Discursive Activists or Patriarchal Bargainers? Religion, Gender, and Neoliberal Governance in the "New" Turkey.

This article examines the intellectual mobilization and discursive activism of religious women in Turkey between 2010 and 2016, focusing on members of an Istanbul Women's Organization (IWO). It explores how these women navigated their outsider-within status amid Turkey’s socio-political transformation from a secularist republican patriarchy to an authoritarian neoliberal patriarchal state under the Justice and Development Party (AKP). Despite efforts to challenge essentialist and reductionist narratives about religious women and to engage in feminist debates, the IWO members found their activism constrained by the re-patriarchalization of the state, neoliberal conservative governance, and persistent gendered oppression. The study concludes that their initial discursive activism was insufficient to effect structural change and emphasizes the necessity of building broader solidarity networks and transversal feminist coalitions to resist interlocking oppressive structures in contemporary Turkey.