The military coup, gender, and memory: Women's transference of the memory of September 12th coup

The military coup of September 12, 1980 is a social event that massively transformed the political life of the society in Turkey. While this event brought about a series of transformations affecting the social and political life, it also had implications for the socialist movement in Turkey due to a series of human rights violations. Like many other social events, the September 12 coup has taken its place in the memory of the society. Among the people affected by the coup are predominantly socialists. In many of the research focusing on the coup, including the documentaries on the period, socialist men are discussed; the social effects of the coup were perceived as affecting a political-social change between men from different generations. Since women's struggles before the 1980 coup were also rendered invisible, women were not seen as social-political subjects who have been affected by and had to cope with this social trauma and in the newly transformed political society. In this context, it is important to reveal women's struggles that are rendered invisible within the patriarchal social context and to reveal their social subjectivity as carriers of intergenerational collective memory. Because women are social subjects whether they are actively involved in politics or not. The women interviewed for this thesis are socialist women and their daughters who participated actively in the political life of Turkey before the coup. Thus, the political subjectivity of women will be examined by focusing on the transference of intergenerational memory. Oral history method was used to reveal women's memories and political subjectivities. In this thesis, the memories about the military coup and political subjectivities about today's issues of women of different generations from the same family who were interviewed with this method found a place.