Affective Activisms and the Right to Have Rights in Turkey

This book presents a novel approach to the study of contemporary social movements and activism. Based on extensive ethnographic research of the life and politics of feminist, LGBTQI+, and women’s religious groups in Istanbul from 2007 to 2015, it explores the affects, meanings, and interpretations these groups express in their activism—in particular, their strategic use of human rights’ language to claim institutional and social legitimacy and their reinterpretation of gender/queer theory across politics of difference to make sense of global dynamics that affect their everyday lives. Chapters interweave personal accounts and life histories of individual activists with specific historical events to demonstrate the activists’ dissidence regarding the conditions that have defined their differently marginalised positions in Turkey and the significance of the formation of unexpected alliances. The ambivalent, yet inescapable, bargaining tool of rights is analysed as a demand over affective democratic visions, citizenship and a life worth living, and thus the right to have rights, as it is argued, pushes us to reflect on how power works when the political and affective surplus value invested in the need to rethink of rights (even beyond human rights themselves) lies both in the search for ways of institutionalising and implementing rightful demands, as well as in outlining more affective visions of political resistance.

By arguing that activism is a performative and affective language that is defined by intersectional hopes, desires and dreams, as much as it engages with legal battles that define who or what might appear as being broken under specific historical and social settings, Affective Activisms employs gender and sexuality as analytical tools to make sense of local and transnational politics of resistance in the face of the re-emergence of authoritarian regimes, sexual harassment, gender violence, homo/trans phobia, and Islamophobia in Turkey and worldwide. It will be of interest to students and scholars across the fields of women's, gender and sexuality studies, queer theory, critical human rights and political theory, sociology, and social anthropology.

Chapter 1. Introduction: The affective language of human rights' activism.- Chapter 2. Queer activism between demands and desires.- Chapter 3. Feminist grammars and (lost) hopes.- Chapter 4. Religious confrontations with (secular) affects.- Chapter 5. The right to have rights and precarious political subjectivities.- Chapter 6. Marching right through the affective economy of the public sphere.- Chapter 7. Epilogue On dreams (before and after the Gezi protests): The right to a livable death.

Eirini Avramopoulou is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens, Greece. Her research interests include anthropology of human rights, social movements, and activism; feminist and psychoanalytic approaches to subjectivity, biopolitics, and affect; queer theory and postcolonial studies. She is the author of Pornographics and Porno-tactics: Desire, Affect and Representation in Pornography (co-edited with Irene Peano, 2016, Punctum Books), Affect in the Political: Subjectivities, Power and Inequalities in the Modern World, 2018, Nisos: Athens (in Greek), Sexuality's Object(ion)s. Critical Theories, Interdisciplinary Readings (co-edited with Pako Chalkidis), 2022, Topos: Athens (in Greek) and Critical Public Anthropology and Gender Studies (co-edited with Eleni Papagaroufali), 2024, Topos: Athens (in Greek).