The metamorphosis of the feminist subject: Between theory and praxis

Since the 2000s, especially in Turkey since 2017, debates over who is included in or excluded from feminist subjectivity have intensified. These discussions revolve around multiple themes, including the category of woman, the condition of woman, femininity and masculinity, the body, politics, patriarchy, and practices of power. The debate shapes the dissertation's main research question: how is a relationship established between the crises generated by the metamorphosis of the feminist subject and feminist praxis? The thesis aims to examine how feminist subjects' intra-feminist debates affect their struggle against patriarchy and how these debates lead to the reorganization of practices of solidarity and struggle. This journey, which progresses as the history, theory, and praxis of the transformation of the feminist subject, revealed that the existentialist processes of subject-formation articulated by Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre are crucial in four respects: first, to understand the relationship between the feminist subject and patriarchy -and other power practices- as the other; second, to reveal the structures created by the material conditions in which the feminist subject finds itself; third, to understand what kind of project the feminist subject produced in place of this situation, in other words, what kind of world the feminist subject desires, and fourthly, to analyze what kind of praxis feminist subject produces to pursue this project and how it transforms its old praxes. Throughout the processes of conducting semi-structured interviews with organized feminist subjects in Ankara, İzmir, and İstanbul, collecting data, and analyzing it, I articulated feminist critical discourse analysis and feminist poststructuralist discourse analysis. The experiences and narratives of feminist subjects in Turkey constructed a narrative about the position of the feminist subject in discussions on the transformation of the feminist subject, its struggle against patriarchy, and its organization of solidarity and resistance practices. As a result, the Feminist Dialogue Praxis emerged as a flexible toolkit that can be transformed according to the conditions of history, the situations of feminist subjects, and the positions of patriarchy -and other power practices- as the other of the feminist subject, enabling the feminist subject, and thus feminism, to transcend its condition of abandonment.