Draw-in as disobedient performances

This paper provides a sociological analysis of the various drawing actions and experiences within two contemporary social movements, namely Occupy Wall Street (2011) in New York and the Gezi Movement (2013) in Istanbul. It introduces those actions as ‘draw-in’s, relating them to historical and contemporary acts of creative resistance such as the sit-in, die-in, bed-in and stand-in. The ‘drawing’, here referred to as ‘draw-in’, embraces an embodied act of disobedience as well, whether to visually illustrate the movement in question, or to criticize the authority, or to reveal the injustice, or to depict the experiences within the social movements. The question is to understand how different temporalities coexist through those experiences and experimentations from the gestural level of drawing performance to the ongoingness of the draw-in s. Despite their differences in terms of form, creative process and consequences, I argue that the draw-in actions are revealed as transformative acts in its both ephemeral and permanent forms. They illustrated and communicated these relatively contradictory temporal forms through the dynamics of form and flow. This article is based on my research on creative performativity and the fieldwork carried out between 2015 and 2022, both in Istanbul and New York.