Introduction

Sheldon Wolin defines democracy as a ‘fugitive project’ concerned with the possibilities for ordinary citizens to ‘becom[e] political beings through the self-discovery of common concerns and of modes of action for realizing them’ (1994: 11). He reconceives democracy as ‘a mode of being that is conditioned by bitter experience, doomed to succeed only temporarily, but is a recurrent possibility as long as the memory of the political survives’ (1994: 23). The Gezi Park protest camp was such an occasion of fugitive democracy. In this chapter, I shall examine how the women’s movement in Turkey helped shape this rare occasion of fugitive democracy in the country, and was in turn reshaped by it.

The Gezi Park protests of 2013, which took place in opposition to the increasingly authoritarian government of Turkey, were an unprecedented phenomenon in the country: the largest, most heterogeneous and spontaneous expression of dissent the country had ever witnessed. The Gezi graffiti and slogans sparkled with creative energy, wit and humour. The park in central Istanbul was occupied for two weeks between 1 and 15 June and the events that began on 27 May lasted until 23 June in and around the park (Kongar and Küçükkaya, 2013). After the police forcibly evacuated the park, the protests changed shape and continued through forums in different parks of Istanbul throughout the summer. According to information provided by the Ministry of Interior, the protests that began in Gezi Park in Istanbul spread to 79 of the 81 provinces in the country, and two and a half million people took part in them (T24, 2013).

The protestors in Gezi Park were mostly middle-class youth of different political persuasions and identities (Konda, 2013). They included environmentalists, social democrats, Kemalists, socialists, nationalists and others who identified as Kurdish, Alevi (a religious group of unorthodox Muslims), LGBTIQ or feminist. Some 94 per cent of those who came to the park did so as ordinary citizens who represented neither a party nor an organisation. The average age of the protestors was 28 in a country with an average age of 30.