How is anti-democratic repression affecting women's and gender studies in Turkey?

How is anti-democratic repression affecting women's and gender studies in Turkey? Nurseli Yeşim Sünbüloğlu (bio) Editors of Pandemonium spoke with Nurseli Yeşim Sünbüloğlu on July 25, 2023. So, it makes sense to start with the recent changing of our name—from the Gender and Women's Research Center to the Women and Family Studies Research Center. This change is quite recent, just six months ago, in fact. This came about probably because of a study—an annual survey has been going on for three or four years, the product of a collaboration with a local NGO called Kaos GL (short for Kaos Gay and Lesbian Cultural Research and Solidarity), which supports and promotes human rights for LGBTQAI+ people in Turkey. My university has collaborated annually with this NGO to provide research support for their study of discrimination against LGBTI+ employees in public and private sectors in Turkey. This time, this collaboration put us on the radar of certain conservative government agencies. They took End Page 101 notice of us because there was a press release to promote that year's (2021) study that came out last year (2022). We had to remove all kinds of references to the study on our website as well as references to the rights of sexual minorities in general. We also had to change the name of the research center from "gender and women's" to "women and family." This kind of attention and pressure from political authorities is not unique to us or to our university. They've been doing this kind of thing to quite a lot of state universities. A majority of women's studies centers in Turkey have gone through the same name change. In fact, I would say all universities in Turkey are feeling this pressure. All universities are under some kind of control, but their authority over some of the private universities might be less, depending on the situation. Depending on exactly where the private universities get their research funding from, they may have more room to maneuver around politically contentious issues, not only issues of gender and sexuality but lots of other politically contentious issues as well. Whereas the state universities—my university is a private university—are under a lot more direct pressure, and so are their gender scholars. So, you know, this sort of pressure and repression—it's been going on for quite some time. But the name change was, I would say, significant—a significant signal more than an actual change. At Kadir Has, we are actually one of the few universities in Turkey that still promotes feminist research and calls it "feminist" research in our mission statement right there on the website beneath that new name "women and family studies." Of course, their insistence we take out "gender" and add "family" to our name reflects how very narrow their understanding of women's studies, or any discipline, really is. Their thinking is that women's studies is just about women and their domestic life in the family, or should be! And so, if we add "family" into the name, then these studies will naturally—I don't know, maybe automatically?—reflect this kind of thinking, that women are only important as they relate to family matters. Of course, studying the family can also be very political! And family studies is a critical scientific discipline on its own. But, you know, they think of "family studies" as just ideas that support a (conservative, traditional definition of a) family—a patriarchal idea of what a family is. So, yeah, stick the word "family" in and they think they have changed us. After the name change, we were joking that one of the first projects we might support would be to study how the conservative, patriarchal family in Turkey is changing! The point is we can do a lot under the auspices of that name change that aligns with our mission anyway. End Page 102 But even though the name change does not, in itself, largely affect what we do or what our mission really is, the fact that they would pay such close attention to...