ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses local community struggles against small-scale, run-of-the-river hydroelectric power plants (HEPPs) in Turkey, with a focus on women’s leading role and radical activism in the movement. Drawing on the empirical case of the East Black Sea Region, the chapter explores water’s worth beyond its immediate use and symbolic value and maintains the centrality of women’s bodily experiences to their emergent political agency against HEPPs. The chapter draws on the insights of feminist political ecology but takes a step forward by developing a body-centered, phenomenological approach in the context of gender and water struggles (but also in the broader context of gender and water governance). It specifically focuses on the embodied relation between women and river waters, treating this relation as a material context constitutive of the lifeworld, in which memory, history, and sense of place are also produced and conserved. This chapter develops the argument that the relationship between water and gender is mediated by the materiality of (human and water) bodies and the embodied relationship between them. It maintains the conceptual potential of a body-centered, phenomenological perspective to contribute to the field of gender, water, and environmental struggles by demonstrating the centrality of bodily, lived experience, sense, and affect to the way these struggles are framed and enacted.
