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
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