Gendered democratic resilience: feminist mobilization under authoritarian constraint in Turkey

While the democratic resilience scholarship has moved beyond institutions to include societal agents of resistance, our understanding remains limited of how gendered agency sustains democracy. In this study, I redefine the scope of democratic resilience by examining the role of feminist actors’ mobilization and introduce the concept of gendered democratic resilience: the movement-level process through which feminist actors sustain democratic practice under authoritarian constraints. I argue that affective dissonance leads to resilience only when processed through feminist reflexivity and backed by a movement’s capacities; without these, attrition is the more likely outcome. Three mechanisms are key for democratic resilience: tactical innovation against repertoire closure, frame bridging against authoritarian meaning capture, and coalitional reconfiguration against isolation, which recalibrates through feedback loops. Drawing on multi-sited fieldwork, semi-structured interviews, digital ethnography, and participant observation in Turkey, I show that democratic resilience is sustained from below through the reflexive and affective labour of gendered political actors. I also identify a resilience-attrition paradox: feminist movements exhibit exceptional adaptive capacity while being depleted by the chronic constraint they resist. This study contributes to the literature by bridging social movement theory with affect in gender studies.