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...

Issue Section:
Third Space
You do not currently have access to this content.