ABSTRACT
Like many other accounts of coming-of-age as a feminist, the author doesn't have any defining moment or a transgressive episode in her life with which to illustrate how she became a feminist. Nonetheless, the peculiar influence of her authoritarian father on her feminist trajectory should not go unmentioned. Her father, who belonged to the first generation of sons of the new Turkish Republic, personified the contradictions of the top-down project of Turkish modernity and Westernization, in which gender equity/the woman question was central. Her university education was consumed by an intense engagement with theories of ideology, reading Althusser, Gramsci, Poulantzas and works produced by the Birmingham School of Cultural studies, and its founder Stuart Hall. Her most chagrining transatlantic conversations in the USA whether with feminist friends or in Women's Studies classrooms were animated by the larger question of gppling with the many contexts from which feminist theory and praxis arise.
