İktisadi ve İdari Bilimler Fakültesi / Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/11727/1399

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Heroes, villains and celebritisation of politics: hegemony, populism and anti-intellectualism in Turkey
(2021) Gencoglu, Funda; 0000-0001-8211-8624
This article analyses the rising tides of celebrity politics in Turkey by contextualising it within the changing dynamics of Turkish politics during the last decade. More specifically, it tries to understand the fault lines of celebritisation of politics with reference to the installation and re-installation of the neoliberal conservative hegemony. Celebrity politics in Turkey has acquired a unique character within a political environment where the tides of social opposition are very high and as a trend of de-democratisation has been hanging over the country. This is what makes the content and nature of celebrity politics in Turkey different from the general tendency in the world, as the most widespread form of celebrity politics is the advocacy of policy matters such as philanthropy and raising awareness on sensitive and noble human causes. In Turkey, the existing neoliberal conservative hegemony, since its first installation, has been able to find new and/or different ways of consolidating, revising, shifting, and re-installing itself, and it has done this by finding new ways of creating the collective identities of us versus them. It is the argument of this study that celebrity politics has been one of the latest resorts in that task.
Moralism, Hegemony, and Political Islam in Turkey: Gendered Portrayals in A Tv Series
(2016) Cosar, Simten; Onbasi, Funda Gencoglu; 0000-0001-8211-8624; AAR-7704-2020
This article offers a feminist reading of the neoliberal-conservative hegemony in Turkey through one TV series, Yepren Dusler,Fler, broadcast on a prominent pro-Islamist TV channel, Samanyolu. Drawing on research into the political effects of storytelling through mass media, we reveal the gendered working of Turkey's neoliberalconservative hegemony, which has been in effect since the late 2000s despite various shifts and relocations. Our main argument is that the gendered subjectivities represented in stories told to the public through the mass media contain important clues for exploring hegemonic constellations. They also hint at possible breaches between hegemonic allies. This article takes issue with the basic assets of the neoliberal-conservative hegemony. It also considers the transitivity between the symbolic and the real by analyzing the connection between claims to moral improvement in this TV series and neoliberal preferences in real politics.
On the construction of identities: An autoethnography from Turkey
(2019) Gencoglu, Funda; 0000-0001-8211-8624; AAR-7704-2020
In this article I analyze, on the basis of my personal experience, the discontents of contemporary Turkish politics; more specifically, neoliberal conservative hegemony, and its three manifestations: stability of instability; a religio-conservative gender regime; and anti-intellectualism. I illustrate how these manifestations are intertwined in the process of identity construction: how an individual's identity as a citizen, as a woman, as an academic is being constantly constructed/de-constructed/reconstructed in a manner integral to the social and political context. The contribution of this article is threefold: it shows how personal experiences are a legitimate source of knowledge; it enables an understanding of how political identities are in a constant state of making; it challenges dominant conceptions of politics and the political through challenging binaries such as individual/social, personal/political, and emotional/rational.
Paid Military Service at the Intersection of Militarism, Nationalism, Capitalism, and (Hetero)Patriarchy: Escaping without Leaving "Manhood'
(2016) Onbasi, Funda Gencoglu; 0000-0001-8211-8624; AAR-7704-2020
The variety of the political standpoints of governments that have initiated exempted military service for several times in Turkey is a sign of a general agreement on its legitimacy. However, Turkey is a country where conscientious objection is almost a taboo. I try to decipher the assumptions behind what is (il)legitimate, and their manifestations in the sociopolitical life from a gender perspective informed by the feminist theory. I argue that what lies behind these is the interconnection between militarism, nationalism, patriarchy, and capitalism. I show how they reciprocally support each other through a critical discourse analysis of the debate on legitimacy of paid military service and illegitimacy of conscientious objection. I conclude that the nature of these debates leads to a reproduction of the hegemonic definitions of manhood and womanhood, together with the reproduction of the masculinization of the political sphere at the expense of the exclusion of and discrimination against other identities.
Social Media and the Kurdish Issue in Turkey: Hate Speech, Free Speech and Human Security
(2015) Onbasi, Funda Gencoglu; 0000-0001-8211-8624; AAR-7704-2020
Parallel to two intertwined processes of the politicization of ethnicity, religion and sexuality on the one hand, and the rise of the internet, on the other hand, hate speech has become one of the most topical issues of political debates. Academic interest on this topic has so far focused largely on the questions of (im)possibility of defining hate speech, on the hate speech/free speech dichotomy, and, thus on the possible ways of dealing with this big challenge of our times. This study tries to open a new window by resorting to the concept of human security. It argues that rival understandings of security (traditional or critical) lead to differences in perceptions of threats/harms which in turn lead to different conceptions of hate speech. This argument is illustrated through an analysis of the way the Kurdish issue in Turkey has been tackled in Eksi Sozluk, one of the most popular web sites in the country.