Speaker: Academia.edu

Abstract: »The 1980 military coup on September 12^th in Turkey and the following three-year military dictatorship suppressed most political opposition through street violence, extrajudicial killings, arbitrary incarceration, and acts of physical and psychological torture under custody and in prison. Women from a variety of ages actively participated in different oppositional groups before and after the coup, were taken under custody and imprisoned for different durations due to charges ranging from hanging illegal posters to engaging in armed action. Yet their political participation as well as their experiences during imprisonment were silenced in the memory and historiography of the period in general, and in the memory of leftist organizations in particular. Despite this erasure and self-silencing, some women testified about their time under custody and in jail in written and visual documents.
In this paper, I analyze the existing narratives by ex-prisoner women in order to shed light to their experiences. I’m attempting to first understand the gendered aspect of violence executed on women in custody and in prison and, second, discuss how gender dynamics influenced women’s resistance during incarceration. Women’s narratives suggest that hegemonic codes of acceptable femininity determined how police officers and prison guards perceived politically active women. Women were thus categorized either as sisters in need of protection or fallen women. While, according to existing accounts, at times officials treated women more leniently than men, more often they punished them through forms torture that aimed their sex. In this highly gendered context, women’s resistance meant not only the denial of authority sanctioned by the nation-state, but also the denial of the roles traditionally assigned to women. In other words, it was an assertion of political subjectivity, when poilitics were not considered women’s space. Yet narratives also reveal that there were times when women opted out of resistance when they were faced with the threat of rape and sexual harassment, a phenomenon which challenges the heroic accounts of female resistance which prevails in studies on women and September 12^th.« (Source: Conference Website)

Wikipedia: History of Asia: History of Turkey / History of the Republic of Turkey | Terrorism: State terrorism / 1980 Turkish coup d'état