Women's movements on the axis of religion and politics in Turkey: The case of the women and democracy association (KADEM)

Women's movements, a form of social movement in the modern world, were organized from the 18th century to the 1960s with the demand for equal rights for women and achieved various gains in the political sphere. By the 1960s, women's realization that new rights did not find a response in daily life necessitated a transformation in sociopolitical and sociocultural spheres. Thus, as new social movement theories suggest, women began to fight for their identity as active actors in the social sphere. However, the women of the period were criticized in various ways, and when these criticisms were combined with postmodern theories, different women's movements emerged. While the course of women's movements in the world has such a background, similar situations have been experienced in Turkey in different ways at different dates. From the late Ottoman period to the 1970s, women struggled against the stereotypes of the ideologies of Westernism, Ottomanism and Nationalism. Then, in the 1970s, women's movements emerged within leftist groups with an anti-feminist identity. In the 1980s, radical and enthusiastic feminist groups emerged in Turkey with the inspiration of 2nd wave feminism. In the 1990s, women's movements diversified. One of these diversifications is the Muslim women's movement. Muslim women in Turkey have transformed through different periods in terms of their relationship with religion, politics and feminism. The last leg of the transformation is the 2000s, when the discourse on women's human rights was on the rise. One of the women's organizations that prioritized women's human rights and tried to gain a place in various discourses of the 2000s is the Association for Women and Democracy (KADEM). The association tries to be the voice of Muslim Turkish women in an eclectic discourse that blends some concepts of feminist literature and some values of Turkish customs and traditions with religious discourses. However, KADEM's eclectic structure and the political-ideological and religious background it stands close to cause controversy. In this study, with the assumption that women's movements in Turkey are closely related to religion and politics, we subjected KADEM, which is one of the most recent and specific examples in revealing this close relationship, to document and discourse analysis. Thus, we tried to present a general perspective on the relationship between politics, women and religion in Turkey.