Abstract

A number of small political groups, including women’s

rights, and ecology and social justice movements in Turkey have

been influenced by the new social movements which came to exist

with the Seattle uprising, the Arab Spring and the Spain 15-M

movement. The slogan “another world is possible” has been adapted

to their jargon of global political action towards a global

action. I will argue in this presentation that in the wind of

change that came with the Gezi resistance in Turkey, women in the

Gezi commune have transformed their role in social movements and

have become an important source of power thus challenging the

dominant masculine constructions of revolutionary space.

The core spirit of the Gezi resistance in Turkey can be

investigated in the framework of the anti-capitalist protests

during the IMF and World Bank meetings in Istanbul in 2009. During

the Gezi resistance, a commune was created in the park causing the

emergence of a revolutionary urban space. Thus far, the Gezi

resistance has been analysed by many researchers. However, there

is a lack of research on the commune itself from the perspective

of everyday life sociology/sociology of the everyday life. As

Alain Touraine claims, social movements are at first new social

constructions, created by the spontaneous and arbitrary actions of

political agents. In two weeks’ time in the Gezi Park, an

organization was formed that was oriented by the natural flow of

mind which was simply inspirational, emotional and gender-

responsive to body politics. It was women as founder-agents of the

commune who transformed their given, traditional roles at the time

of resistance, rejecting the processes of gendered social

reproduction. My aim is to understand the distinctive features of

women’s response during the revolutionary situation in the Gezi

Resistance. I will try to answer the question “what is the role of

women in constructing a communal lifestyle?” Gezi’s liberal

composition can give us insights into women’s role in the

sociology of everyday life during protests but also women’s

domination in the struggle in Turkey, in comparison to Tahrir.

“This life is a hospital in whicheach patient is possessed by the

desire to change beds. One wants to

suffer in front of the stove and another believes that he

will get well near the window.”

Baudailere, Paris

Spleen

Boredom is the dream bird that hatches

the egg of experience. A rustling in

the leaves drives him away.

Walter Benjamin

The earth was a cloud of gas… The origins of life

explanations are generally told by this opening sentence, right?

The most familiar element for the people who experienced the

social movements in the last years also should be gas, right? Tear

gas and of course, water cannons. Now we adapted -or in other

words- evolved to live with them in the daily life practically.

When I look back, it’s been 2 years, a very short period but what

a huge history. The history of us and the history of Gezi commune.

Hereby, this paper has two purposes. First, to talk about the

social change and social construction of Gezi in everyday life.

Second, to focus the perspective and look at the gender role

division in Gezi commune.

The creation has been always mystified by the sovereigns. I

could explain here some heroic stories that I witnessed. We have

symbols, we created them in couple of days. But when it comes to

analyse the event which we are in and around and trying to

understand , we need the strategic approaches for the study. As a

sociology major, I know lots of instruments to delaminate what I

hold in my hands. In other respects, the hardest part is to decide

the tools. The difficulty that I feel, James M. Jaspers has

clarified with his words:

“We also need research into strategic choice in a range of

contexts; the choices leaders make in recruiting others, those of

individuals in deciding whether to attend an event, the choices of

opponents faced with pro- test, the decisions made in the heat of

a confrontation, those to change tactics or ideologies. When we

look for decisions and dilemmas (instead of for structures), we

will find them. This research agenda plays to the methodological

strengths of this field.

Not all action is strategic. Most of what we do is routine or

communicative, rather than directed to the means for getting what

we want from others. Within social movements, there are a number

of routine activities that are not questioned—but many of them

could be. Almost every action of a protest group reflects an

explicit or implicit choice: it could have been done differently.

But they are not of equal consequence. What colour to paint the

office is a choice, but not (most of the time) a strategic choice.

True, a very popular TV star supported the activists in the

first days of uprising and when he couldn’t find that he was

looking for (more popularity), he claimed that the people hit the

streets because it was a hot and sunny Saturday in June. Sometimes

I justify him in my mind internally, because he could be right

about some points. I just follow the clues and look at the first

signs that are obvious. The remarkable signal was the women of

Gezi, from the initial point to every single day throughout the

happenings. Within this motivation, we started a research project

which named “the Gezi and female objects. In Gezi commune for 15

days and in succeeding months, we were surrounded by any type of

women from all walks of life, each of whom had a different level

of subjective consciousness. They show that women are beginning to

recognise and reorganise their collective power. Emergence of a

collective women’s action is evident.

In our research, I aim to maintain our objective on women’s

role in the social movement Aside from being participants

ourselves, we interviewed around 50 women. The general assumption

is that the women were the initiator and executive power of this

movement. But the importance of this effect is not emphasised in

the analyses, which are written by men. “ While we were still on

the streets, men went back home and started to write Gezi's

history. We prefer to resist rather than set the meaning. We

needed time to interpret yet, but they wanted to stabilise the

movement in their true and dominant perspectives.” said one of the

intervenants.

Gezi commune, if defined as a commune and I choose to define

as it as such, existed for 15 days. On 27th May a small group of

activists started to resist in the park against construction

machines. The police intervened violently. The second day the

group got larger. This time police set fire to the tents of the

resistance group and tried to clean up the park. These

interventions took a couple of days. The turning point was the

night of 31th may to 1st June, when the police attacked heavily.

This time an unexpected flow rose up against the police. The

barricades were set up, Gezi Park was occupied. As I mentioned in

the introduction, everything was a cloud of gas. The day after,

the commune had been founded, people woke up in a brand new

organisational life form that they had never seen before.

It was 2012, I was reading Badiou’s “The Communist

Hypothese”, but actually I wasn’t able to progress easily because

I could not imagine what a barricade was. In the summer of Gezi, I

read it in maybe 3-4 hours and I said “yes, this is it”. “We are

precedents of May 68, hooray”. It’s bizarre that in 2 years so

many things changed, from those days of resistance to the forums.

The most common word which is used by people now for the social

movement is “deflation”. Now, we are in the point to look at what

was it? What is that action? What was that social order in those

15 days? What factors determined that social change? Were we able

to change anything, really?

After all the interviews and participant observation in this

period, the general opinion of women is that something has

changed. This is the hypothesis of our project research.

Consequently, how should we establish a relationship between field

work and theoretical analysis? In regard to classical theoretical

traditions, we have conflict theory, functionalism, symbolic

interactionism, structuralism, post-structuralism etc. Between

sociological theory and social theory, we have to interrogate the

dynamics which set up the context. That is to say the set of

cultural patterns- epistemic, economic and ethical- that Alain

Touraine called “historicity”.

In the article of “An Introduction to the Study of Social

Movements”, Touraine draws a typology of conflicts and says “The

notion of social movement is a specific mode of constructing

social reality.” In the types of Touraine’s conflict typology, he

prefers to open up different conflicts. As for myself, I wanted to

focus on one side and took third type of social conflict, which

occurs in M.Crozier’s definition “zones of uncertainty”. In other

words, zone of exception, space of exception. “Many conflicts

which were considered “organisational” are in fact “political”.

When Gezi Park was re-organized by the community with all its new

structural forms, it shows that the space of exception in terms of

agents.

The space of exception is simultaneously a state of

exception. The state of exception is the climax point of the

political action. This political action is the ontological reason

of the political and exceptional space. We can call it a

revolutionary space. A space surrounded by barricades. A space

which is totally ours. A space like an utopia. In terms of

historicity, there is an emergence of a totally new cultural

pattern; there is no money, economy of commodity. It’s a place for

ecology, it’s a place for women, for children and youth and LGBTI,

minorities, oppressed groups, members of the lower class and even

middle-class. May be the most apparent social stratum may be the

“middle class”. After analysing the Gezi movement, “the majority

approaches this as a middle class movement. They did right and

they committed mistakes. Just I want to mention here Agamben’s “a

community of whatever beings” in his book of “The Coming

Community”. It means new political subjects which can overcome the

formal, rational and authoritarian space by its amorphous inherent

irrationality.

“Perhaps the most outstanding consequence of viewing human

society as organisation is to overlook the part played by acting

units in social change.” Whatever beings are acting unit and their

action is not oriented by co-ordinated. This acting unit attempts

to act with its intentions, wishes, and desires. A kind, gentle,

caring to the inexperience ones. Being good, innocent and

honoured against the Evil. The main sense of Gezi can be

identified feminine by its symbols, the strong and beautiful

women images.

“The Commune was the biggest festival of the nineteenth

century. Underlying the events of that spring of 1871 one can see

the insurgents’ feeling that they had become the masters of their

own history, not so much on the level of “governmental” politics

as on the level of their everyday life. “ says Guy Debord, in

theses on the Paris Commune. I have to give attributions to Paris

frequently because when it comes to life, the comparison helps to

show the similarities and commons to understand both sociology and

history. Especially from the point of view of the city and from

the point of the view of women liberation. Here, the key point is

the relation between women and the city. We are the young women in

Turkey in the neoliberal age who grown up with American series

“sex and the city”. We are the same young women who oppressed by

the religious rites. But wherever in the world, women live the

same experiences in action.

“A young woman is walking down a city street. She is

excruciatingly aware of her appearance and of the reaction to it

(imagined or real) of every person she meets. They will comment on

her defects, or compare them to those of other passers-by. They

will make her a participant in, their fantasies without asking if

she is willing. They will make her feel ridiculous, or grotesquely

sexual, or hideously ugly. Above all, they will make her feel like

a thing.”

“Being a woman is being stuck and trapped in the city. To

survive in the city, girls should be socialised more or less “like

boys”; they should be independent, competitive and aggressive.

Created situations can break that pattern of socialised acceptance

of the world as it is. Only action, to re-invent the everyday and

make it something else, will change social relations. Women are

hyper-aware of their surroundings because of the risks and

threats. We have to be, to survive. The general attributions to

women like intuitive, passive, physically weak, hysterical,

overemotional, dependent by nature etc. Contrarily to these

attributed presuppositions, the women confronted real danger

against pepper-teargas and water cannons with no fear. It’a

critical momentum in the first construction of symbolism in Gezi.

Then , the women were called brave. In the exceptional space, as a

new political subject women manifest itself with through breaking

its aporia. Negri uses the term of aporia to describe the

challenge of the potential power. By the impulse of the Gezi

movement, the tension is exploded and turned into an outward flow

of expression.

Gezi had a world which has its own time, own space and own

reality. In 15 days, like creation myths, it built a new culture

and civilisation. the tents for housing, the food corner and its

lines, library, children’s ground, farmer’s ground, performance

stage, agencies for institutional political parties, social

communities, university groups, chamber groups, and even its own

media. It had its own tv, radio. It had its own way of

communication., Even though the routine was fluxional, the commune

was always alive. Some lived in the daytime, some lived in the

nighttime. In the morning you could find people on the breakfast

line, then doing their morning workouts, , some people playing

volleyball, somebody doing yoga. In the afternoon, the commune

would start to get crowded, some groups would make music, some

groups would teach. In the evening there were performances on the

stages, there were forums for discussion, someone was drinking

while someone was praying. It was an illusion of a free world

which got very close to being real. This is a everyday life. All

of these components came together, spontaneously, as acting

units they took their positions in the space, in the exceptional

revolutionary space. These components came together in a

functional way, a conflictual way, an interactionalist way, but

formed a model of a new social organization.

One of the ateliers in the commune was a collective work for

data compiling and mapping on the relations of capital and power

in Turkey. They use an interface powered by graph commons network

mapping tool. It shows directly the mechanisms of urban

transformation. When I reflect on the similarities of Istanbul and

Paris, both cities have similar levels of urban compression.

Simmel tells the blase attitude of the citizens and the sentiment

of being l’autrui. We can observe this alienation in the women’s

behaviour, especially in the avant-garde cinema of May 68 films of

Godard. The women’s images in a background of a city silhouette

which has extensive grey blocks and flats. The city with fallic

and rectangular shapes. And I should add an other detail here,

“Paris Spleen” of Baudailaire was published 2 years before Paris

Commune; “Spleen” has a meaning of boredom and depression in the

city.

On the other hand, in his book “The Logic of Practice”

Bourdieu describes the form of the house in the Kabyl. He gives

every detail of the organisation of the house and he says “the

house is organised in accordance with a set of homologous

oppositions.” To make another comparison with Tahrir square, the

social distribution of gender was heterogenous in Gezi. Bourdieu

defines a practical geometry for this logic of practice in his

observations in a mythic-ritual space in Kabyl. Independently, the

social construction of commune in Gezi has an other type of

geometry. My argument is that the form of the commune has a form

of network beyond the extensions. It refers to Manuel Castells at

the same time that it was a invention for a population that

designated itself like a network mapping. While I was trying to

figure out my ideas about this subject, I was going to a

conference of the chamber of the city-planners in the architecture

faculty. While I was walking in the corridor I recognised the

models of the scholars. I have been walking so many years in that

university but I hadn’t noticed that. This network form is kind

of discovering perspective and realising the dimensions beyond

analytics. This geometry of multitude is a different language of

organisation type. And if this structural form is created as

heterogenous, a homologous reposition would be impossible.

Bibliography:

Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community

Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice

Herbert Blumer, Symbolic Interactionism - Perspective and Method

M. Crozier, Relations du Pouvoir et Situation d’incertitude

Meredith Fox, Women and Her Mind: The Story of Daily Life

Carol Ehrlich, Socialism, Anarchism And Feminism

Guy Debord, Theses on the Paris Commune

Jodi Dean, Solidarity of Strangers

Kian Kenyon-Dean, Collectively Learned Individualism

James M. Jasper, A Strategic Approach to Collective Action

Berger & Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality

Feride Çiçekoğlu, Şehrin İtirazı