‘Everything or nothing, all of us or none’: emotional articulation of different subjectivities in gezi park protests

Abstract

While Feminist IR provides valuable insights on gendered political analysis, intersectional analysis seeks to expand our understanding of gender and feminism to include diverse and plural experiences of woman at the intersection of gender, class, and race. The multi-systemic approach in understanding oppression and privilege within intersecting structures, as well as understanding how various subjectivities become reified or transformed is an integral part of intersectional analysis. Although intersectional analysis aims to understand how power operates at intersections of various subjective positions, conceptual and methodological challenges in understanding power - subjectivity interrelation persists. This research combines intersectional analysis with politics of emotions to trace how subjectivities marginalised are articulated and sustained. Deriving from the understanding that emotional is political, it is possible to enrich intersectional analysis through the emotional literature of IR that seek to move beyond the understanding of emotions as ‘derivations of rationality’ and recognise the political and social significance of emotions in global politics. The 2013 Gezi Park Protests will provide useful grounds to seek the role emotions play in understanding how the intersecting oppressive structures are perceived and resisted by the so-called Gezi community. By demonstrating emotional articulations of political through an intersectional analysis of Gezi, this research explicates that although Gezi movement that mobilised people from various subjective positions, the emotional articulation of resistance narratives articulated by the movement itself as well as the government at that time, the protests failed in realising its potential of creating an alternative socio-political culture in Turkey.