"An Article That I Am Not in the Mood to Write Anymore": Motivations to Research about Popular Feminism

My friends have grown bored of me talking about conceptualizing some form of popular feminism that I have been noticing "in the air" in Turkey. For many feminist activists and scholars based in or engaged with Turkey, it seems confusing to talk about "popular feminism" at a time of such active antigender and antifeminist mainstream discourse. Thus each time I have shared this conceptualizing idea with someone, I have had to explain my usage of the term. Despite growing antigender mobilization, feminist ideas have become increasingly popular in some spaces in Turkey, but we have not been able to analyze this beyond a discussion of whether that popularity is good or bad. Once I explained this in detail, I was encouraged to "write something" about it because the contradictions I problematized seemed intriguing to many. Here I reflect on my failure to write about popular feminism, situating that failure in relation to the political atmosphere in Turkey after the 2023 elections. I do not aim to complain about contemporary political conditions (well, maybe just a bit!) but rather to discuss how our relations with the world around us are linked to our readiness to build research in a specific way. I suggest that sometimes a researcher's reluctance can produce new ways to ask questions. I am inspired by feminist work encouraging us to unpack how we produce knowledge (Davis and Evans 2011), and I turn to mood as a tool for it.

In my earlier work I analyzed political commitments as an affective lens that sticks, proposing the concept of "mood of commitment" (Gülçiçek 2022). I now want to reflect on a mood change from the uprising excitement to reluctance toward my research focus on popular feminism in Turkey. "Mood" is often conceptualized as a way to consider how we relate to the world and with whom we find ourselves attuned (or not); it is not individual (Ahmed 2014; Pereira 2022). Thinking about our mood as researchers helps us reflect on "how we situate ourselves in relation to an object of study and what we find most salient" (Felski and Fraiman 2012: vi). We always find ourselves in one mood or another that draws on some styles of argument (or not); those styles of argument catch what will or will not matter to us (Felski and Fraiman 2012). Analyzing the mood of a researcher is not simply thinking about our own lives and how an "external" world shapes us. Rather, analyzing mood blurs demarcations "between individual and public affect" (Hemmings 2012: 527) and centers our relationships with the world in which we find ourselves. The vagueness of the concept gives it great potential. Drawing on its vagueness, I will reflect on how mood shaped my orientation to researching popular feminism and falling out from that mood by attuning myself to "odd" groups who talk about feminism.

The excitement I felt about conceptualizing the contradictions of popular feminism in Turkey came from a change I observed between August 2015, when I moved to the United Kingdom for my PhD, and August 2020, when I returned. Before 2015 feminist circles were very active, but they were small and intimate. Except for those circles, feminist knowledge was somehow "okay" but also alien in the academic and left-wing political worlds.To capture how feminist knowledge was marginalized, my friend and I wrote a piece for a feminist magazine on how some ask us "what feminists think about X or Y" as if feminist literature can be summarized in a few sentences and there is no need to read feminist texts when someone can simply tell you (Özdemir and Gülçiçek 2015). One of the many things that generated intimacy among feminists was talking about these repetitive examples of ignorance and our annoyance with simplistic understandings of feminism.

While I was away, I often visited Turkey, produced research about it, and actively followed (and felt affected by) political events. Yet when I moved back in 2020, I was struck by the...