Democracy in the making: the acts of women and the feminist movement in Turkey

Women in Turkey have questioned and challenged the citizenship regime, emphasizing the need to take into account their democratic, participatory, and egalitarian demands. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, as a reaction to these feminist challenges, progressive gains were increasingly countered by anti-feminist and anti-gender discourses, activism, and policies that sought a return to the ethno-cultural, gendered, and patriarchal versions of citizenship. In this article, we examine how the feminist movement has remained resilient in the face of these backlashes, arguing that women's acts of citizenship, realized through women's civil society activism and social mobilization using both social media and public protests, have acted as the core of transversal politics. We discuss how women have demanded and negotiated their rights against the gendered patriarchal regime. We provide an overview of the historical formulation of gendered citizenship and the feminist movement in Turkey, discussing the latter alongside the challenges that it posed to the citizenship regime. We then focus on three specific moments of anti-feminist backlash in the last two decades - the introduction of anti-abortion measures, sexual harassment and violence against women, and the withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention - and examine women's acts of citizenship resisting and challenging these backlashes.