The turn to territoriality is linked with the rise of authoritarianism in Turkey. The incumbent Justice and Development Party (JDP) has reshaped key institutions, national identity and foreign policy, under a program dubbed as “the New Turkey.” The most significant characteristic of this new paradigm is its neo-Ottomanism that unleashes militarist and racist discourses towards non-Turkish and non-Sunni groups both within and outside its borders. These discourses determine Turkey’s expansionist involvement in the Syrian conflict and the Syrian Kurdish politics under the pretext of eliminating ISIS terrorism.

In this presentation, I will examine how these new discourses and policies take gendered and racialized forms in the context of the civil war in Syria. In particular, I look at the pro-JDP newspapers and security analysts’ portrayals of Syrian Kurds and Arabs (2015-2018) through stereotypical images of “terrorist Kurd (men)” and “victimized Arab (women)”. Such differentiations are used to recreate social borders within “the new Turkey.” Intersectional feminist discussions are urgently needed to expose and unsettle such borders, a task yet to be fulfilled.

Socio-cultural anthropologist with a PhD from University of California, San Diego (2016). She holds MA in Comparative Studies from Ohio State University and BA in Cultural Studies from Sabanci University (Turkey). Among her research and teaching interests are political violence and radical movements, gender and sexuality, ethics and morality, memory and trauma studies, critical multiculturalism, and feminist pedagogy. Her work spans Kurdish Studies, Middle East studies and the New Europe studies. The article, “Fragile Goddesses: Moral Subjectivity and Militarized Agencies in Female Guerrilla Diaries and Memoirs” is published by the International Feminist Journal of Politics, as Cynthia Enloe Award 2016 winner. She has taught undergraduate courses on multiculturalism, racism and transnational feminism in the departments of Anthropology, Ethnic Studies and Critical Gender Studies at University of California, San Diego. She is currently working on her book, provisionally entitled, “Revolutionary Morality, Gendered Militancy: Kurdish movement in-between Radical and Liberal Democracies.”

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