Critical Pious Agency and Muslim Feminists’ Activism in the Age of Authoritarianism

Abstract

This article examines how the aggressive public discourse on feminist protest works at the current political moment in Turkey, when Muslim feminist subjects are at stake. It looks at the heated public debates on the 2019 Feminist Night Walk with a particular focus on the recent proliferation and concentration of the divergences and fault lines in the Muslim women’s movement. Drawing on the Foucauldian approach to the power-discourse-resistance nexus, it investigates different forms of gendered subjectivity in the reformist segments of the Muslim women’s movement that are produced in accordance with the changing contextual dynamics and explores whether these subjectivities are conventional/conformist or resistant. Along these lines, it provides a typology of two distinct modes of gendered Muslim subject formation at the intersection of Islam and feminism: hybrid subjectivities embracing the hegemonic terms of governmentality, and resistant Muslim feminist activists.