Exploring the fault lines and their political efficacy in anti-gender politics in the context of democratic backsliding
By: Didem Unal (she/her/hers)
In recent years, illiberal regimes in contexts as diverse as Russia, Hungary, and Turkey have appropriated a docile civil society model to maintain their dominance. Such regimes transform civic space by repressing dissident organizations and replacing them with GONGOs, which can be defined as civil society organizations that act within the limits set by an authoritarian government. In such contexts, the reduction of space for autonomous civil society is simultaneously coupled with a crackdown on gender equality politics and the activism and political efficacy of feminist organizations. A central role is attributed to anti-feminism and anti-genderism in reinforcing and reproducing the hegemony of the authoritarian regime. Moreover, in addition to the cooptation of GONGOs and marginalization of feminist activism, strategic coalitions emerge between state actors and a wide range of anti-gender civil society actors who articulate an aggressive opposition to gender and gender equality perspectives by aiming to restructure policy making.
Restrictions on LGBTI+ related events and feminist protests have become a commonplace in Turkey. Since 2015, the government authorities have imposed various restrictions on pride walks and feminist protests through regulations, defamation campaigns, and lawsuits and also by instrumentalizing the Covid-19 pandemic. However, anti-gender rallies, known as ‘Great Family Rallies’, where the demonstrators heavily rely on anti-feminist and anti-gender hate speech, were permitted in the same period. Even the government officials have participated in these events and publicly declared support for their ideological cause. This selective and systematic crackdown on feminist and LGBTI+ movements on the one hand, and state favoritism for anti-gender mobilizations on the other, require further attention to grasp the multi-faceted restructuring of civil society in the age of authoritarian populism in Turkey and beyond.
In my recent article for IFJP, I take Turkey as a social laboratory to explore the power dynamics of anti-gender actors’ strategic relationship with the state in an illiberal context. The findings suggest that we need to take a more nuanced approach to the rising importance of anti-gender civil society in the reproduction of the hegemony of illiberal political regimes. Anti-gender actors exhibit different ideological positions, tactics, and strategies, which in return lead to the establishment of different relations with the state. As I explain in the paper, in the Turkish context, a major fault line in the discourses and frames of anti-gender actors is whether their opposition to gender amounts to a complete rejection of gender equality or draws on an appropriation of gender equality along conservative lines.
In the article, I adopt a two-tier typology to distinguish between anti-gender actors, who display a hardliner position by adopting a complete rejection of gender equality, and those who declare a commitment to women’s human rights but simultaneously argue for the natural differences of the genders and conservative gender norms. In distinguishing between different interpretations of opposition to gender, the article evaluates how ideological cracks in anti-gender alliances and state-movement relations shape the political efficacy of different anti-gender actors.
LGBTI Pride March in 2013 in Taksim, Istanbul. Source: Wikimedia Commons
In the last decade in Turkey, gender has been operationalized as a constitutive pillar of the ruling AKP’s (Justice and Development Party) authoritarian populist politics at the level of both ideology and strategy. The opportunistic synergy between the AKP’s illiberal regime and the rising anti-gender mobilization has been influential in establishing a new gender regime along Islamically accentuated, anti-gender lines. In this period, the party has promoted a wide range of anti-gender civil society actors by facilitating their mobilization as well as incorporating their demands into the state agenda. However, not all anti-gender actors are treated the same and benefit from hegemonic power modalities in similar ways. The current political conjuncture in Turkey has generated discursive and political opportunity structures that are more beneficial for some anti-gender actors than others. More specifically, it has led to power positions in favor of those anti-gender actors whose social movement frames resonate with the policy frames of the authoritarian regime without any ideological cracks. As a result, the hard liners that declare full support for the regime and push its crackdown on rights-based frameworks to the extreme gain greater legitimacy, while the soft liners that operate in a norm-loaded policy field guided by a seemingly pro-women perspective are undermined and their capacity to influence the state agenda is diminished.
Key political moments that created new discursive and political opportunity structures for anti-gender actors in Turkey include public debates on violence against women, underage marriage, and women’s right to alimony in divorce cases. At these moments, hardliner actors have improved their capacity to influence the formal institutional political space and engaged in interactions with state actors through various methods ranging from sustained pressure and lobbying activities to consultancy meetings and electoral support. On the other hand, appropriating feminist rhetorical frames along conservative lines, soft liner anti-gender actors have attempted to distinguish themselves from the hardliners in formulating a seemingly women-friendly policy framework. For example, responding to Turkey’s withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention (European Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women) (IC) in 2021, they have initially opposed the government’s claim that the IC is antithetical to the so-called Islamically accentuated, cultural values of the nation. However, following a backlash from hardliner anti-gender circles and a defamation campaign, they shifted to a position that resonates with the hegemonic regime’s aggressive anti-gender politics. Their shifts between the anti-gender framework and commitment to women’s legal equality display a political ambiguity that is politically ineffective to curb the aggressiveness of the rising anti-gender politics in Turkey, and is bound by the imaginaries of the hegemonic political regime. As their political influence and efficacy declines, the hard liners enjoy more leeway and legitimacy to reconfigure the civic space and processes of gender policy making in a drastic way. Within this frame, the study of the Turkish case provides us with a broad understanding of the heterogeneity of relations between the state and anti-gender social movements and the changing conditions of their political effectiveness in a democratically declining context.
Read the full article here: The variety of anti-gender alliances and democratic backsliding in Turkey: fault lines around opposition to “gender ideology” and their political implications
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Didem Unal Abaday is Academy Research Fellow at the Faculty of Theology of University of Helsinki. Previously, she was Thyssen Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies of Central European University (CEU) and a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Gender Studies, Ethnology and History of Religions at Stockholm University. Her recent publications have appeared in various journals such as Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, Politics & Gender, and European Journal of Women’s Studies.