Dissident women's organizations as a counter-hegemonic actor in Turkey

Abstract

Could the Turkish women's movement, which has a strong reaction mechanism, be a constituent actor of counter-hegemony? The main reasons behind this question are the women's movement's deep-rooted history and its openness to combine theory with practice/action. When looked from the Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau's perspective of radical democracy theory, the women's movement appears to have a considerable potential of deciphering the existing hegemony and articulating the social demands which exclude and are excluded by the present-day hegemony in Turkey. This article tries to understand how women's movement in Turkey conceptualizes the existing power relations that constitute the neoliberal religio-conservative hegemony and how it responds to it.