Understanding images of environmental resistance : village women from ‘Gokova’ to ‘Yesil Yol’

Abstract

In 1984, a group of women occupied the road of Gökova to block the experts of electric institution who came to Gökova for technical measure works for the thermal power plant construction. The newspapers wrote the event as “Women say ‘no’ to the plant!” In the following years, while the projects of power plants and appeared, the reactions of locals and environmentalists increasingly continued. And in almost all reactions the village women appeared as the faces of movements. This study began through a desire to understand the village women images of grassroots environmental movements. It attempts to figure out how these images are represented by the media. To this aim, we look at news reports of ten different grassroots environmental movements, which were published in the Turkish newspapers. By looking at visual and textual discourse of the news reports, we explore the images according to three main approaches; composition of images, the signs of social subjects and differences, and the relationship with the context.