucault’s (2008) discussion of biopolitics attests.Last, the emphasis on the agenda-shifting function of commentary concerning gender and sexuality discourages a gendered understanding of the larger terrain of politics by obscuring the fact that Erdoğan’s masculinist political language and style constitute an inherent and even central part of his political power. Advising young couples during their wedding ceremonies to have at least three children (Tahaoğlu 2014), scolding young men he passes for smoking cigarettes in defiance of his repeated recommendations (“Cumhurbaşkanı Erdoğan kafede sigara içenlere kızdı” 2014), and complaining of coresiding male and female university students (“Başbakan Erdoğan: Kız ve erkek öğrenci aynı evde olmaz” 2013), Erdoğan performs his political power through a gendered and intimate idiom. Issues of citizenship and the state in Middle Eastern and larger postcolonial contexts have long been studied from the perspective of gender (Abu-Lughod 1998; Chatterjee 1986; Kandiyoti 1991). In particular, scholars of Turkey, such as Salih Can Açıksöz (2012), Elif Babül (2015), Carole Delaney (1995), Dicle Koğacıoğlu (2004), Ayşe Parla (2001), Nükhet Sirman (2005), and Jenny White (2014), have analyzed how Turkish national and state discourses and practices function through the idiom of patriarchal family, emphasizing the trope of masculine protector of female, family, and national and state honor. Informed by this scholarship, Açıksöz and I have argued elsewhere that the current political rule in Turkey, personified in Erdoğan, depends on a gendered relationship with and a patriarchal domination over female and even (at least young) male citizens (Açıksöz and Korkman 2013). Especially but not exclusively in the intimate terrains of gender and sexuality, Erdoğan performs his relationship to his citizens in the idiom of patriarchal family relations as he behaves and speaks like, and even explicitly refers to himself and is referred to as, a father (“Ağlatan vedayı anlattılar” 2014), husband (“AKPʾye üye olmak Erdoğanʾa nikahla bağlanmaktır” 2013), and brother (“Başbakan Erdoğan: Hanım kardeşlerimiz üç çocuk hibe edin” 2013). This gendered intimacy renders Erdoğan’s political rule highly familiar and effective if also vulnerable to feminist and queer critiques. Dismissing the politics of intimacy as secondary obscures the centrality of gender to political power at large and de-emphasizes the significance of feminist and queer politics that reveal and critique the gendered and gendering mechanisms and effects of power.Despite their recent dismissal as distractions from “real” politics, issues of gender, sexuality, reproduction, and family are undeniably political. They are political not just because of their politicization by a neoconservative politics of intimacy but also because of a long-standing tradition of transnational and local feminist struggles for the recognition of intimate issues as political (Arat 1994). Today a plethora of feminist and queer individuals and organizations in Turkey tirelessly critique Erdoğan’s comments and the AKP’s politics of intimacy in particular and heteropatriarchal domination in general. The political opposition stands to benefit from listening to and amplifying these voices and avoiding devaluing them by denying their political agency and wisdom by deeming them misguided reactions to agenda-shifting maneuvers.Dismissing the critiques of Erdoğan’s comments, which are of burning urgency to women’s and LGBTQ lives, disregards feminist and queer concerns and limits our capacities for coalition politics. Feminist politics itself is not effortlessly intersectional but is potentially so and has recently demonstrated its capacity for multidimensional analysis and action, for example, in pairing the chant “abortion is a right” with “Uludere is a massacre” (“Kürtaj haktır Uludere katliam” 2012). Furthermore, disregarding feminist and queer critique limits our capacities for political analysis and action, because it ignores the fact that the exercise of political power is gendered and the politics of intimacy is central to economic and political governance. For all the forces of political opposition struggling against the hegemony of neoconservatism aligned with neoliberalism, feminist and queer critique focusing on issues of gender, sexuality, reproduction, and family constitutes not a distraction from “real” political agendas but an essential and invaluable political intervention.An earlier and shorter version of this article was published in Turkish and is available online at www.bianet.org/biamag/siyaset/161108-hakiki-gundem-kadin-bedeni-ve-politika.

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