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  • Thinking Women, Feminism, and Muslim Identity through Bodies and Space in Turkey
  • Banu Gökariksel (bio)

The corpus of miriam cooke's writing defines new frontiers in scholarship on women's writings on war and violence, Islamic feminism, and the dissident politics of art and literature. cooke engages with double critique that writes against Orientalism and Islamophobia as well as indigenous forms of repression and injustice. Her emphasis is on the intersections of power and poetics, highlighting the aesthetics of political critique. Her work identifies the persistent agency of women writers and artist-activists in times of hopelessness and turbulence. Her scholarship, deeply grounded in several countries in the Arab world, generates questions about gender, politics, and everyday experiences in Turkey, where I have been conducting research since the 1990s. Women have been at the forefront of contestations over the terms of inclusion and exclusion in Turkey. They challenge prevailing hegemonies, provoked partly by the targeting of women's bodies, dress, and subject positions by differently situated ideological groups, secular or Islamist, attempting to reconfigure the public sphere according to their vision.

Women and Muslim Identity

Women Claim Islam, which focuses on the rise of Islamic feminism in the Arab world, helps us understand how secular and religious women in contemporary Turkey respond to prevalent power structures and political ideologies. cooke (2001, viii) argues that dominant narratives of history, war, emigration, and exile have excluded women's stories, leading Arab women writers to demand "to be heard and [End Page 116] seen." These writers have formulated complex identifications based on their multiple positionalities, criticizing global and national feminisms and Islamic power and knowledge systems that marginalize them (155).

Much of the research I conduct in Turkey focuses especially on women who self-identify as devout Muslims. For much of the 1990s through 2010, the headscarf symbolized shifting ideological fault lines in Turkey (Secor 2005). During this period the state banned the wearing of this article of clothing in many government and public spaces. In other spaces, secularists maligned and marginalized women who wore it. From 1996 to 2013 I heard many accounts of how women's practice of wearing the headscarf had initiated encounters and experiences that made them aware of the dominance of secular ideology not only on the streets but also in scholarship, in feminist activism, and with respect to their own bodies and family lives. All devised tactics to navigate the everyday geographies of secularism and several became actively involved in resisting this hegemony by producing alternative realities.

In Women Claim Islam cooke (2001, ix) usefully defines feminism as "above all an epistemology": "it is an attitude, a frame of mind that highlights the role of gender in understanding the organization of society." Whether or not a woman self-identifies as a feminist, cooke argues that feminism "seeks justice wherever it can find it. Feminism involves political and intellectual awareness of gender discrimination, a rejection of behaviors furthering such discrimination, and the advocacy of activist projects to end discrimination and to open opportunities for women to participate in public life" (x). This emphasis on feminism as awareness, rejection, and activism is productive for thinking about how headscarf-wearing women have responded to opposing parties politicizing and instrumentalizing women's dress and bodies in struggles for power and dominance. Pious women have strategically claimed identities as Muslim women while refusing to be depicted as the singular Muslimwoman—a term that cooke (2007) coined to criticize the erasure of differences among Muslim women and the emergence of an ascribed singular category where gender and religion become one. Turkish women, most of whom wore the headscarf, participated in demonstrations at the gates of universities and in city squares to criticize the headscarf ban from the mid-1980s. Realizing that most women's rights organizations were aligned with secular state-sponsored feminism and did not consider the headscarf ban aviolation of women's rights, devout Muslim women either established new Islamic feminist organizations (Diner and Toktaş 2010, 42) or started working in human rights organizations. Several sued the Turkish state at the European Court of Human Rights, to no avail (Gökarıksel and Mitchell 2005).

Focusing on the symbolism of...

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