Abstract
This is a timely book as Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP: Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi) under the leadership of president Tayyip Erdogan is about to reach two decades of increasingly authoritarian rule and conservative political transformation. As an expat feminist, Turkish communications and media scholar working now in the United States, Esra Ozcan, has experienced first-hand the headscarf ban of the 1990s in Turkish universities as a BA and MA student. In the preface, Ozcan mentions how her own personal experience of the headscarf ban informed her graduate studies later on. As a young woman wearing headscarf herself, she has suffered discrimination through the repressive policies of the secularist Kemalist elite that held checks and balances through an unelected military-civilian bureaucratic elite that ruled the country until the early 2000s. In her book, Mainstreaming the Headscarf, Ozcan reflects on the symbolic use of the headscarf in newspaper images and how the conservative women newspaper columnists used it at first to bring attention to their marginalised/repressed status as women under an authoritarian system and later on how these same women broke their negotiation with liberal intellectuals and secular feminists and betrayed them by supporting the neo-con agenda of AKP and Erdogan.
Ozcan uses a qualitative method combining content analysis with discourse analysis to sample and comment on three conservative women columnists who have written on the headscarf issue from the late 1990s until 2015. In her analysis, she focuses on (1) key turning points in AKP’s electoral history (in 2002, in 2007, and in 2011), (2) major referenda covered by newspapers and (3) the aftermath of 15 July 2016 coup attempt after which AKP won by a minor margin and subsequently changed the checks and balances of the country’s political system, eventually leading to an authoritarian one-man presidential system.
The book is organised into six parts. The introduction lays down the foundations of Ozcan’s main argument where she claims that the term ‘Islamist feminist’ is misleading and explains why she prefers to use the term right-wing conservative women instead. Ozcan draws parallels with AKP’s neo-conservative economic and social policies. She also reminds the reader about the experience of women around the world who are also pushed more and more into insecure, underpaid, home worker jobs. Ozcan argues that a misogynist discourse is defended by women newspaper columnists to legitimate misogynist discourses by authoritarian politicians.
The first chapter chronicles and problematises the secularism versus Islamism debate that led to AKP’s rise to power in 2002. The chapter successfully narrates major events during AKP’s time in power. Ozcan also describes and debates in detail the mechanism of media capture and repression used since 2010 in Turkey and its implications for liberal and feminist voices. Chapter 2 tells the story of the headscarf ban from the perspectives of different parties in Turkey and exposes the common rhetorical strategies used to defend or oppose the headscarf. Here, Ozcan uses examples from her own personal family history to discuss in length how the lives of successive generations of young women in Turkish universities have been affected by the headscarf ban and how such visuals of women in headscarf are used ideologically to support a right-wing gender regime to come under AKP’s authoritarian rule.
Chapter 3 is on visual culture of gender representation in Turkish newspapers. Here, Ozcan is able to situate the debates around the headscarf issue within an analysis of visuals, culture and news. She analyses news photographs in four newspapers in the political spectrum, both secular and Islamist published between 2002 and 2012. The analysis results in important findings: that stories of poor women in headscarf (images of poverty) are replaced by successful middle-class women in AKP’s ranks (headscarf and SUVs), and female columnists wearing the headscarf moved from margins to centre and from being the critics of establishment to defenders of the new establishment.
Chapter 4 is a thorough analysis of three key right-wing conservative women journalists’ columns. Ozcan draws particular attention to the argumentative strategies used by these women to justify AKP’s and Erdogan’s authoritarianism. She illustrates in detail how conservative women journalists approached controversial topics and events that helped deepen polarisation in Turkish society such as the Occupy Gezi Park protests (May 2013), the now defunct peace process with the Kurds, and the restriction on alcohol consumption. Particular attention is paid to these conservative women’s break with Turkey’s liberal democrats as part of a hegemonic struggle to gain the power to define what constitutes ‘common sense’. Ozcan discusses in detail this process of conservative women becoming part of the new establishment and the visual/rhetorical strategies they used in their columns to legitimate AKP’s conservative gender vision and other authoritarian social policies.
In Chapter 5, Ozcan offers an interpretation of how left-wing and progressive feminist movements in Turkey interact with conservative women in a highly polarised political climate where feminists are constantly demonised by AKP and Erdogan. She points at the possible dilemmas faced by Turkish feminists in their attempts to distance themselves from religious doctrines that limit women’s freedoms but also oppose Islamophobia. She asks who has the power and the right to represent ‘women’s rights’ and points at the conflicting perspectives in AKP’s gender policies. The chapter is successful in linking this debate to the broader questions within feminism. Ozcan also argues that the critical wing of conservative women might be the possible new allies of leftist feminists against the rising competitive authoritarianism in Turkey.
In the Conclusion, Ozcan discusses the potential for a new gender equilibrium under the AKP regime in Turkey. She sums up the findings and debates raised in the book and points at different possible directions of the headscarf debate in Turkey for the future. This chapter has Gramscian overtones as Ozcan uses Gramsci’s concepts to propose new analytical possibilities to push back and claim a new democratic domain as a departure from AKP’s repressive ideological realm that is restricting it. She is also wary of the growing disconnect between intellectuals like herself and half of the country’s population that do not seem to care how the other half lives. Her concerns are valid as the most recent authoritarian developments such as the complete closure of bars serving alcohol during the Covid crisis, the attacks on LGBT rights supporters, the laws passed to limit social networks and ban Netflix in practice for showing undesirable gender roles all point to the dangers for people with secular lifestyles under AKP’s authoritarian rule.
Mainstreaming the Headscarf has three unique contributions: First, it shows how the everyday use of an ordinary object like the headscarf can be construed as a changing symbol depending on the user’s political status. Right-wing conservative women used it to claim marginalised/repressed status, then used it again to form alliances with secular feminists and liberal intellectuals and finally they are using it as power status symbol under AKP’s authorisation regime. Ozcan illustrates well how a symbol like the headscarf can be visually used for ideological positioning by right-wing conservative women journalists in Turkey who later came to become engineers of AKP’s new gender hegemony which paved the way for the eventual authoritarianism of President Erdogan. Finally, the book proposes ways to break the new authoritarian gender hegemony of AKP and Erdogan by claiming new ground via pushing back and regaining secular freedoms. Overall, Mainstreaming the Headscarf is a theoretically engaging book rich with in-depth examples and analyses of Turkish media and proposing new ways to break right-wing conservative hegemonic media rule by authoritarian governments. Ozcan does this by carefully avoiding binaries like secular versus Islamist in her discussion throughout the book. It is a rich book, which advocates new methods to counter hate media by AKP government through first-hand personal insights and anecdotes while making theoretically rich propositions.