WOMENS STUDIES INTERNATIONAL FORUM, vol.80, 2020 (SSCI)
This study focuses on the fragmentations based on exclusionary identity politics within the women's movement in Turkey. Through in-depth interviews I conducted with women activists and academics in Turkey in 2014-2015, I explore activist women's positions on identity issues, such as gender, religion and ethnicity, as well as their views of each other. I argue that seeing identities as unalterable deepens the fragmentation within the movement, creates a false sense of homogeneity within groups and exacerbates activists' tendency to stay in their small groups. In order to move away from the limitations of identity politics, I offer adopting dialogical transversal politics in understanding differences among women, whereby activists can find a realm aside from the exclusionary structures of universalism and identity politics, and suggest coalition building as a realm where transversal politics can cultivate and in which a degree of solidarity within the women's movement in Turkey can develop.