ABSTRACT
The Gezi Uprising was the largest wave of demonstrations and civil unrest in the history of modern Turkey. This chapter analyses how the Gezi protests laid claim to, opened and extended "the space of appearance", in dialogue with Hannah Arendt's work on political action. From multiple disciplines traversing political theory, cultural sociology and media and performance studies as well as my personal experience of the protests, it discusses the culture of protest, both online and offline, as a case of performative democracy. Drawing on the recent work of Butler and Gambett, the chapter envisions the Gezi Uprising as an instance that allows for rethinking the highly nuanced bodily dimensions of "the political". It focuses on the image of the "lady in red" to understand how the performativity of a photograph that circulated on the media in combination with the non-violent resistance and vulnerability of the body it depicted contributed to the initial mobilization of the protesters.
