ABSTRACT
In Turkey, the internationalization of gender norms has led to a de-monopolization/de-massification of feminist discourse and activism, long dominated by the upper and secular classes. Previously often excluded because of their popular origins, new activists have gained the means of speaking for themselves and of constructing original political discourses and practices. By doing so, they do not imitate globalized norms, but they provincialize them. The Capital City Women’s Platform (Başkent Kadın Platformu Derneği), founded in October 1995, illustrates this re-appropriation of international norms by working-class women whose social rise comes out of the mass access to higher education. The Başkent activists position themselves between the local and the global political levels and they question religious and national specificities in the unifying light of globalized gender norms which transformed their relations and interactions with power and society. They think and act in relation to their immediate environment but the consequences of their thought and action could have a global reach, as they compete with Eurocentric, homogenizing perspectives on globalized norms, in order to include, through international bodies, multiple and discordant voices potentially leading to a non-hegemonic universality.
