Abstract
Esra Özcan’s book Mainstreaming the Headscarf: Islamist Politics and Women in the Turkish Media scrutinizes the complex connotations of the headscarf at the current political moment in Turkey. Tracing the changing meanings of the headscarf in visual culture and communication, it examines how the Justice and Development Party’s (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi (AKP)) reshuffling of the gender regime in anti-feminist terms with a reference to the Islamic tradition has transformed the image of women in Turkey. First, Özcan provides an analysis of newspaper photographs of headscarf-wearing women collected from four newspapers, namely, Hurriyet, Sabah, Yeni Safak and Zaman, between 2002 and 2012 during the election periods. Second, she analyzes headscarf-wearing conservative women journalists ‘columns published between 2006 and 2014. Her main argument is that under the AKP period, ‘the headscarf has moved from the margins to the mainstream and the women wearing it from victimhood to success’ (p. 3). For Özcan, the imagery of the headscarf as a signifier of the ‘ideal’ woman is central to the new gender hegemony established under the AKP rule. She provides a detailed account of the visual culture in the AKP era that utilizes Muslim women’s headscarf for populist arguments and links it to the morality of the nation and the will of the majority. Özcan further argues that ‘since Gezi protests, headscarf emerged as a symbol of nation pushing the critiques of the AKP outside of the nation’ (p. 76).
Mainstreaming the Headscarf is composed of five chapters, together with an introduction and a conclusion. Chapter 1 gives a comprehensive insight into the social, cultural and political background of ‘new Turkey’ under the AKP. In Chapters 2 and 3, Özcan demonstrates that the headscarf in contemporary Turkey is framed in multiple and complex ways, depending on the actors’ motivations, and is always part of an ongoing hegemonic struggle. She neatly exposes how the social and political connotations of the headscarf have changed in the recent history of Turkey in the discourses of four groups: secularists, Islamists, feminists and liberal democrats. Pointing out these actors’ strategic manoeuvres and discursive shifts, Özcan suggests that since the 1990s feminists and liberal democrats have regarded the headscarf as an extension of identity politics, acknowledged its democratic possibilities and affirmed the language of choice, agency and conviction in headscarved women’s narratives, attributing it a positive quality that can reinforce democracy in Turkey. Yet, Özcan concludes that this liberal democratic thesis has proven wrong because it detached the headscarf from the undemocratic limitations of right-wing politics and thus failed to acknowledge that its mainstreaming can serve the regressive potential of religious conservatism.
In the 1990s, scholars critically engaged with the idea that conservative women’s religious beliefs would diminish as modernization takes hold in their lives. Nilufer Göle’s (1996) Forbidden Modern proposed the concept of ‘non-Western modernities’ to account for the new generation of young, well-educated and urban, headscarf-wearing women in Turkey who emerged in the public sphere in the 1980s, protesting the headscarf bans and demanding access to education in secular institutions. Özcan critically engages with the post-1980 academic literature, which describes headscarf-wearing women as new actors of Islamism. For Özcan, conservative women’s double commitment to Islam and Western feminist ideas such as women’s autonomous agency is not necessarily ‘surprising’, ‘unexpected’ or ‘promising’. She prefers to frame this double commitment as mobilization of ‘multiple rhetorical resources and argumentative strategies to insert their point of view into the discourse’ (p. 54). In doing so, she aims to shift the focus from the promising qualities of the women’s role in the history of Islamism to the regressive connotations of their involvement in right-wing politics since the 1980s.
Özcan engages in a detailed discussion of the labels and prefixes used to describe conservative women’s complex positions in Turkey. She questions the explanatory capacity of frequently used labels such as ‘Islamic’, ‘pious’, ‘conservative’ or ‘Islamic/Muslim feminist’, arguing that they define the authenticity of conservative women’s positions with reference to Islam and limit their position to the conflictual realm between Islam and secularism. According to her, this approach ‘diverts attention from the right-wing nature of Islamist activism and conservative women’s role in it’ (p. 5). Within this frame, Özcan prefers to use the prefixes of ‘conservative’ and ‘right-wing’ to highlight conservative women’s commitment to right-wing politics. At a political moment when right-wing populist discourses resonate across the world through similar discursive, epistemic and symbolic processes, this reading opens up a useful space to expose the similarities between conservative women’s discourses in different contexts.
In Chapter 4, Özcan develops her arguments with a close look at the newspaper articles of conservative women columnists who have become increasingly visible since the mid-1990s and emerged as influential public figures in the AKP era. She tackles the question of how and why mainstream conservative women columnists who have been praised for their bridge position between secular and Islamic circles and their multiple critique aimed both at Kemalists’ ultra-secularism and at the patriarchal discourses of Islamist politics have toned down this critical, progressive position and moved to being ardent supporters of Erdogan.
Locating their writings in the changing political context in Turkey, Özcan states that AKP’s anti-secular and anti-feminist hegemony could not have been sustained without the support of conservative women journalists who have emerged as elite actors in Islamist, pro-Erdogan media over the last decade (pp. 3, 138). Özcan argues that mainstream conservative women are not ‘passive recipients of power but they are strong defenders of misogynist men in power’ (p. 98). She contests recent scholarly work that points out the promising qualities of conservative women journalists’ recent pro-feminist reactions against AKP’s patriarchal policy perspectives. For Özcan, this positive view is misleading because it takes conservative women’s selective appropriation of a feminist language at face value without considering their support for a repressive regime (p. 149).
In Chapter 5, Özcan concludes that as devout supporters of an authoritarian leadership, mainstream conservative women journalists undermine the prospects for solidarity between Islamist and secular women with regard to women’s rights. For her, ‘it is futile to search for grounds of solidarity with them’ (p. 150). Yet, Özcan misses the point that fixing the meaning of their narratives as ‘unqualified’ for feminist coalitional solidarity might entail an essentializing tendency that overlooks the fluidity and flexibility of political positions in Turkey in an era that does not tolerate dissent and opposition. One might argue that although Özcan’s account rightfully points out the limitations of mainstream conservative women’s positions, it is not sufficiently attentive to the multiple layers of their pious agency that display abrupt discursive shifts, temporalities and instabilities in the current political environment, especially when topics such as family, reproductive rights, women’s sexualities, feminist identity and feminist protest are at stake.
Özcan acknowledges that conservative women do not represent a homogeneous group in Turkey. She categorizes them into three groups: the mainstream wing, the radical wing and the critical wing (p. 11). According to this categorization, the mainstream wing, which is the main focus of Özcan’s study, refers to the pro-AKP figures who may use a protective critical voice at certain points to alert the party about potential criticism from its opponents. Özcan states that while the radical wing disagrees with the mainstream wing in their preference for a stricter, male-dominated Islam, the critical wing departs from them with its affirmation of a feminist position and its critical attitude towards AKP’s authoritarianism and anti-feminism. Within this frame, Özcan sees the critical wing of conservative women as potential allies for resisting authoritarianism in Turkey. Yet, for her, ‘unresolvable tensions between religion and feminism’ block sustainable feminist coalitions between secular feminists and conservative feminist women (p. 157). She also alleges that ‘wearing a headscarf on religious grounds and claiming feminism at the same time indeed presents a contradiction-in theory’ (p. 158). Framing observant women’s commitment to gender-traditional religions and their autonomous feminist agency as dichotomous and in paradoxical terms makes Özcan’s study susceptible to the binary between Islam and secularism that she sets out to question. Özcan’s conclusion also seems to underestimate recent scholarly and activist attempts to find possible dialogic ways of fostering mutual recognition of differences and self-reflexive transformation in the women’s movement in Turkey.
Despite these shortcomings, Özcan’s analysis aptly demonstrates that in the current era, both secular feminists and critical conservative women in Turkey find it increasingly difficult to have common ground with pro-AKP conservative women in responding to the feminist emergencies in the new gender regime. Özcan’s observation about the closing of the coalitional space in the women’s movement begs many productive questions for future research. Most importantly, it paves the way for rethinking/deconstructing the labels and fixations used to denote mainstream conservative women’s subject positions and exposes their major role in right-wing politics in Turkey.