The variety of anti-gender alliances and democratic backsliding in Turkey: fault lines around opposition to “gender ideology” and their political implications

ABSTRACT

This article examines the politics of knowledge production and the affective politics of rising anti-genderism in civil society in contemporary Turkey with a focus on two main points: (1) the variety of actors and their different strategies opposing “gender ideology,” and (2) the effects of state–movement dynamics on the political efficacy of those strategies. The findings demonstrate that anti-gender alliances between state and civil society actors display a discursive plurality in Turkey in terms of how they manage the fluidity and heterogeneity of the opposition to “gender ideology” that links a wide range of concerns about feminist ideas, movements, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and intersex (LGBTI+) rights. Providing a typology of the different forms of opposition to “gender ideology,” the article concludes that in the recent era the right-wing populist regime in Turkey has redrawn its alliances in the gender policy field, accommodating illiberal actors’ anti-gender demands and anti-equality policy visions. This shift toward an aggressive performance of anti-genderism renders gender equality politics more contentious through a polarizing populist form of knowledge production and affective politics and even destabilizes gender equality policies that have already been accepted.

KEYWORDS:

• Anti-gender alliances
• right-wing populism
• discursive politics of gender equality
• democratic backsliding
• state–movement relations

Introduction

In the contemporary era, gender equality features as a central target of the democratic backlash under right-wing populist (RWP) regimes and ideologies (Dietze and Roth 2020; Graff, Kapur, and Walters 2019; Graff and Korolczuk 2021). RWP actors in countries as diverse as Brazil, Poland, Hungary, Russia, and Turkey reinforce the binary gender model and hierarchical gender norms through opposing “gender ideology,” an empty signifier that they vaguely define to link different reactionary agendas against progressive gender politics (Graff, Kapur, and Walters 2019; Mayer and Sauer 2017). This opposition draws on the idea that “gender ideology” promotes homosexuality and transgenderism and dismantles the heteronormativity of the “ideal” family structure (Garbagnoli 2017; Graff and Korolczuk 2021; Kováts 2017). The demonization of sexual and reproductive rights, non-normative sexualities, and gender equality politics helps RWP actors to represent themselves as the sole protectors of the “good” people against the “corrupting” effects of feminist agendas.

This growing mobilization against “gender ideology” is not only about restructuring the gender regime along conservative lines; it can also be regarded as a strategic quest for “epistemic power” – that is, the power to produce and normalize knowledge claims on gender (Korolczuk 2020; Paternotte and Verloo 2021; Yla-Anttila 2018). Anti-gender knowledge, in this context, implies essentialist representations of biological differences between the genders and their normative signification, while the politics of anti-gender knowledge production refers to processes of constructing social truths and setting the terms of the political debate in line with the anti-gender agenda (Mayer and Sauer 2017; Paternotte and Verloo 2021). As RWP actors attempt to replace feminist politics and knowledge with an alternative form of knowledge production, they seek the epistemic power to have control over the terms within which gender is debated and perceived in society (Korolczuk 2020; Paternotte and Verloo 2021).

Affective politics also plays a significant role in contemporary mobilizations and epistemological struggles against “gender ideology” and feeds into rising polarization around gender (Sauer, Dietze, and Roth 2020). The affective atmosphere of anti-gender mobilizations is highly charged with negative emotions such as fear, hate, anger, and resentment and provides grounds to claim legitimacy for masculinist identity politics and its “post-truth” epistemology – namely, epistemic processes that imply a reluctance to engage with facts and a tendency to replace rational public debate with personal judgments and emotions (Budgeon 2021; D’Ancona 2017; Foroughi, Gabriel, and Fotaki 2019).

Looking at the restructuring of the gender regime under the rule of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey, this article examines the politics of knowledge production and affective politics of rising anti-genderism in civil society with a focus on which concepts and principles are opposed when contesting “gender ideology,” by whom, and which alternative solutions and paradigms are offered. Previous studies indicate that RWP regimes provide favorable conditions for anti-gender civil society actors in various ways, amplifying their ideological positions and facilitating their mobilization (Graff and Korolczuk 2021; Grzebalska and Petö 2018; Kandiyoti 2016; Krizsán and Roggeband 2021; Kuhar and Paternotte 2017). Building on this scholarship, this article presents evidence from Turkey to demonstrate that in authoritarian contexts, the “populist zeitgeist” generates a political conjuncture where the illiberal communication styles and knowledge production of anti-gender actors can achieve growing resonance and legitimacy. Taking an interpretive approach to how “gender ideology” is contested in different ways by different actors, it draws attention to two main points: (1) the variety of actors and their different strategies in terms of how they manage the fluidity and heterogeneity of the opposition to “gender ideology” that links a range of concerns about reproductive and sexual rights, feminist movements, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and intersex (LGBTI+) rights, and (2) the effects of state–movement dynamics on the political efficacy of those strategies. Situating the discursive heterogeneity of anti-gender activism in the context of the dual dynamics of gender backlash and democratic backsliding in Turkey, the article evaluates whether different interpretations of opposition to “gender ideology” generate any ideological “cracks” in anti-gender alliances and force actors to redraw political frontiers. The study of the discursive heterogeneity in anti-gender mobilizations is theoretically and politically necessary to grasp the political efficacy of different anti-gender actors and to expose the contextually shifting terms of their strategic relationship with the hegemonic political regime.

The article is structured as follows. First, drawing on feminist scholarship on the discursive politics of gender equality (Ahrens 2018; Kantola and Lombardo 2021; Lombardo, Meier, and Verloo 2009; Verloo 2018a), it distinguishes between the “liberal”/“moderate” face of the anti-gender movement that co-opts rights-based arguments to engage in subtle or “indirect” forms of opposition to gender equality under the disguise of human rights activism, and the illiberal actors/hard liners that continuously violate the democratic norms of the political culture through provocation, aggression, dramatization, scandalization, and political uncivility. The actors studied in this analysis can be cited as follows: the Turkish Family Assembly, an anti-gender non-governmental organization (NGO); Islamist media outlets such as Milli Gazete, Yeni Akit, and Yeni Şafak; Islamist public figures – namely, Abdurrahman Dilipak and Sema Maraşlı; and KADEM (the Women and Democracy Association), a government-sponsored non-governmental organization (GONGO). While it makes a distinction between soft liners and hard liners, the article does not aim to identify “good”/“acceptable” and “bad”/“unacceptable” forms of anti-gender mobilization, but rather seeks to provide a basis for understanding the shifting patterns of meaning making and the broad spectrum of norms and values used to legitimize anti-gender claims.

Second, reflecting on state–movement interactions, the article notes that authoritarian regimes appropriate a docile civil society model to maintain their dominance (Giersdorf and Croissant 2011; Greskovits 2015). Such regimes transform civic space by repressing dissident organizations and replacing them with a civil society sector that acts within the limits set by the authoritarian governance. In the Turkish case, the reduction of space for autonomous civil society, intensifying polarizations, and the gender policy backlash have led to a crackdown on feminist activism and generated GONGOs (Negrón-Gonzales 2016). Moreover, beyond this marginalization–co-optation nexus, strategic coalitions have emerged between civil society and state actors around nodal points that crystallize in anti-gender knowledge production and affective politics. The article exposes the power dynamics in the restructured civil society domain that underpin the contextually shifting terms of anti-gender actors’ strategic relationship with state actors. It highlights that the AKP has redrawn its alliances in the gender policy field in the post-2019 period. The findings suggest that the party has shifted toward an aggressive performance of anti-genderism by embracing the political demands of the hard liners of the anti-gender bloc that not only adopt a hostile attitude toward the feminist principle of gender equality but also demonize the traditionalist egalitarian approaches that reappropriate gender equality norms along religio-conservative lines. This increased opposition to “gender ideology” and the waning influence of moderate soft liners in the government means that, in the context of democratic backsliding, political shifts toward competitive authoritarianism provide the hard liners of the anti-gender mobilization leeway and legitimacy to reconfigure the civic space and processes of gender policy making in a drastic way.

The anti-gender bloc and its fault lines in populist contexts

Actors that operate as oppositional forces challenging “gender ideology” may be quite dispersed and display different dynamics of opposition to gender equality in terms of ideology and organizational structure (Ahrens 2018; Berthet 2022; Krook 2016). Mieke Verloo (2018b) notes that these oppositional forces can originate mainly from three domains: (1) the formal domain of politics and policy making (namely, actors from the parliament, government, and bureaucracy), and organized religion; (2) the domain of civil society (such as social movements and interest groups); and (3) all other domains of society (such as the economy).

Anti-gender oppositional forces are inter-relational in the sense that their self-reflective positionality vis-à-vis other anti-gender actors may affect their “movement frames” – that is, schemata of interpretation that construct meanings associated with relevant social problems and events (Polletta and Kai Ho 2006). In a context where the political regime takes the lead role in furthering anti-gender agendas, anti-gender civil society actors can be expected to engage in increased interaction with state actors to achieve political gains (Krizsán and Roggeband 2021; Kuhar and Paternotte 2017). Reflecting on Hungary and Poland, Agnieszka Graff and Elżbieta Korolczuk (2021) explain the alliance between anti-gender civil society actors and state actors by employing the term “opportunistic synergy,” which they use to stress two levels of co-operation – namely, ideological/discursive and strategic/organizational. This opportunistic synergy may involve political alliances, ideological affinities, and organizational ties, and it works to the advantage of both sides, enabling state actors to claim that they must pay attention to “demands from below,” while making it possible for anti-gender civil society actors to reach wider audiences. It also begs the question of which actors and movement frames in the anti-gender bloc can most benefit from state favoritism.

A major fault line in the discourses and frames of anti-gender actors is whether their opposition to “gender ideology” amounts to a complete rejection of gender equality or requires an appropriation of gender equality along conservative lines, which Ronnee Schreiber (2008) calls the rightist co-optation of feminism and gender equality. On the one hand, the problematization of gender may translate into a hard-line position in the form of a complete rejection of gender equality. On the other hand, civil society actors that declare a commitment to women’s human rights may choose to adopt messy and politically ambiguous frames, arguing for the natural differences of the genders, but also employing a seemingly progressive language that opposes hierarchical gender roles (Schreiber 2008). Rather than directly opposing gender equality, they may choose to redefine it with reference to the “gender complementarity” model, suggesting that gender equality should never connote sameness between men and women. According to the gender complementarity model, the idea of equality should be revised in a way that is conducive to biological differences (Ün 2019). This traditionalist egalitarian model uses “gender justice” in place of “gender equality,” presenting it as a superior concept that comprises equality but also acknowledges the supposedly innate dispositions characterizing the different genders.

Petra Ahrens (2018) and Johanna Kantola and Emanuela Lombardo (2021) define the anti-gender activities of the former cohort of actors as “direct interventions” into gender equality politics. They argue that, through their complete rejection of the egalitarian framework, direct forms of opposition to gender equality are characterized by a political style based on the continuous negation of the norms of liberal political culture such as civility, political correctness, inclusivity, and rationality. Stressing its mainstreaming in contemporary political culture, Ruth Wodak (2020) defines this political style as the shameless normalization of the unsayable. As for the latter cohort of actors, Kantola and Lombardo (2021) suggest that their “indirect” opposition may embrace “gender” as a category of structural inequality, but employs anti-feminist or non-feminist perspectives to construct alternative concepts and paradigms to address gender issues. These actors adopt oppositional frames that operate in a norm-loaded policy field guided by a human rights perspective and political correctness to ward off criticism and to legitimize their conservative co-optation of feminist discourse. According to Tessa Lewin (2021, 255), this conservative reappropriation of feminism implies a “discourse capture” suggesting “intentional resignification, shifting, mimicking, or twisting of existing concepts and terminologies, with the result that their dominant meaning and ideological underpinnings are altered, or replaced.” Michał Krzyżanowski and Per Ledin (2017, 567) explain the ambivalences of such discursive shifts as characteristic of “borderline discourses” that oscillate “between civil (i.e. pro-democratic) and in/uncivil (i.e. anti-pluralist and anti-democratic) ideas and ideologies.”

Both categories of anti-gender actors and their direct and indirect forms of opposition, though in different forms, generate negative political effects that restrict the public space for debating progressive gender policies. In the context of regime change toward “competitive authoritarianism,” where democratic institutions exist in form but not in substance (Esen and Gumuscu 2016; Levitsky and Way 2002), the political conjuncture can generate new discursive and political opportunity structures that can translate into power positions in favor of those civil society actors whose social movement frames resonate with the policy frames of the authoritarian regime (Koopmans and Statham 1999). As a result, the hard liners that declare full support for the regime and push its crackdown on rights-based frameworks to the extreme may gain greater legitimacy, while the soft liners that operate in a norm-loaded policy field guided by a seemingly pro-women perspective are undermined and their capacity to influence the state agenda is diminished.

Methodology

Borrowing from critical frame analysis (Kantola and Lombardo 2021; Roggeband 2018; Verloo 2018a), the empirical discussion presented here draws attention to what is represented as the problem in “gender ideology,” by whom, and the different ideological and epistemological assumptions that underpin these framing processes in contemporary Turkey. It understands frames as the schemata of interpretation that actors use to make sense of different situations and events in the policy realm (Bacchi 2009; Bacchi and Eveline 2010). Frames identify agents responsible for the alleged problem and empower those that can “fix” the problem, thereby excluding certain frames or actors, promoting others, and suggesting lines of action (Verloo 2005; Verloo and Lombardo 2007). Conny Roggeband and Mieke Verloo (2007) suggest that the study of dominant and/or competing frames in the discourse of political actors can help us to explore how a particular public debate over policy making has evolved and which representations have gained dominance over time in the definition of the policy area at stake.

Along these lines, the analysis provides insights into the framing strategies of two categories of actors: (1) illiberal anti-gender actors and their “direct” opposition to gender equality (the Turkish Family Assembly; Islamist media outlets such as Milli Gazete, Yeni Akit, and Yeni Şafak; and Islamist public figures – namely, Abdurrahman Dilipak and Sema Maraşlı); and (2) KADEM and its “indirect” forms of opposition. The period studied runs from 2019 to 2022, beginning with the proliferation of anti-gender discourses in the AKP’s gender politics and their adoption as a policy perspective. During this period, the AKP’s extreme politicization of gender and sexuality along religio-conservative lines increasingly shifted to an anti-gender securitization perspective that crafts threat perceptions around gender and exacerbates antagonisms juxtaposing the “pure” people versus “immoral” elites (Unal 2023). The AKP’s anti-genderism has proliferated in tandem with the rising public visibility of oppositional frames in civil society opposing gender equality as an ideology, a policy vision, and a social movement (Eslen-Ziya 2020; Unal 2021).

The qualitative data consists of anti-gender actors’ public communications, including interviews, press statements, newspaper columns, journals, websites, social media texts, and the programs of the Women and Justice Summits, which are international biennial events organized by KADEM since 2014 to address matters concerning women, family, and society. This data was gathered through an online search of key sources such as national newspapers and news outlets (Milli Gazete, Yeni Akit, and Yeni Şafak), anti-gender actors’ social media accounts (Twitter) and websites, and KADEM’s women’s journal (the Journal of Women’s Studies). The analysis is attentive to the fact that online communication technologies provide a space that is conducive to the construction, promotion, and dissemination of anti-gender knowledge, and are successfully appropriated by anti-gender actors as a revolt against the perceived monolithic nature of mainstream media (Harsin 2018). News sources such as Bianet, Gazete Duvar, and KaosGL that adopt a critical attitude to anti-gender mobilizations were also included in the online search to qualitatively map the diversity of anti-gender framing strategies.

The analysis particularly focuses on political moments where new “discursive and political opportunity structures” – that is, ideas in the larger political culture that facilitate the articulation and reception of certain movement frames – open up space for anti-gender actors to oppose gender equality politics (Ferree 2003; Koopmans and Statham 1999). Such key moments include recent public debates on the Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence (the Istanbul Convention, IC) and on policy making against violence against women, underage marriage, and women’s right to alimony in divorce cases.

The populist zeitgeist and AKP–anti-gender civil society collusion in Turkey

In the last decade, the agitation of socio-political anxieties into a populist self–other confrontation has become mainstream in the political domain in Turkey, generating antagonistic communication styles that perpetuate negative emotions such as vengeance, hatred, and fear (Öktem and Akkoyunlu 2016; Tansel 2018). Scholars suggest that the spirit of “New Turkey” under AKP rule emanates from a strong sense of victimization that employs resentment as an affective pillar of its hegemony and casts pious Muslims as victims of rights violations under ultra-secular policies in modern Turkey (Yılmaz 2017). This victimization narrative is also gendered in that it enacts a masculinist protection model with a recourse to the rhetoric of “our veiled sisters” that essentializes veiled women as inherently vulnerable subjects constantly under attack through rights violations, ultra-secularist hatred, vigilantism, and physical violence (Unal 2022).

In addition to this negative affective politics, anti-intellectualism and anti-scientific dispositions are key elements of the populist zeitgeist in Turkey (Balta, Kaltwasser, and Yagci 2022; Gençoğlu 2018). David Paternotte and Mieke Verloo (2021) point out that RWP actors’ anti-elitist attacks on liberal academia aim to dismantle the existing institutions of knowledge production and promote an alternative “politics of knowledge,” especially in the field of gender policy, generating a new “ensemble of rules according to which specific effects of power are attached to the true” (Foucault 1980, 132). In the last decade, gender has been operationalized as a constitutive pillar of the AKP’s populist politics at the level of both ideology and strategy, and has become a key site for cultivating a new politics of knowledge that sustains the antagonistic core of the party and its populist claims about representing the national will against “corrupt” elites (Arat 2022; Cindoglu and Unal 2017; Kandiyoti 2016; Unal 2023). The anti-abortion initiative in 2013, sustained attempts to legalize underage marriage and pardon perpetrators in sexual assault cases, the withdrawal from the IC, attacks on gendered understandings of violence against women, the enforced closure of numerous women’s organizations, especially in the Kurdish regions in the aftermath of the 2016 coup d’état attempt, and the criminalization of feminist activism through lawsuits (such as the lawsuit filed in 2022 to shut down the We Will Stop Femicide Platform, a prominent anti-femicide organization) can be cited here as some of the recent examples of the AKP’s attempts to dismantle the existing institutions and policy perspectives that promote gender equality. Moreover, the AKP employs proactive strategies through establishing new epistemic institutions including GONGOs (such as KADEM) and research centers and universities (such as its recent plans to set up family studies centers as alternatives to women’s studies centers and women’s universities as a form of gender segregated higher education) that aim to demolish gender equality politics (Cumhuriyet 2021).

The opportunistic synergy between the AKP’s illiberal regime and the rising anti-gender mobilization has been influential in establishing a new gender regime and producing “alternative” knowledge on gender. The 2013 Gezi Park protests and the 2016 coup d’état attempt were critical moments in Turkey when the AKP tried to reorganize civil society through processes of marginalization, co-optation, and strategic coalitions (Atalay 2022). In the post-2013 period, at the same time as the party has securitized and marginalized feminist movements through restrictive laws and regulations, defamation campaigns, and the criminalization of feminist activism, it has promoted GONGOs on the condition that they operate in a way that is consistent with the regime’s goals (Kütük-Kuriş 2022). However, the recent collusion of the AKP and anti-gender actors goes beyond the processes of marginalization and co-optation and displays the features of a strategically defined, mutually constitutive partnership in which both parties benefit from increased political efficacy in terms of agenda setting, policy implementation, and legitimacy (Özkazanç 2019; Unal 2021).

In the post-2019 period, AKP actors have explicitly articulated this strategic coalition in the form of selective support for the anti-gender mobilization. Under the pretense of COVID-19 measures, government authorities have facilitated anti-gender rallies while denying permission to other protest activities such as Pride walks and feminist protests. Moreover, AKP mayors and members of parliament (MPs) have recently joined various anti-gender rallies organized in different cities, publicly declaring support for the anti-gender and anti-LGBTI+ ideology (KaosGL 2022).

The recent debates on the IC clearly exemplify the party’s incorporation of anti-gender actors into the state machinery through acknowledging, amplifying, and implementing their political demands. Turkey was one of the first countries to initiate and sign the IC in 2011 and ratified it in 2012 with the support of all political parties in the parliament. The IC came into force in August 2014, making Turkey liable for preventing any form of violence based on gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity. While the AKP initially celebrated the signing of the IC and regarded it as a matter of national pride (Erdoğan 2011), it subsequently abandoned this celebratory approach in the context of democratic backsliding, turning the IC into a “problemspace.” This negative campaign against the IC triggered a new wave of feminist movement in Turkey mobilized through intersectional ties in inclusive platforms (such as EŞİK, the Women’s Platform for Equality) and new slogans such as “Implement the IC,” “The IC Saves Lives,” and “The IC Is Ours” (DW Türkçe 2021). However, despite feminists’ warnings that it was a major pushback against women’s rights and would only empower male perpetrators of violence, Turkey formally withdrew from the IC on July 1, 2021.

Anti-gender groups’ negative campaigns against the IC have been successful in influencing the AKP’s policy stance, providing the party with an excuse to suggest that “demands from below” communicate rising concerns in society over the “perils” of the IC. On various occasions, AKP officials have referred to the anti-gender demands in civil society as the “true” will of the nation that need to be addressed at a policy level (Ahval 2020). In this anti-gender collusion, both actors adopt a culturalist rhetoric that regards the “gender ideology” of the IC as a Western imposition, the epitome of the sexual promiscuity of Europe, and a “Trojan horse” to smuggle homosexuality into law (Unal 2021). Drawing on the East/West binary, this rhetoric employs an idealized representation of the Islamic civilization that can allegedly provide a culturally authentic policy vision alternative to Western norms.

The AKP’s culturalist approach to gender forges alliances with illiberal anti-gender actors with respect to many other issues, such as underage marriage and women’s alimony rights. In 2016, the AKP proposed a controversial motion that paved the way for men guilty of the sexual abuse of children to avoid persecution if they marry the victims (Hurriyet Daily News 2016). AKP officials argued that underage marriage is a common cultural practice in Turkey and bottom-up demands require the state to acknowledge that families are broken up because of a legal framework that is not attuned to distinguish between “will” and “force.” This populist move, which aims to legitimize the “supply side” of the party’s reactionary gender agenda with a recourse to the “demand side,” constitutes a core aspect of the AKP’s opportunistic relationship with illiberal anti-gender actors.

However, it is important to note that this strategic alliance is not unified and is subject to intra-party contestation. The intra-party fault lines have become visible particularly during the recent debates on the IC. Some women AKP MPs pointed out that it was the AKP itself that ratified the IC a decade ago and the fact that the Convention is now being vilified on cultural grounds is not convincing and only suggests political opportunism (DW Türkçe 2021). In public speeches and press interviews, Canan Kalsın, an AKP MP and president of the Parliamentary Committee of Equality of Opportunity of Men and Women (KEFEK), problematized the terms in which the IC was turned into a scapegoat (DW Türkçe 2021). Consequently, Kalsın was removed from her role within KEFEK. In a similar vein, the AKP ignored KADEM’s initial opposition to the withdrawal decision and excluded it from the party’s decision-making processes (BBC Türkçe 2020). This shift in the AKP’s alliances from traditionalist egalitarian frameworks to orthodox Islamist anti-gender ideology hints at complex contestation processes during which moderate actors have been excluded and the capacity of illiberal actors to demonize gender equality has significantly increased.

Varieties of civil society opposition to gender equality politics

Illiberal political styles of direct opposition to gender equality

In recent years, illiberal anti-gender actors in Turkey have mobilized around a variety of political demands – namely, the call for the annulment of the IC and Law No. 6284 that aim to combat violence against women, opposition to women’s rights to alimony in divorce cases, and the campaign for child custody in favor of men (Bianet 2018). Anti-gender NGOs such as the Turkish Family Assembly, Islamist media outlets (namely, Milli Gazete, Yeni Akit, and Yeni Şafak), and Islamist public figures such as Abdurrahman Dilipak and Sema Maraşlı engage in contentious collective action to propagate the merits of anti-genderism for protecting national values (Özkazanç 2019). Anti-gender actors skillfully use social media and amplify controversial debates on gender through religio-conservative media channels. Their organic ties to religio-conservative media networks and their active social media presence ensure their significant public visibility. Regarding mainstream media as a “corrupt” institution, they often blame it for misrepresenting gender issues through statements such as “violence against women is a social problem fabricated and triggered by mainstream media” (Gazete Duvar 2021).

Anti-gender actors regard state–movement interactions as a critical domain in which to improve their capacity to influence the formal institutional political space (Graff and Korolczuk 2021; Krizsán and Roggeband 2021). Engaging in different interactions with state actors, ranging from sustained pressure through lobbying activities to consultancy meetings and electoral support, they generate a legitimizing social force for the anti-gender agendas of the political regime. In the Turkish case, this opportunistic synergy is particularly striking when it comes to the populist communication strategies, post-truth knowledge production, and affective politics commonly adopted by the AKP and illiberal anti-gender actors.

The AKP’s narrative of victimization shaped by resentment, anger, fear, and a sense of perceived injustice resonates in illiberal anti-gender groups’ discourses in the form of the “male victimization thesis.” This masculinist narrative operationalizes an aggressive affective discourse with reference to the loss of hegemonic masculine values vis-à-vis the recent feminist gains in political, social, and cultural fields that allegedly lead to insecurities in men’s psyche and social roles (Kandiyoti 2016; Mellström 2018). Moreover, the rhetoric of “malevolent” women who allegedly abuse women’s rights enables illiberal anti-gender actors to further reinforce and perpetuate the male victimization thesis. For example, Sema Maraşlı has stated: “Women demand everything that they can associate with the concept of rights. They call it alimony rights to steal money from their ex-husbands’ pockets. They commit adultery and demand the right to abortion” (Maraşlı 2020, author’s translation). Opposing women’s alimony rights, anti-gender actors amplify the male victimization thesis by depicting ex-spouses receiving alimony in divorce cases as “greedy, opportunistic” women and blaming them for abusing laws through “malevolent” intentions and false statements.

Some women work in uninsured jobs in order to benefit from alimony, while others get married without having a civil marriage. Men who remarry and establish a new home for themselves, on the other hand, give their children’s sustenance to alimony. (Yeni Akit 2019)

Employing resentful politics and post-truth epistemology, anti-gender actors aim at a comprehensive restructuring of discourse, policy, and gender vocabulary in favor of men. The emotional mechanisms of scapegoating, resentment, and vengeance underpinning their reactionary activism draw on a moral sense of superiority based on male victimization that mobilizes as a “counter-movement” to invert feminist principles in an antagonistic relationship (Corredor 2019).

The IC emerged as another key site where the male victimization thesis crystallized. Anti-gender actors generated a “moral panic” around the IC over the claim that it granted legal status to homosexuality and same-sex marriage (BBC Türkçe 2021). They frequently framed the decisions made in accordance with the IC and Law No. 6284 to remove the perpetrators of violence from their home for a specific period of time as symbolic cases that expose the alleged loss of male privileges. The president of the Turkish Family Assembly, Adil Çevik, stated: “Men are thrown out of their homes without any evidence … Once thrown out of his home, the father’s honor in the neighborhood is irreversibly shattered” (Sivilsayfalar 2018). Suggesting that the legal framework is working against men, this anti-gender rhetoric deploys “affective masculinism” as the basis for making misogynist claims (Harsin 2018; Nicholas and Agius 2017). It claims epistemic legitimacy by presenting affects as reliable evidence for proving truth claims and repudiating women’s experiences and narratives. As a result, post-truth epistemology and its fallacious claims and “alternative facts” emerge as key sites where affective masculinism is perpetuated (Budgeon 2021; Nicholas and Agius 2017).

Though the illiberal anti-gender rhetoric does not draw on a rights-based approach, it occasionally instrumentalizes the language of rights to serve reactionary demands. A significant rhetorical tactic used by anti-gender actors to normalize masculinist demands is “discourse capture,” enacted through a rights-based approach. As Lewin (2021) argues, discourse capture selectively adopts feminist principles and subverts their political meaning to perpetuate a politics of gender inequality. For example, Maraşlı (2019b) hijacked the rights-based approach in arguing that the IC and its fundamental principle that “women’s statements are essential in violence cases” is sexist in that it establishes a hierarchical relationship between men and women’s situated knowledges and grants privilege to women’s perspectives. Her main reasoning behind this idea is that many women are prone to slandering and accusing men of violence through unsubstantiated, “malevolent” claims, which in turn cause the break-up of families, emotional harm to children, and damage to men’s wellbeing. This hijacking of a feminist approach – that is, a human rights perspective on sexism – to amplify men’s rights clearly enacts a resentful affective politics in favor of male privileges.

The contextual specificities of anti-gender knowledge production in Turkey crystallize especially when the politics of gender inequality merges with civilizationalist thinking at the intersection of Islam, nationalism, and culture. Similar to the AKP, anti-gender actors frequently refer to the moral superiority of the Islamic civilization and evoke the supposed authenticity of Turkish culture through a civilizationalist frame that denounces Western values and their “imposed” feminist legal tools, such as the IC, as “corrupt” influences on “our culture” (Unal 2021). The statements below, which are excerpted from Islamist writers’ columns in various local anti-gender media organs on the occasion of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women on November 25, 2019, clearly exemplify how Islam operates as an essentialist category of cultural belonging in anti-gender knowledge production:

There is no place for homosexuality in Islam. The Quran mentions about the tribes that were destroyed because they lived a homosexual life. We are against the Istanbul Convention because it normalizes perversions condemned by the Quran. (KaosGL 2019)

A Muslim would never betray his honor and his family! He would never subvert from his right sexual orientation. And this Convention will never work! (KaosGL 2019)

This religiously accentuated opposition to the IC results in a “knowledge regime” marked by conspiratorial thinking. The use of the language of conspiracy, involving accusations of “Western secret plots” aimed against the Turkish nation and the family, and Western conspirators imposing “gender ideology,” is quite common in the anti-gender rhetoric (Yeni Akit 2022). The close affinity between the AKP’s RWP political style and its conspiratorial thinking and the affective politics and knowledge production of anti-gender actors targeting “feminist conspirators” is striking to note here. This commonly shared “discursive field” attests to a growing strategic and ideological alliance based on a post-truth opposition to feminist constructions of gender.

Anti-genderism in KADEM’s activism and indirect opposition to gender equality

Since its foundation in 2013, KADEM has operated as a GONGO that regards feminism as a Western ideology “alien” to the national values and norms (Diner 2018; Kütük-Kuriş 2022; Özcan 2020; Tabak, Erdoğan, and Ün 2023). Echoing the AKP’s gender complementarity perspective, KADEM appropriates feminist rhetorical frames along conservative lines and formulates a seemingly women-friendly policy framework, suggesting that the Islamic concept of justice is superior to feminist gender equality politics.

One of the main missions of KADEM is to generate alternative conceptualizations that would replace gender equality with the idea of “gender justice” perpetuated through the slogan “Equality in existence, justice in responsibility” (KADEM 2021a). According to this slogan, gender roles in the context of public participation should be reimagined in such a way that takes into account men’s and women’s “natural” sexual differences: “There will always be different roles and responsibilities for men and women in family and society. This is the natural law. Men’s and women’s physiologies are not the same” (KADEM 2021b). Operationalized through the Quranic concept of fitrat, which refers to human beings’ biological and divinely ordained nature, KADEM’s gender justice and gender complementarity frameworks connote an anti-gender stance that assigns social roles through essentialist lenses. This also resonates in President Erdoğan’s statement that “[w]omen and men cannot be treated equally because it goes against the laws of nature … You cannot make women work in the same jobs as men do, as in communist regimes … This is against their delicate nature” (Guardian 2014). In addition to fitrat, the notion of salih amel (“good deed”), an Islamic concept defining individual ethics in relation to one’s useful contributions to society, also serves as a key way for KADEM to suggest that natural dispositions bring about different social responsibilities for men and women and that only through following this natural law can one be useful for society as a whole (KADEM 2021a). In this sense, the Islamic framework and its communitarian perspective provides a means for KADEM to anchor rights in natural conceptions and propose new cognitive frames alternative to feminism.

However, we should note that KADEM’s gender essentialism is quite ambivalent and exhibits the qualities of a borderline discourse that oscillates between opposition to gender equality and commitment to women’s legal equality (Krzyżanowski and Ledin 2017). KADEM’s president Saliha Okur Gümrükçüoğlu has stated that natural dispositions should never lead to structural gender inequalities: “We defend the idea that men and women are equal in ontology because of their humanity and thus no institution or person can violate women’s human rights” (KADEM 2021a). Gümrükçüoğlu also avoids rejecting the concept of gender altogether. On various occasions, she has stated that gender as an analytical concept cannot be dismissed as it provides useful tools for explaining how different societies and cultures attribute different roles to women. These shifts between the Islamic framework and the human rights approach display a political ambiguity that compels us to recognize the appropriation and resignification of feminist language in conservative pro-women political positions.

In social movement scholarship, such acts of co-optation and reappropriation are called “frame variations,” where opponents may embrace certain aspects of a movement’s discourse but misrepresent and subvert its ultimate goal (Burke and Bernstein 2014). Ahrens (2018) and Kantola and Lombardo (2021) use the concept of “bending” to define the working mechanisms of conservative actors’ co-optation of feminism and their indirect interventions into gender equality politics. The discourse of gender equality is adjusted and appropriated in such a way as to make it serve goals other than gender equality. In KADEM’s knowledge production, the concept of gender justice replacing gender equality places the main accent on the reproduction and consolidation of women’s traditional roles as primary caregivers.

KADEM members frequently refer to the cultural authenticity and merits of the gender justice and gender complementarity frameworks by bending it toward familialism (KADEM 2019, 2020). KADEM’s public campaigns and knowledge production exemplify its stress on women’s “natural” caring responsibilities. For example, a major theme of the third Women and Justice Summit was the empowerment of family, during which violence against women was discussed primarily from the perspective of family unity with reference to the AKP’s motto “Strong Family, Strong Turkey.” As the summit primarily focused on family unity, the consequences of violence for women’s individual lives and wellbeing were ignored (Kadın ve Adalet Zirvesi 2018). KADEM presents the gender complementarity framework as protective of the family and attentive to women’s familial responsibilities: “It is a requirement of this principle that a woman who is a mother should have the right to flexible working and devote time to her child” (KADEM 2019). However, stressing its commitment to women’s human rights, KADEM also affirms the prioritization of women’s wellbeing over family unity. Gümrükçüoğlu has stated that “where there is violence, there is no family” (KADEM 2019). These shifts between the prioritization of women’s wellbeing and the stress put on women’s caring responsibilities, allegedly dictated by their fitrat, imply a “culturally resonant” public claim making that indicates that, in a co-opted civil society, GONGOs can exist only if they abide by the discursive and policy boundaries denoted by the authoritarian government (Doyle 2018).

KADEM’s ideational heterogeneity and political ambiguity also resonate in its attempts to disassociate itself from illiberal anti-gender actors’ reactionary politics with regard to several gender policy issues – namely, underage marriage, violence against women, and the IC. For example, Gümrükçüoğlu has stated that KADEM is opposed to underage marriage: “Underage marriage is the undertaking of a very fundamental task for the society, making a home, by an individual who cannot yet bear her own legal responsibility. Thus, we are against the practice of underage marriage” (KADEM 2019). However, when reflecting on the AKP’s controversial 2016 motion on underage marriage, Gümrükçüoğlu declared that though KADEM initially opposed the motion, it acknowledged the common practice of underage marriage in Turkey and consequently the need to restructure the legal framework accordingly:

The reason why we objected to the recently prepared government bill on the amnesty of victims of early marriage was the possibility that abusers could be included in this amnesty as well as real victims. However, we believe, as we did then, in the necessity of a new amnesty bill that will completely eliminate this danger. (KADEM 2019)

A similar political ambiguity characterizes KADEM’s approach to the IC. KADEM initially stressed the importance of the IC, arguing that “the gender terminology of the IC does not clash with our culture” (KADEM 2019). However, following a backlash from Islamist anti-gender circles, KADEM members shifted to a position that resonates with the AKP’s decision to withdraw from the IC, suggesting that there is a need for a new legal framework since the IC has become too controversial.

During the defamation campaign, KADEM members were accused by those in Islamist circles of serving feminist lobbies, propagating an anti-family agenda, and subverting national interests, and were insulted in derogatory terms (Dilipak 2020). Regarding KADEM’s seemingly women-friendly perspective as a threat to the ideal of enacting a masculinist policy vision, illiberal anti-gender actors made use of post-truth strategies – namely, conspiracy theories and false rumors – to conduct the defamation campaign against KADEM (Harsin 2018). They argued that KADEM was funded by the European Union and the Hungarian-American philanthropist George Soros, and instrumentalized this funding not to struggle against violence against women, but to serve its “malevolent” agendas against Turkish culture, the family, and the nation (Maraşlı 2019a). Manipulative, misogynistic strategies of self-victimization were also used, with suggestions that KADEM’s pro-women stance insults, discredits, and disadvantages men and turns them into victims (Maraşlı 2019c).

KADEM’s stance vis-à-vis Turkey’s withdrawal from the IC is marked by its positionality in a complex web of relations between different anti-gender actors and agendas. Its interactions and iterative, dialogic processes with these actors inform its frames and counter-frames, and its defensive positionality regarding the Islamist allegations centers around three claims: (1) a disclaimer on responsibility (“KADEM is just an NGO; states are the responsible parties that sign international treaties, not NGOs,” “KADEM was not founded when the IC was signed”); (2) an accommodationist position claiming that the IC has become too controversial and thus an alternative legal framework is needed that would be in tune with “local” values; and (3) a cultural relativist approach to international law (“We do not agree with the terminology of sexual orientation used in the IC. One can revise international treaties in line with local norms and values”) (KADEM 2019).

As these defensive claims suggest, KADEM’s stance on the IC is politically ineffective and is bound by the imaginaries of the AKP regime. However, KADEM cannot be seen as a passive actor or bystander since it assumes significant roles contributing to the growth of anti-gender politics in Turkey. Furthermore, its indirect interventions into gender equality politics under the pretense of human rights can easily slip into politically uncivil communication strategies such as scapegoating, demonization, and hate speech, especially when it comes to the issue of sexual orientation and LGBTI+ subjects.

KADEM’s hate speech against LGBTI+ rights manifests itself most vividly through two frames. First, a moral frame enables KADEM to present heterosexuality as natural, self-evident, and desirable and to define any deviation from heteronormativity as immoral and dangerous:

We don’t accept being mentioned in conjunction with homosexual movements, which we see as a threat in terms of our position, the importance we attach to the family and the continuity of generations. Our struggle against this immoral movement will continue. (Bianet 2020)

Moreover, KADEM frames any attempt to promote LGBTI+ activism and public visibility as deviating attention away from the problems of the “real” victims who suffer because of “real” problems such as wars and oppression (Gümrükçüoğlu 2020). This framing of LGBTI+ issues as unimportant and as a distraction from the “real” agenda implies that LGBTI+ activism imposes “deviant minority values on average people” (Paternotte and Kuhar 2018, 9). This frame also hints at KADEM’s use of post-truth epistemology when dealing with LGBTI+ issues. The moral frame intersects with a conspiratorial frame that suggests that LGBTI+ activism has a hidden agenda supported by international groups, organizations, and lobbies (KADEM 2020). This frame argues that LGBTI+ activism has become an ideological imposition across the globe and constitutes an authoritarian enterprise that silences any opposition to its propositions (KADEM 2020). Consequently, KADEM’s supposedly rights-based approach actually accommodates, reproduces, and reinforces the AKP’s homophobia and its illiberal communication strategies demonizing LGBTI+ subjects. Yet, in an era when new forms of state–movement interactions are invoked to legitimize an aggressive performance of anti-gender politics, KADEM’s borderline discourse committed to women’s legal equality means that it is no longer such an ideal coalition partner for the AKP.

Conclusion

The populist zeitgeist generates a political conjuncture where anti-gender discourses can achieve growing public visibility, resonance, and legitimacy. This article has examined the dynamic power constellations, variety of actors, and discursive strategies that constitute the anti-gender bloc in the civil social domain in Turkey. It has argued that the growing anti-genderism in Turkey is deeply intertwined with the decisive socio-political shifts that have occurred in the recent era in terms of the politics of knowledge production and the role of affects in politics. The AKP’s post-truth epistemology and affective politics motivated by populist antagonisms generate a common discursive field in which party officials and anti-gender actors can engage in an opportunistic, mutually beneficial relationship. This article has highlighted that this opportunistic synergy is marked by a discursive plurality in terms of the ways in which gender equality politics is contested and defamed. It has exposed the fault lines of the anti-gender bloc by differentiating between the “liberal”/“moderate” actors that engage in subtle forms of opposition to gender equality under the guise of human rights activism, and the illiberal actors/hard liners that negate equality between the genders altogether. As a result, it has evaluated the anti-gender alliances that have become hegemonic in the recent era, controlling the discursive terms within which opposition to gender equality is organized, articulated, and defended.

In the context of regime change toward competitive authoritarianism, what is significant to note is that democratic backsliding does not necessarily happen through a complete crackdown on civil society; this crackdown can in fact be selective in that the regime can legitimize those civil society actors whose claims are in line with its governmentality. While the AKP provides favorable political and discursive conditions for all cohorts of civil society actors that either aim to block gender equality politics altogether or generate religio-conservative, rights-based paradigms in place of feminist perspectives, in the recent era it has redrawn its alliances with these anti-gender actors. The party has ignored the “liberal”/“moderate” face of the anti-gender movement that co-opts feminist ideas along religio-conservative lines and accommodated illiberal actors’ anti-equality demands. This shift toward an aggressive performance of anti-genderism makes gender equality politics more contentious in Turkey through a polarizing populist form of knowledge production and affective politics.

This study of the discursive plurality of the anti-gender bloc also sheds light on how feminist counter-hegemonic politics can be imagined in the era of gender backlash. As the analysis has shown, a borderline discourse shifting between an anti-gender stance and a human rights framework turns out to be politically ineffective in curbing the excesses of aggressive anti-genderism and is bound by the imaginaries of the backlash regime. Though feminist emergencies require building intersectional, inclusive solidarities in contemporary tumultuous times, feminists need to bear in mind that liminal actors whose ambivalent discourses shift between rights-based frameworks and anti-equality rhetoric cannot subvert the ideological grip of masculinist hegemony and expand feminist struggles and epistemologies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Academy of Finland: [Grant Number 349550].

Notes on contributors

Didem Unal

Didem Unal is Academy Research Fellow in the Faculty of Theology at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Previously, she was Thyssen Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies at the Central European University (CEU), Austria, and a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Gender Studies, Ethnology, and History of Religions at Stockholm University, Sweden. Her research interests focus on gender politics, right-wing populism, feminist coalition politics, and Muslim women’s movements.