Abstract
Exploring the limits of language when one needs to translate hope between the local and the transnational, this paper focuses on a silent feminist protest that took place in memory of an Italian performance artist who was found raped and dead in Istanbul, Turkey in 2008. My analysis stems from research material collected during eighteen months of fieldwork and engages with post-structuralist theories and feminist and queer studies in order to argue against recent theories that locate affect outside language, representation and discourse. By highlighting the performative components of political language in its tight relation to affective dispositions, I argue that the activist women’s silent protest was not speechless, but instead echoed the long history of the feminist movement fighting against male violence and sexual harassment, as well as the feminists’ (lost) hopes for changes and social transformation.
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Notes
Interview in Italian with Silvia Moro; English translation from the Brides on Tour website http://bridesontour.fotoup.net/tappe/27/spose-in-viaggio-intervista-a-silvia-moro#a.
Today’s Zaman, 14 April 2008. http://www.todayszaman.com/newsDetail_getNewsById.action?load=detay&link=138906.
On April 15, Hayrettin Bulan, the head of Sefkat-Der, an organisation that runs a battered women’s refuge in the city of Konya, said, “We have given her the nickname Angel Pippa and we are going to name one of our refuges after her… she is an angel in our eyes and we want to draw the whole world's attention to her message of peace and the fight against violence towards and the rape of women” Asia Times Online, 23 April 2008. See http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JD23Ak01.html.
Mehmet Yilmaz, Hürriyet’s columnist, suggested the idea that Pippa’s march would be continued by Turkish woman and Elele, a women’s magazine, promised to provide wedding dresses and cover the expenses of the journey (Yilmaz 2008).
See Bingöl Elmas’s documentary Pippa’ya Mektup (2010).
The process of rendering women asexual by idealising them is also emphasised in Ayşe Saktanber’s work on the representation of the Turkish woman in the media. On the one hand, the publicly circulated image of the virtuous wife and self-sacrificing mother marks women as asexual, whereas sexual women are presented as defined by nothing else apart from their sexuality translated as loose, easy and available (1990, p. 198).
Posing an unanswerable question can be perceived as an “act proper” according to Yannis Stavrakakis who argues that “it is impossible to speak the whole truth. Nevertheless, one needs to try. Not in the hope that he or she will eventually manage to say it all; on the contrary, fully assuming the failure of our own words to say it: it is through this very impossibility that truth holds onto the real” (2007, p. 12).
After a series of hearings, on the 25th of June in Kocaeli 1st High Criminal Court, Karataş was convicted and received a life sentence for murder, in addition to 7.5 years for sexual assault, 5 years for restricting a person's freedom and 1 year and 8 months for theft.
In August 2003, Article 462 of the criminal code, which was used to reduce penalties for perpetrators under the justification of provocation, was annulled. This happened after the considerable efforts made by advocates of women’s rights institutions working with feminists and of course in view of potential EU membership. However, although this article was annulled, there were still other problematic clauses that regulated the process of dealing with honour crimes and crimes involving male violence against women. Later, the government party AKP reintroduced the provocation clause under a new draft law, creating a fierce response from feminist groups (cf. also Kogacioglu 2004, p. 131).
Today’s Zaman, 8 October 2008 (http://www.todayszaman.com/newsDetail_getNewsById.action?load=detay&link=155284&bolum=101).
However, it should be mentioned that few years later, in 2012, Murat Karataş’s sentence was reduced from “aggravated life imprisonment” to “life imprisonment” based on his good behaviour during the legal process. This decision surprised the family of Pippa who claimed that they had not been properly informed by their lawyer regarding the legal procedure. They made public announcements expressing their surprise and concern about this decision. See, http://www.milliyet.com.tr/pippa-bacca-nin-ailesi-isyan-etti/dunya/dunyadetay/21.04.2012/1531129/default.htm.
A similar point is made by Sally Engle Merry in her research on court cases in a small town in Hawaii. The author argues that the legal system protects “good victims”, while “stories of innocent victims injured by malicious offenders are clearly the most powerful” (2003, p. 354). As Merry writes “The good victim in the law is not a woman who fights back, drinks or takes drugs along with men, or abuses her children. When women act in violent and provocative ways to refuse to press charges or testify, legal officials are often frustrated” (ibid.).
This act recalls another court decision in the 1980s not to consider the telegraphs and the petitions sent by the feminists regarding the case of a battered woman because, as it was claimed by the court, those who protested could only be considered an interested party in the verdict if they had been beaten personally (Arat 1999, p. 301).
Drawing once again a connection to 1988 when, at the Temporary Modern Women’s Museum set up on the 8th of March, the objects exhibited ranged from kitchen utensils to IUDs.
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Avramopoulou, E. Hope as a performative affect: feminist struggles against death and violence. Subjectivity 10, 276–293 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41286-017-0031-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41286-017-0031-0