Abstract
Feminism works to make visible all political and legal structures that restrict women’s freedom and participation in society with its social media protests since 2010 in Turkey. Social media protest has brought women from different backgrounds together and strengthened women’s solidarity. It also enabled an expansion in struggle for women to speak their word by forcing the government to cease the limitations upon women’s freedom and rights. The aim of this chapter is to critically discuss the feminism’s practice of digital sphere in which it expands a discourse against the restricted public sphere. The research data was collected conducting in-depth interviews with feminists who took part in social media protest and organized them and feminists who participated in March on 1987. The study shows that after 2000s, feminists have used social media as a medium of feminist policy and of raising awareness to women rights. It reveals that social media is an important tool to gathering women from different cultures and identities together; to push government to make legislations and change the existing ones about women’s rights, to raise awareness to gender inequality, to create public opinion toward femicide and sexual abuse and to expand the feminist discourse.
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Notes
- 1.
I follow Markham and Buchanan (2012), Recommendations from the AoIR Ethics Working Committee (Version 2.0).
- 2.
This is the first name of a woman who was brutally murdered by a man.
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Eyrek, A. (2023). Feminists’ Social Media Protests and the Digital Public Sphere in Turkey. In: Wiesslitz, C. (eds) Women’s Activism Online and the Global Struggle for Social Change. Palgrave Studies in Communication for Social Change. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31621-0_4
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