Sounding possible worlds: The cacophony of the Istanbul Feminist Night Marches

Historical background of Feminist Night Marches in Turkey

Although Feminist Night Marches started in 2003, conversations regarding its history often mention the 1987 solidarity march against battering as a moment of origin. The 1987 march was the first legal march after the coup d’état of 1980, uniting more than 3000 women in Istanbul streets after a judge refused to grant a divorce to a woman whom her husband was abusing (Arat, 1994; Demirdirek, 2015; Şahir, 2019). It is also remembered as the first event where women gathered in numbers that surprised even the women who organized the event (Karakuş, 1987: 7). The 1987 was indeed the beginning of a new era after the 1980 coup d’état crushed all political opposition wherein feminists opened up new channels to talk about what it means to be a woman and generated new modes and forms of resistance to patriarchal oppression (Arat, 1997; Çakır, 2011). Cities in Turkey saw many women’s marches and feminist campaigns following that year, including the famous Temporary Modern Women Museum and the Purple Needle Campaign (Amargi Yayınları, 2012; Sirman, 2013). In the following years, women’s organizations started to unite diverse groups of women that had not been together before. For example, in the 1989 Woman’s Day demonstrations in Sultanahmet and Bağlarbaşı, feminist organizations, feminist magazines, women politicians, leftist feminist associations, women nurses, women students, and individual women all got together for the first time (Amargi Yayınları, 2012; Savran, 1989).

Although political spaces for women diversified after the ‘1980s, it became difficult to unite women in the ‘1990s and early 2000s. 1990s project feminism, the increase of campaigns and projects funded by private institutions, international non-governmental organizations (NGOs), or ministry offices caused an upsurge of campaigns that lasted until the early 2000s (Bora, 2014; Ergüneş, 2006). In this context, it became difficult to schedule a time and place for mass demonstrations. The attention was focused on project-based campaigns, and state officials rarely permitted daytime demonstrations. Also, weekends were split between different feminist organizations that wanted to do private protests. In other words, weekdays were low attendance, and weekends were fractured. A critical turning point took place in 2003 with the first night march, when women decided to gather at night for the first time. A feminist activist Mehtap Doğan ⁴ explains this transformation as follows:

Twelve years ago, the loosening power of women’s emancipation movement, the lessening of feminist demands within women’s activities, and the blurred lines of ideological/political background that divides feminist and non-feminist women urged feminists to create a feminist protest different from the demonstrations they were already a part of. They wanted this protest to belong to all women and that no one should have come into prominence, so they decided to restrict the usage of any placards, flags, banners, or tokens that are signed by or are associated with an organization. (Rahte and Tokdoğan, 2014: 72)

This practice continued to be conducive to uniting women, as women who did not belong to a union or an organization or women who could not join demonstrations during working hours were able to attend the night march. Another turning point took place in 2013 with the Gezi Park protests, ⁵ which also shared the urge to be an inclusive and open space. Gezi paved the way for novel forms of thinking and activism and fostered the know-how and experience to make politics without letting ideological differences and political identities fracture the togetherness women experience on the street (Arat, 2013). After Gezi protests, Feminist Night Marches met demands for a space that enables differences to co-exist: a space that does not harbour pre-established, and somewhat rigid and cliché, political ways of being and resisting.

The emergence of new collectivities, starting with the 1980s and gaining momentum in 2013, grew the reach of women’s solidarity; but it also brought new dynamics with regards to collective action. Even though women got together for shared concerns, each had their unique experience of what it means to be a woman in Turkey. Different political groups wanted to vocalize their own political concerns in the demonstration, but this often conflicted with other groups’ priorities. These conflicts kindled many dilemmas since the 1980s, but the shared concern regarding the necessity of collaboration generated many valuable discussions. The question of whether women should foreground within these spaces their own political identities, ideologies, and practices, or whether it may be possible for all women to focus on their commonalities and foster an inclusive environment in which all women could exist together is still a continuous debate (Kaktüs, 1989).

Recent years of the Istanbul Feminist Night Marches and their aftermath have witnessed heated debates regarding the LGBTI+ presence within the marches. ⁶ These discussions about the ‘proper subjects’ of the march are indeed the continuity of the march’s long-lasting value of inclusivity, but they are also the ripples of the deepening roots of intersectionality within feminist politics around the globe. As the UN states in a recent publication about the waves of feminist activism, ‘Previous generations conceptualized and argued for intersectional movements and worked “in solidarity” with them, but current movements have incorporated radical intersectionality as a core principle of their practice and membership’ (Molyneux et al., 2021). Feminist Night Marches are a part of this larger transformation of political activism and the rise of the collective awareness that feminist struggle cannot be separated from other political struggles such as gender, race, ecology, and class, along with others. However, it is also crucial for Feminist Night March attendants and organizers that no political group, slogan, or banner excludes or devalues a particular experience of womanhood. The motivation behind this approach is the collective will to create an open space where all women can feel a sense of belonging (8 Mart Feminist Gece Yürüyüşü, 2022). Feminist Night Marches are seen as a temporal and spatial field of togetherness where differences can unite, not as a clash of different political agendas. Therefore, although new collectivities lead to diverse conflicts during Women’s Day each decade, what we see across time, and what the soundscape of the march reminds us, is the shared concern about inclusivity. Be it about leftist, Kurdish, refugee, migrant, Armenian, or Muslim women, men, lesbian women, trans men, or trans women, in the long run, the shared concern regarding the necessity of collaboration and inclusivity continues to prevail. ⁷

Today, the policies of the current regime continue to threaten the lives of women, ⁸ and its lack of tolerance for criticism continues to shrink human rights and civilian space in Turkey. Not to mention that since the 2019, Feminist Night Marches on Istiklal Street are banned by the state, and women are often attacked by the police with rubber bullets and pepper spray. Against these interventions, Feminist Night Marches continue to exist as an open space for women to protest the patriarchal power regime that seeks to silence them. Undoubtedly, these interventions are not unique to this century. The control over and suppression of women, their bodies, and voices, speak to a long history of national gender politics that feeds off a long durée of patriarchal ideology and its treatment of the feminine voice.

The gendered acoustic order of the social

Gender politics has always treated the female body as a site of power within patriarchal regimes. As the voice is the primary tool of communication, of relating, self-expression, language, and meaning, connotations around it influence social interactions and power dynamics immensely. The regulation of the female voice has been a constant motivation in patriarchal regimes across contexts and is rooted in a long history of social, political, and economic systems. Anne Carson (1995) in ‘The Gender of Sound’ traces the gendered perception of sound and voice back to Ancient Greek society. Carson deconstructs the prevalent meaning structures around voice by providing historical examples that exhibit the ongoing processes in which different acoustic characteristics became connected to gender categories. Giving examples from Aristotle’s conceptualization of the female voice as containing her ‘evil disposition’ or the tale of Echo who was denied control over her own voice as a punishment for using her womanhood for her hopeless love for Narcissus, Carson illustrates how having a feminine voice came to be regarded as inhabiting a position detached from logos, reason, and rationality. In contrast, the masculine voice became associated with sophrosyne – the ability of having reason, solid wisdom, temperance, tranquility, and self-control (p. 126). These gendered conceptualizations of voice survived until the present day; strengthening their hand with the rise of binary forms of thinking within Enlightenment theory; and took new shapes in different times and geographies while feeding the binary that conceives lower and coarser voices as authoritative, charismatic, convincing, or rational, and high-pitched voices as feminine, irritating, irrational, or emotional. This gendered perception of voice when merged with gender binaries fed the norm that all men should have masculine voices and all women should have feminine voices, and anything out of these alignments makes a subject lacking (of femininity or masculinity) or abnormal. This way, voice became an indicator of a properly gendered subject, and therefore a means of patriarchal power.

In Turkey, from the period of ‘modernization’ onwards, ⁹ the female body has become the signifier and a product of a Western and secular nation (Göle, 1996; İlyasoğlu, 1998; Kandiyoti, 1995). The way women dressed, walked, and talked became symbolic of the civility of the nation. Adab-ı Muaşeret (Etiquette) books from those years that provided guidelines and advice for the proper ways of being a civilized subject portray the gendered regime of this civilization process (Ural, 2018). For the new subjects of the Turkish Republic, who had been exposed to major transformations, these books offered a blueprint for becoming ideal citizens. They also served the purpose of laying out the new codes of how to behave in the public sphere. Women were particularly encouraged by these new regulations to partake in new public roles in the Republic. They were urged to ‘participate in the [sic] urban life in a way to exhibit modernity; however, as the carrier of the national identity which is identified with honor, they should also be able to control themselves, even in the face of harassment’ (Ural, 2019). She was advised not to laugh out loud, not to drink and dance more than is necessary, and not to indulge in excessive behaviour. The books further advise the new Republican Turkish woman to live out any of her strong emotions in the private sphere and hide them from sight when in public: ‘she should not cry even though she is in endless pain and sorrow, she should hide the excess of her pain, her grief, and her joy at home’ (as cited in Ural, 2018: 92). What is particularly telling here, and which these Adab-ı Muaşeret books evidence, is that the voice is a significant component of the regulation over the female body.

One contemporary example of the outcome of gendered policies regarding the female voice in Turkey can be feelings of general irritation towards vocal women protestors. In private conversations, the shouts and chants of women protestors are often dubbed an ear-shrieking sound, which allegedly devalues the cause, while no similar comments are made towards male protestors. When I was trying to understand why women protestors often received this reaction, one interviewee urged me to start the question with when rather than why. When does a woman shout? In Turkey, it is very common to hear men shouting, but it is always an ‘occasion’ when a woman shouts. This difference is a result of the aforementioned history of disciplining the female voice; the female subject is constantly warned and educated to control her voice, to leave her emotions at home. A woman who is loud in public is, therefore, a subject that is out of the norm. Be it a moment of danger or joy for the woman in question, it is always a risky moment for the patriarchy, and for the general order within the ‘civilized’ Turkish nation that expects women to remain silent. All these presumptions point to a sensory order that has very strict rules about who can do what, where, and when. Jacques Rancière argues that the senses of the social are divided in certain ways by positioning bodies to specific times, spaces, and forms of activities. As subjects are formed into groups that are associated with certain ways of doing and being, their participation in the social sphere is also implicitly shaped and framed. He conceptualizes this as the distribution of the sensible, a set of sensory rules that conditions the possibilities of perception and listening by creating self-evident sensory laws that divide what is sayable/unsayable, who is audible/inaudible, and visible/invisible (Rancière, 2004). In the acoustically gendered social order, the vocalic expression of women becomes bound to the private, and its performance in the public sphere becomes risky for the normative distribution of the sensible. Thus, the screams of women mark a threshold of the normal: a breach in the maintenance of the flow of the ordinary. It is often portrayed as an excess of emotion and a lack of reason. A female scream marks a loss of control, a display of the lack of sophrosyne, and the failing grip of reason and language. Be it a woman shouting a slogan during a protest, a woman shouting ‘help’ while in danger, or a woman laughing loudly in a public place it does not matter. These are all categorized as noises that symptomize a crack in the order, a limit of language and reason, where words are not enough and extreme emotional expressiveness takes over. This becomes an even bigger problem if women make sounds collectively. Carson explains that, in Ancient Greece, the collective sounds of women were regarded as an alarming event. These sounds, often referred to as ololyga, were a climactic part of women’s rituals or festivals. They were likened to very distressing noises such as emotional cries or animalistic shrieks, and the events of its occurrence were banned in the city:

No proper civic space would contain it [ololyga] unregulated. The female festivals in which such ritual cries were heard were generally not permitted to be held in the city limits but were relegated to suburban areas like the mountains, the beach or the rooftops of houses where women could disport themselves without contaminating the ears or civic space of men. (p. 125)

The collective voices of women were regarded as uncivilized and unworthy of the ears of the civilized men. They did not have a place in the city centre according to the normal distribution of the sensible in Ancient Greece. Thinking of Turkey’s Feminist Night Marches as an ololyga opens up new ways of understanding it as thousands of women in a city centre performing a ritual: that is, shouting, whistling, and making noises that generate strong reactions from the hegemonic order, that of patriarchy. Some laugh at it, some get annoyed by it, some want to silence it. Ololyga is still unwelcome in the 21st century. Despite this response, the insistence on performing this sound has political power.

Cacophony: The acoustic atmosphere of the march

Against the continuity of the gendered sensory order of the social, women in Turkey continue to organize and resist in different forms. Feminist Night Marches hold special importance for women as a space that unites thousands of them. Although I mainly focused on what women thought about and felt within the march in my interviews, I also tried to understand the acoustic dimensions of the march in order to grasp how this acoustically gendered sensory order affects women today. For interviewees, discussing sound and voice opened up novel ways to think about their activism. For example, İdil said that the acoustic experience of the march is a characteristic of the event that describes its success:

When there is no walk, there is no sound, it is like that in my memory. When the march is banned, there is a rupture, but where there is walk, there is aliveness, there is a very yekpare ¹⁰ sound. When you, as an activist, hear that sound, you say there you go, this march is done!

By yekpare, İdil refers to the uniqueness of the cacophony of the march. Cacophony is usually defined as a discordant and ungovernable noise; therefore, any sound that is ‘bad’ for the dominating discipline of the power regime may be called a cacophony (Yetişkin, 2018: 98). Indeed, many women defined the sounds of the march as a cacophony – a bundle of noises – but as İdil points out, it is a very particular and unique sound that is integral to and at the core of the experience of the march. It is not homogeneous, but a strong and solid sound emerging from a collective. It consists of shouts, whistles, songs, drum beats, and slogans. Even the slogans which make most of the qualities of the cacophony of the march are not performed homogeneously or simultaneously.

Slogans move like waves within the march. A slogan emanates from mouth to mouth and from ear to ear, creating a sonic presence like a ripple, and then it fades away. Then another ripple emerges in another place as if immense but unseen raindrops are falling on top of the march and making where they land resonate. Therefore, the dissemination of the sounds of the march does not have a linear disposition, but a centerless and temporal one. What is even more interesting in the performance of these slogans is that they do not privilege the semantic quality of words over the performance of them. Joining the vocal performance of slogans is more akin to attending a beat, a rhythm. Brandon La Belle (2010: 125) defines this acoustic attendance through the dancing body: ‘the sonic body can already be thought of as a sort of dancer, as one driven by the beat yet finding its own particular expressive shape, as a responding counter-rhythm that follows the beat while already breaking it. Indeed, one interviewee, Irmak, compared joining a slogan to dancing: ‘It is a feeling like you just have to close your eyes and dance, like joining a song in a concert, it requires a little confidence and a certain amount of dedication. The rhythm of the body, and this body-slogan connection, invite us to think about the sonority of the marches in a new way. This cacophony women dance to is unregulated and raw, co-existing in a way that is neither disciplined, categorized, or framed. Several women, for example, indicated that the march could feel very disorganized due to the volume of whistles. ‘People say things, but you never understand them’, said Irmak. Almost no one hears the declaration, even through the megaphone. As such, some have argued that this acoustic nature of the march renders communication complicated. Nevertheless, the difficulty of conversation enables another form of dialogue within this cacophony. As İdil argues, ‘we diverge on so many issues when we sit around a table, but in the physicality of the march that doesn’t happen’. In the night marches, women who do not know each other or who possibly have very different ideologies get together for a shared purpose and experiment alternative modes of relating to each other that are not based on semantic communication but on physical collectivity. Many women highlighted the importance of the physicality of the march in different words, but one of the most striking testimonies came from Ayşe, who said: ‘It [the words of the slogans] did not really matter to me after a point. You realize sometimes that the slogan is nice, but after a point, it is just enough to just say ‘aalee lööö’. How can we evaluate this marginalization of language and this prioritization of rhythm, of this bodily/vocal form of expression? La Belle offers a clue: ‘such moves poignantly locate rhythm as means for reordering place, for publishing against the inscriptions marked on the body, and as a production of another kind of public space’ (p. 125). If we concur with La Belle’s metaphorical rhythm-dancer analysis, what may be the transformative power within the counter-beats that women are simultaneously creating and dancing to? This question necessitates understanding how the acoustic performativity within the march leads to ‘another kind of public space’.

Beyond language: The phoné of the sounds of the marches

‘Alee löö’ from Ayşe’s comment is a good starting point as they represent sounds that do not signify anything within language. This takes us back to Carson’s (1995) discussion of ololyga:

The ololyga with its cognate verb ololyzo is one of a family of words, including eleleu with its cognate verb elelizo and alala with its cognate verb alalazo, probably of Indo-European origin and obviously of onomatopoeic derivation. These sounds do not signify anything except their own sound. The sound represents a cry of either intense pleasure or intense pain. To utter such cries is a specialized female function. (p. 125) ¹¹

Ayşe’s comment defining slogans similar to these corporeal sounds that signify joy or pain is remarkable in revealing the bodily and sonorous quality of the march. The collective voices of women, whistles, shouts, chants, and slogans which weave into a big cacophony operate outside the semantic system. The performance and remembrance of these sounds do not depend on their grammatical significance but on the emotions and affects they ignite. Meaning, this acoustic space of the march does not harbour the ordinary verbal performances of the phallogocentric political space. It does not operate through a notion of voice that focuses on the enunciation of words that make sense in the semantic order. On the contrary, they hint at an alternative form of relationality that does not feed on gendered perceptions of voice that define who is reasonable, who gets to be a political subject, and who gets to have a voice (Davis, 1995).

In For More Than One Voice, Adriana Cavarero (2005) bases the gendered acoustic structure of the phallogocentric order on the division between speech/language and voice/sound: in other words, on the division between the semantic and the phonic. As mentioned earlier via Carson, since Ancient Greece, the ideology of logos was entangled with the processes that resulted in gendered perceptions of different sounds and voices. This process also has its roots in the division between language and voice, between the semantic and the phonic. The gendering of voice that Carson discusses is enriched when thought of alongside Cavarero’s description of the historical processes that led to the prioritization of the semantic/semantike over phonic/phoné regarding the definition of logos, even though at first, and etymologically speaking, the concept of logos equally valued both of these qualities (p. 35). Cavarero argues that in time, logos lost its connection with the phoné. This loss is also connected to the gendering of sounds through the binaries logocentrism creates. Where the grammar, the linguistic, reason, and writing became more associated with men and semantics, the rhythmic sounds, nonlinguistic enunciations, the body, and songs became concepts that are more affiliated with women and the phoné. Both Carson and Cavarero aim to reveal and subvert this categorization that creates hierarchies and promotes unequal social relations. Cavarero does this by reintroducing the phoné into the discussion of logos. She starts her analysis with a quote from Italo Calvino, ‘a voice means this: there is a living person, throat, chest, feelings, who sends into the air this voice, different from all other voices’ (p. 1). By refocusing our attention to the body of the subject that speaks, Cavarero highlights the phonic aspect of voice that has lost its place to speech. She reminds us that a voice is, after all, an acoustic performance that conveys the uniqueness of its performer. By following this ontological source in vocalic transmissions, Cavarero urges us to reimagine interaction as an acoustic space that values the unique sources and vocalic singularities within it. This imaginary hints at the possibility of a political space fuelled by sonic interaction, by vocalic connection rather than semantic transference: a political space that prioritizes the connection of vocalic singularities rather than the semantic references within these vocalic performances.

This vocalic move is also an attempt to reclaim and redescribe logos in a way that disqualifies the umbilical cord between reason, language, and the masculine voice that Carson points out. For women who are confined to the borders of phoné, as the ones disadvantaged in acquiring language, meaning, and reason, Cavarero’s endeavour is especially important. It offers a new political potentiality, and a way to dismantle the gendered power dynamics within the social sphere. It calls for a reciprocal and resonant social sphere where voices are as meaningful as words. Feminist Night Marches act as a manifestation of putting the state of phoné before semantike. They prioritize who is speaking and which bodies are performing sound, rather than what is being said. They remind us to take the acoustic quality of voice and the bonds it weaves instead of being fixated on a communication system that is based on semiotic meanings of vocal performances. Feminist Night Marches derive their power not from well-performed speeches but from the collectivity of different voices, however chaotic that might be. This quality contributes to the argument that mass political protests of our decade often require an understanding of voice not as ‘a form of transparent political representation of specific demands’ but as a vocality of presence that demands being heard and acknowledged (Kunreuther, 2018: 5). These resistant moments generate new beats and generate a temporal intensity that hijacks the flow of pre-established entanglements between language and the social order. Or, in the words of Holger Schulze, ‘the mere presence of resisting corpora questions the harmonizing power structure’, (p. 205). Sonorous resistant bodies create glitches in the phallogocentric harmony that is imposed on them. They call out for the realization of the possible worlds prefigured within their togetherness.

The materiality of the transformative potential within the Feminist Night Marches

I have argued that the cacophony of Feminist Night Marches manifests novel forms of relationality that challenge the pre-established gendered acoustic order of the social by prioritizing the unity of voices instead of ‘meaningful’ speech performances. However, during fieldwork, understanding how this manifestation of ‘another type of public space’ affects women was rather difficult. For a long time, I was focused on emotions, and trying to get descriptions of feelings. Yet participants continued to say how good the march was, via phrases like: ‘iyi geliyor’ and ‘güzel geliyor’. The literal translation of these phrases is ‘good comes’, and ‘beautiful comes’ but they refer to a positive outcome as if something makes everything better, something makes it easier, and it makes you feel good, capable, and at ease; similar to the phrase ‘it’s nice’. This was frustrating for me; I encouraged women to define what they meant by these phrases using descriptive sentences and adjectives, but to no avail. The turning point was when I realized that they were using these phrases because it was challenging to define what they felt exactly. There were perhaps no specific words that would do justice to their emotional/sensory/material experiences. These phrases, in fact, were pointing to a blockage in language. On lucky occasions, when I asked subjects to elaborate what they meant by ‘iyi geliyor’ they said things such as: ‘being together with other women makes me feel powerful’ or ‘I felt that it made me tangibly stronger, as if I can do anything after this’. These kinds of details were valuable, as most of the time ‘iyi geldi’ did not find any particular explanation, but many women said walking together, being together, and shouting together felt good.

Thinking with Spinoza’s definition of affect as the change of intensity in one’s capacity to act made this general state of goodness more meaningful (Deleuze, 2004). It urged me to listen beyond the words. Then I focused on the atmosphere of the discussions rather than the words that women used, and I started to observe that while women expressed their emotional state of being in the night marches, their voices took a new tone, and they leaned into the table while talking, moved their hands more, and their eyes were more lively too. The rhythm accelerated, and sentences from different voices followed each other more fluidly. I soon realized that this change could be experienced as a moment of reminiscence where the initial experience of the march is manifested again, in a different time and space. These moments contained clues of women’s initial affective states within the march. In a way, these conversations and the march had similar atmospheres. After this realization, it became clearer that phrases of ‘iyi geliyor’ and ‘güzel geliyor’ were attempts at defining an affective change. They were referring to the fact that the collective corporeal experience in the march was increasing the intensity of women’s capacity to act. Similar to the conversations, the collective act of physically being together in the march was fuelling women’s affective mood. They were being more active, more optimistic, more energetic, connected, capable, more powerful. The collectivity of voices within the Feminist Night Marches physically and mentally transformed individual participants. Being together, which makes them feel joyous, alive, and safe, generates a sense of empowerment and creates solidarities that make it easier for them to deal with the material struggles of their lives. Feminist Night Marches are essential for its participants for this reason; as many of them said again and again, they only feel a sense of their own power and solidarity with such intensity on the 8th of March, when they share the same rhythms with other women.

When we look at the bigger picture, we may note that this happens only one day a year; there is a dearth of opportunities for public togetherness in the lives of women in Turkey. There are no spaces or times where women occasionally make sounds together in large numbers in the public sphere and this is regarded as normal. Their gatherings are most often approached as an excess that requires the government’s close attention and regulation; and the recent bans of the march rob women of the potential to effectively engage with each other, from creating a mixture of bodies that lift each other physically and spiritually. Against this urge to control and discipline, the collective bodies of women gain a resistive force just by being together on Women’s Day each year. Although not specifically written for the Istanbul Feminist Night Marches, Holger Schulze’s portrayal of protesting bodies is relevant to quote here as the common feature the marches have with other protests around the world. Schulze argues that when sonorous masses get together, they form a resistive collective existence. This unity becomes an entity, and

It is present, it acts, it moves, and it gestures; it sounds and it resonates: It is – if you will – a moving body of resistance. It is a They: those aliens are here. They exist. They demand attention, recognition, and focus. As listening and sensory bodies, collective corpuses. A multitude of focuses, of lives and forms of existing, biographies, desires, habits and idiosyncrasies. (Schulze, 2018: 201)

Just being there, demanding ears to listen to them, and eyes to see them is the resistance embedded in the existence of the union of their bodies, ‘your bodily presence as such in this location, on that time of the day, together with those other human bodies is resistance in all its materiality’ (Schulze, 2018: 202–203). Therefore, although the march is only one day a year, and is faced with restrictions, the collective experience of resistance creates an overflowing or ‘excess’ existence; and spreads the kind of solidarity that affirms togetherness beyond particular identities.

Women explained this mode of resistance as a demand for being free to walk and make noise together. İdil says, ‘It is such a discharge and a story of self-creation, I can shout here today and I am going to shout until the end, everyone, hear, we are here, we are many’. Several interviewees also described this with the phrase ‘gövde gösterisi’, which literally translates as a display of body, but means a show of force: ‘it is a show of force to the public, it is a show of force to the government. It is a state of saying: we exist, we are here, and we are doing this at the center of the city, and we must do it’, says Ece. Even in the aftermath of a march, this intensity continues: ‘When I leave, I feel very alive; for days afterward, I feel very alive’. What is also valuable in how women describe this intensity is that it contains both anger towards gendered oppression and an appreciation of life and solidarity. It is both a show of force to enemies and a physical, joyful experience that enlivens their bodies and souls. This experience is directly at odds with the state’s attempts to tame the collective physical presence of women, the free expression of their desires, and the material changes that their actions facilitate.

8 March marches are not a revolution in itself. It is also not just something wherein you make your demands to the state, and then pursue these demands . . . Everybody wants to jump and play; they want to say I am alive, I am here, and I am going to a party after this’. (Ecem describes)

This quote is very telling in that it summarizes well the atmosphere of these marches. Ecem is also of the opinion that in a time where we are trying to survive by watching Netflix at home, where everyone feels like they are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, the celebration of life by dancing and shouting at these marches provides a lifeline. War, bombings, police violence, domestic violence, unpredictable judicial processes, unlawful dismissals; one can continue to give endless examples of experiences that border on traumatic for a citizen of Turkey. Feminist Night Marches, which affirm life and existence, provide a bulwark against these traumatizing state acts, and manifest togetherness and joy as a practice that consistently proves vital for women regularly pushed to breaking point. It is evident that the march provides women with a new perspective with which to tackle real-life problems, as it is not only a political performance of a ‘counter-rhythm’ – a demand of a new public space – but it is also a transformative space for the subjectivities and bodies that attend it.

Conclusion

Feminist Night Marches continue to form a critical part of activism in opposition to the patriarchal Turkish state. As in the 1980s, the current women’s movement is still powerful in uniting women across ideologies and identities. Feminist Night Marches offer a space for women to come together because of their shared experiences as women and walk and shout against the patriarchal system while also celebrating life. Through their collectivized physical resistance, they perform an acoustic ritual that breaks the expected ways of being a woman and doing politics. From a Rancièrian point of view, thousands of women shouting at the city centre at night restructure the pre-established distribution of the sensible by performing a dissensus: a ‘re-configuration of the common experience of the sensible’, (Rancière, 2010, 140). A dissensus in Rancière’s terminology is a political and aesthetic process that reveals the arbitrariness of the inherent sensory order, and generates new perceptions, audibilities, and visibilities for the purpose of equality. Through their ololyga, women – despite limitations – create a political space to echo the voices of silenced women back into the public sphere. They reclaim their place, visibility, and audibility by re-configuring dominant sensory regimes via celebrating their own existence and putting their bodies and voices in public places. And they do so not by giving well-structured speeches but through their rhythms, voices, and bodies. In a way, they recompose the gendered meaning system that defines who makes sense according to phallogocentric values by generating a political and transformative space that values presence and relationality. Women leave the march experiencing the potentiality of an alternative way of living together triggered by this prioritization. Although temporarily, they dance at the border of the materiality of a possible world where different voices can make sounds together without silencing each other. Even though this transformative experience is in the form of cacophony, it still leaves material traces at their bodies and souls that perpetuate the imaginary of a world where all voices matter. Women indicate that although once a year, the continuity of this ritual is crucial, as the march has become a symbolic act that connotes that they are there, they are not shutting up, and that they exist, no matter what. Their perseverance empowers all women facing the current government’s ongoing anti-feminist policies and narratives. Against the attempts of the patriarchy to suppress their voices, women find ways to unite and resist alongside their differences and celebrate life and solidarity by sounding possible worlds.