ABSTRACT
Women’s political empowerment has emerged as a particular field of interest in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in Turkey. Women’s absence in many spheres of life, including the political sphere, has become one of the main references to discuss the patriarchal characteristics of the established regime. The AKP was founded in 2001 by those who claimed to distance themselves from the Islamist Refah Party. The AKP’s particular emphasis on the active roles and status of women within the party and their empowerment as active agents of politics was used as an important mark of distinction from earlier versions of political Islam. In this study, which focuses on the self-narrations of AKP female politicians nominated and elected in the 2009 local elections, the aim is to expand the discussion on how the AKP female representatives narrate their experience of this ‘political empowerment’ stressed in the AKP’s program and whether they subvert, transform or reproduce patriarchal authority.
