Mobilizing with affect: Gendered experiences and practices in the feminist movement in Turkey

Official URL: https://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b2756129_(Table of contents)

Responding to the rising anti-gender agenda, across the globe and in Turkey, feminist resistance draws from emotions and affects when mobilizing and forming resistance. This study, locating expressed or unarticulated affect(s) as sites of analysis, aims to understand how feminist activists or volunteers sustain their presence in feminist communities despite the rising authoritarian politics and anti-gender attacks in Turkey. Upon conducting semi-structured interviews with thirty feminist, activist/volunteer women who reside and participate in feminist communities in Istanbul, I identify entanglements between affective dissonance, affective solidarity, and affective belonging as integral to developing resilient and transformative feminist activism in Turkey. I propose affective volunteering as an overarching phenomenon to encapsulate instances when participants feel dissonant at the beginning of their activism journey, experience solidarity as they become a part of a community and feel belonging to the movement and to the feminist cause. Here, affective volunteering as a complex but flexible phenomenon identifies intersections of dissonance, solidarity, and belonging as fruitful experiences that bear transformative potentials. I argue that through shifting between these three affective phases of volunteering, participants develop affective volunteering and this in turn makes their activism/volunteering resilient. This research adds a new framework, affective volunteering to the literature while also proposing a qualitative analysis of activists’ experiences in feminist communities.