Most observers of Turkey have been surprised by Prime Minister Recep
Tayyip Erdoğan’s unwillingness to compromise with the Gezi Park
protestors, whose resistance for the preservation of an İstanbul park
has been transformed into a nationwide wave of popular urban
protests—despite ongoing efforts at violent suppression—and threatens to
become a full-fledged political, and economic, crisis. When Erdoğan
hastily left the country for a North Africa trip after the escalation of
protests, the moderate comments offered by his deputy Bülent Arınç and
President Abdullah Gül created a public expectation for reconciliation.
Instead, Erdoğan continued to play the same provocative tune from
Tunisia, leading to conspiracy theories and speculations, such as the
suggestion that he might be approaching the end of his biological and/or
political life. The word on the street suggested that he might be
“losing it.” Maybe his health was rapidly failing and he was heavily
medicated. Maybe he was being sacrificed by his party, for whom he had
become a liability, and was acting out with fury. Once back in Turkey,
Erdoğan proceeded to deliver increasingly aggressive and intimidating
public addresses, despite widespread calls to start a dialogue and seek
compromise with the protestors, leaving even his usual supporters in the
media to wonder about his unnecessary stubbornness.
Since the beginning of the protests, Erdoğan has been repeatedly
criticized for being arrogant, brash, and stubborn by dozens of domestic
and international commentators. These alleged personal qualities
actually sit well with his now well-established political style,
characterized by condescending to and scolding his opponents. We only
need to remember how he shaped the vocabulary of the protestors, who
responded to Erdoğan’s degrading name-calling by reclaiming and
identifying with his insults such as “looter” and “drunkard.”
Nevertheless, explaining, or rather explaining away, Erdoğan’s
authoritarian political style by referencing his personal whims
psychologizes politics at the expense of a deeper understanding of its
cultural politics. This article seeks to challenge these psychologizing
approaches by analyzing Erdoğan’s political style through the lens of
gender and illustrating how the language of the Gezi Resistance was
forged in a dynamic relationship with the particular gendered power
embodied by Erdoğan.
“The Child Breaks, the Mother Mends, and the Father Looks the Other Way”
After weeks of brutal police attacks against the protesting masses
(resulting in four dead and thousands of wounded citizens) proved
ineffective, Erdoğan personally met with a handful of artists in a
poorly executed public relations campaign to help the government sway
increasingly critical public opinion. Hülya Avşar, a very popular
actress, explained to journalists after her meeting with Erdoğan that
she spoke “as a mother raising a teenager” and advised Erdoğan about how
successful families work when a conflict arises: “The child breaks, the
mother mends, and the father looks the other way.”
Erdoğan finally held a meeting with the representatives of the
resistance, during which he got angry, harshly scolded one of the few
women in the room, refused to calm down, and left the meeting abruptly,
escorted by his daughter, his official consultant. A brief truce was
declared, only to be shattered even more viciously by a final police
raid of Gezi Park, leading to an even larger popular uprising and a
campaign of state terror.
Three weeks and hundreds of thousands of gas canisters later, Erdoğan
is still relentless, responding to criticisms of his “roughness” by
declaring that “this Tayyip Erdoğan will not change.”
Interpreting Erdoğan’s “stubborn” political style as a psychological
or behavioral problem means disregarding the universe of meanings and
feelings that renders Erdoğan’s way of exercising power so evocative.
Analyzing the political repertoire upon which Erdoğan built his rule and
charisma from the perspective of gender, Erdoğan’s “stubbornness” can
be framed not as a matter of personal eccentricity, but rather as a
matter of masculinity.
To begin with, Erdoğan embodies a very particular masculine political
persona. His masculinity is an innovative synthesis of Islamist and
urban tough styles and orients his voice and his body language, as well
as his particular way of exercising power. With an aggressive,
uncompromising, and domineering “personality,” he aspires to act as
every citizen’s father, brother, and husband. (Indeed, one of the
inventive feminist graffiti of the Gezi Park “divorces” Erdoğan through
talaq:
“Talaq Tayyip, talaq!”) So far, this patriarchal authoritarian
masculinity has been seen as one source of the charismatic popularity
that has propelled Erdoğan’ successful political career. It may also be
the reason why he cannot compromise and is currently being crushed under
the weight of his own power.
Erdoğan has been intensifying his exercise of power through
performing this masculinity as the very instrument of his governance. He
repeatedly recommended that women of Turkey have three children,
recently supported a prohibition on the retail sale of alcohol after ten
pm, and reported that girls were sitting on men’s laps in the Gezi Park
to delegitimize the resistance movement. Put differently, he enacts the
role of a husband who wants three kids, a father who forbids drinking
at night, a brother who snitches on his sister for socializing with men.
He is a man who dominates, forbids, orders, scolds, degrades, and
threatens. When he cannot maintain his rule by consent and/or coercion,
he has no choice but to look away, to ignore, and hope that the mother
will intervene, placate, pacify, and smooth things over before he
returns home. (In this case, deputy Bülent Arınç initially played the
mother part but Hülya Avşar stole the role.)
The Language of Resistance
This masculine rule is what lies behind Erdoğan’s seemingly puzzling
antagonistic personality and irrational behavior, and it is what
prevents him from acknowledging the agency and dignity of the
protestors. This masculine rule is what produces the anger of the
protestors against being controlled, being looked down upon, and not
being listened to. It is also the reason that the supposedly apolitical
language of the resistance, which deploys humor and cursing rather than
any party ideology, speaks to Erdoğan mainly through masculinity.
Precisely because Erdoğan plays the role of the father, brother, and
husband, the language of the protestors targets Erdoğan’s masculinity
though swearwords that question his penis size, heterosexuality, and
impenetrability. The language of the resistance engages with, questions,
and answers Erdoğan through the imperatives of hegemonic masculinity.
The language of the resistance, personified by the leftist soccer fan
group Çarşı, speaks in the lingo of urban poor male youth and
challenges the policemen “to strip their helmets and drop their batons”
to get ready for a fair fight “to see who is the real man.” This
masculine language of the resistance threatens to feminize Erdoğan
through swear words derived from penis- and penetration-centered sexual
acts. This language deploys the same masculine idiom that Erdoğan uses
and despite, or perhaps precisely because of, this, it becomes the voice
of the masses resisting Erdoğan’s masculinized exercise of power and
dominance. On the one hand, this masculine language creates a space to
question and resist political authority. On the other hand, it others
women, LGBT individuals, and sex workers who have been fundamental to
the resistance from the very beginning, by brandishing swear words that
demean these groups and threaten them with sexual violence. In other
words, the resistance is speaking the language of power.
A feminist intervention is possible. It is not only possible but also
required in order to recognize one of the main axes of power and
resistance, namely gender and sexuality, and to articulate feminist and
LGBT activism with other social justice struggles that constitute the
Gezi Resistance. Feminist analysis suggests that what we see on the
walls of the Gezi resistance is a reverse image of what is reflected
through the camera obscura of gender ideology. Phallic swear words
targeting Erdoğan express a discontent about his performance of
masculine rule. The matter is indeed Erdoğan’s masculinity. The good
news is that feminist and LGBT activists have long articulated their
discontent about Erdoğan’s masculine rule, about his taking on the role
of the father, husband, and brother of the whole society, and have
contributed to critiques of and resistance against this masculine rule
The masculine language of the resistance has been reclaimed and
transformed by feminists and LGBT activists, who covered (hetero)sexist
graffiti with purple paint, urged “no cursing of women, gays, and
whores” on T-shirts, signs and stickers, subverted chants (for example,
by substituting “see the gays” for “let’s see who the real man is”),
contributed their own slogans (such as signs declaring a “Tayyip and
harassment free zone”), and encouraged everyone to transform their
language by inviting them to “resist by persevering, not by swearing.” A
feminist “swearing workshop” was held in the park to reconsider
existing swearwords and slang and to collectively reinvent a non-sexist
language. Productive strategies like subversion and reinvention allowed
for a resistance in which the anger expressed by urban poor male youth
through sexist slogans were not erased but rewritten in
non-(hetero)sexist ways. These feminist interventions are crucial for
the full recognition of women and LGBT peoples and their political
struggles as integral to this popular opposition, and of feminist
critique as essential to understanding power and resistance.
The Gezi resistance transformed women’s and LGBT individuals’
everyday experiences of the male-dominated public sphere through the new
public spaces it dynamically constituted and reconstituted for the past
three weeks. Before the eruption of the protest, Taksim—the political,
cultural, and touristic center of İstanbul—was also infamous for the
rampant sexual harassment of women, especially during public gatherings
like New Year’s Eve, as well as a site of constant police violence
against transgender people. The claim that Gezi Park and Taksim Square
were completely free of sexual harassment, a common statement among the
protestors, may be an overstatement; but it is a fact that women, gays,
transgender people, and sex workers reclaimed the streets, parks,
plazas, and nights in the course of the Gezi resistance. It is also true
that they were empowered in this new public space in which they were
not subjected to routine street harassment. These gendered experiences,
knowledges, and languages acquired in and through the resistance have
contributed to the feminist and LGBT movements, as well as the larger
Gezi resistance.
As this resistance was banned from Gezi Park itself and police
repression and violence rendered mass protests impossible, the
resistance has spread to new spaces and morphed into new shapes. The
latest form of resistance, standing still quietly in public, was
initially dubbed “the standing man.” “Standing woman” and “standing
person” immediately followed. Gezi resistance is reinventing itself as
it reinvents the language of resistance.
[An earlier version of this article appeared in Turkish at bianet.org.]
