Abstract
Özcan explores the similarities between conservative women’s movements in Turkey and the United States. She argues that the designation of conservative women’s activism as “Islamic feminism” in Turkey has eclipsed the similarities between these women and the conservative women’s movements elsewhere. The chapter focuses on how Turkey’s conservative women, so called “Islamic feminists,” have aligned with the authoritarian policies of the Justice and Development Party, supported the elimination of rights and freedoms, and institutionalized anti-feminism. The author suggests that transnational feminist scholarship pays more attention to how networks of conservative women in different parts of the world ally with misogynist men in power and contribute to the marginalization of feminism.
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Notes
- 1.
See the special issue by Television and New Media on “The Reality Celebrity of Donald Trump.” http://tvn.sagepub.com/site/misc/DonaldTrump.xhtml.
- 2.
Diner and Toktaş (2010) have left out the Ottoman period and designated slightly different reference points, including the Kurdish women’s movements during the 1990s in the story of feminism in Turkey. But they kept the three waves metaphor.
- 3.
Pazartesi, the feminist journal of the 1990s, clearly reflects this ambivalence. See Pazartesi (July–August–September 2007). The volume is a compilation of articles published in the journal from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s on women and religion.
- 4.
For the propagation of orthodox religious values in schools, see Arat (2010).
- 5.
For more information on the debates see Tulin Daloglu, Al-Monitor (September 24, 2014).
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Özcan, E. (2018). Conservative Women in Power: A New Predicament for Transnational Feminist Media Research. In: Harp, D., Loke, J., Bachmann, I. (eds) Feminist Approaches to Media Theory and Research. Comparative Feminist Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90838-0_12
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