Mainstreaming the Headscarf: Islamist Politics and Women in the Turkish Media (Video)
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- Hello, I'm Esra Özcan. I'm a scholar of Communication Studies
- teaching at the Department of Communication at Tulane. The title of my book is, Mainstreaming
- the Headscarf: Islamist Politics and Women in the Turkish Media. In the book I tell the
- story of the rise of authoritarianism in Turkey during the past 18 years between 2002 and 2020.
- I was particularly interested in how human journalists on the Islamist right
- have contributed to the loss of democracy in Turkey.
- I am a communication scholar but the book is not only about communication studies my imagined
- readers are also interested in political science, sociology, anthropology, and gender studies.
- Let me give you some background information about the subject. During the 1990s and early 2000s
- sociologists and political scientists categorized Turkey as a democracy with some deficiencies.
- So it was a democratic country but not democratic enough.
- I was an undergraduate student in Istanbul in the 1990s majoring in sociology.
- As that generation of sociology students, all we wanted politically was a stronger,
- better democracy with more rights for all. In Turkey at the time, the groups that were
- marginalized the most were the Kurds, Alawites, various leftist groups, and finally religious
- women wearing head scarf, because there was a ban on headscarf in the universities. Adult women
- over 18 who wanted to wear a head scarf were not allowed to do so on university campuses.
- So we wanted more rights for all these groups. Turkey was a multi-party democracy during the
- 1990s. There were several parties on the left and several parties on the right.
- Three political parties dominated the right at the time. First, there was the secular right,
- which was also the center right. There was and still is an ultra nationalist fascist right.
- They believe in the superiority of Turks as an ethnic group over the other ethnic groups
- in Turkey. And finally, there was the Islamist religious right. The religious right wanted
- a government and a society organized on the basis of religion and religious conservatism.
- In Mainstreaming the Head Scarf I'm telling the story of how Turkey's religious right
- mobilized the issue of headscarf and the feeling of injustice around it to establish alliances
- with the liberal democrats, the feminists, and other pro-democracy constituents in the country.
- Religious rights came to power in Turkey in 2002 under the leadership of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan,
- who is the current president of Turkey. Erdoğan successfully transitioned the country from a
- democracy to an authoritarian regime in around 16 years. He has now power over the three branches of
- the government: executive, legislative, and judiciary branches. The media as the fourth estate
- is also under very tight control. In the book, Mainstreaming the Headscarf, I'm talking about how the
- pro-Erdoğan woman journalists have contributed to this process of loss of democracy. I analyze their
- argumentative strategies in favor of Erdoğan about a variety of issues, ranging from foreign policy
- issues to women's rights. I argue that throughout this process of transitioning to authoritarianism,
- women of the religious right in Turkey have succeeded to make their understanding
- of women's rights as the new mainstream, as the new common sense. There is no headscarf ban in
- Turkey anymore, but practicing headscarf has been encouraged and idealized at the expense of women
- and men who don't want to organize their lives on the basis of religious conservatism.
- In the book I also reflect on the choices made by Turkey's liberal democrats and feminists during
- the 1990s and the early 2000s. In hindsight, I wonder if Turkey's liberal democrats and feminists
- could stop or prevent the rise of authoritarianism had they made different choices. The book lays
- out some of the tricky debates on the road to authoritarianism and to the collapse of our basic
- formerly agreed upon concepts, such as women's rights and democracy itself. Thank you very much.
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