The most high- powered administration by far in several decades, with close to 60 per cent electoral support behind its political reforms by late 2010, as well as key international policy circles during most of its rule, the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) nevertheless remained largely inert in the face of a number of burning everyday issues. Unlike the majority of those addressed in the preceding chapter, the issues that ceaselessly tested the pious sensibilities in power were barely of the stock of the ‘hard cases’ formed by resilient fault lines that reigned over domestic politics. The everyday manifestations of the transgressions at issue involved women, the lower grades of labour, alternative gender identities, prison inmates and the ransacked cityscape– all almost consistently pushed aside to the margins in the mainstream media, until 2013 at least. The Gezi Park protests (see Chapter 6) in the summer of that year, sparked by an organised resistance to an urban redevelopment plan in the centre of Istanbul, which had been set to destroy a local park by building in its place a shopping mall, would suddenly draw the attention of large sections of society to those issues by highlighting ‘the political’ intrinsic to each and every one of those. The demonstrations would attract keen participants from, among others, local women's associations and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) bodies. Some of the problems long in oblivion would thus acquire precious visibility and, more importantly, start getting partly integrated into those areas of interest that constituted the centre of attention in politics. Notably, the Kurdish- led Peoples’ Democratic Party (Halkların Demokratik Partisi), merging Kurdish politics with the Gezi insights, and on ascendance from 2014 for a spell, would come to include LGBTI politicians within its ranks and make gender equality a major part of its political agenda. According to the global gender equality report of the World Economic Forum in 2015, Turkey ranked 130th out of 145 countries.

Most of the hitherto little- noticed plights addressed below appeared to be linked to two distinct and formidable undercurrents: (1) the settled patriarchal practices, which, as some of the critics argued, had an increasing toll under the AKP rule, and (2) a crony capitalism newly created around the government that wasted human lives and readily enabled the pillaging of precious urban space.