Turkey Power and the West

‘You are fired!’ Towards the Hegemony of Neoliberal Hypermasculinity

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This is the final post in a series of posts by several guest authors  for The Disorder Of Things symposium on Ali Bilgic‘s new book Turkey, Power and the West: Gendered International Relations and Foreign Policy, released in late 2016. In this post, Ali Bilgic responds to the previously published posts and makes some concluding remarks. The full series is collected here.

He is signing a document. Men standing behind him are all serious, looking over the shoulder of the one who he is performing the ceremony, a TV show par excellence. One of them passes the black folders; one after another, one signature after another. When he signs, his eyebrows rise a little, probably to see better. In this moment, it is possible to notice the blankness in his eyes that complements the expressionless face of the new Commander-in-Chief: there is no sign of affect in them, a staunch wall, like the one to be built on the border with Mexico, or the one in Palestine/Israel.

US President Donald Trump signs an executive order in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, January 23, 2017.
Trump on Monday signed three orders on withdrawing the US from the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, freezing the hiring of federal workers and hitting foreign NGOs that help with abortion. / AFP / SAUL LOEB (Photo credit should read SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)

One expects he would abruptly say ‘You are fired’; one wonders whether he has learned and practised this masculine emotionless performance during his years in the world of entertainment: in a reality show where young men and women wildly competed against each other to prove themselves to the neoliberal finance capitalism. Otherwise, they are fired, they vanish, do not exist anymore, neither for the audience nor for the market. This kind of decision requires rational thinking; in other words, a solid emptiness, a wall.

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Decoding Gender in Turkish Foreign Policy: How Ali Bilgic Gets it Right

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This is the fifth and penultimate post in a series of posts by several guest authors  for The Disorder Of Things symposium on Ali Bilgic‘s new book Turkey, Power and the West: Gendered International Relations and Foreign Policy, released in late 2016. The full series is collected here.  Swati Parashar is a Senior Lecturer in the Peace and Development program, School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She is an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow, Monash University, Australia.

There is something fundamentally reassuring about reading a book on gendered hierarchies and foreign policy, at a time when we have just witnessed the inauguration of the Donald Trump Presidency in the United States of America. It is reassuring, because it tells us that the global gendered order of states is not going to be replaced anytime soon and gendered hierarchies will remain at the heart of all political contests, resistance and acts of solidarity. After all the biggest challenge to the Trump presidency is going to come from women’s groups who successfully organized the Global March on 21 January 2017.

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Of Malls and Mosques

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This is the fourth post in a series of posts by several guest authors The Disorder Of Things on Ali Bilgic‘s new book Turkey, Power and the West: Gendered International Relations and Foreign Policy, released in late 2016. The full series is collected here. Aida A. Hozic is an Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of Florida.

The publication of Ali Bilgiç’s book Turkey, Power and the West: Gendered International Relations and Foreign Policy in 2016 could not have been more timely. There are few historical moments in our recent history when politics of gender and race have been so forcefully pushed to the front and center of global conversations. Conflicts, refugee flows, uprisings, coups and counter-coups, populist blowbacks and rising authoritarianism – all seem to be written through, with, and over racialized, gendered bodies of men, women and children, justifying the persecution of some and advocating protection of others. Turkey, as the events (and the trail of bodies) of the last few years tragically confirm, sits at the crossroads of all these trends; civilizational cliché that it is the country where “East meets West” can no longer suffice to explain (and perhaps never could) multiple fissures and violent contradictions of its polity.

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Turkey, Power and its Eastern Others

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This is the third post in a series of posts by several guest authors The Disorder Of Things on Ali Bilgic‘s new book Turkey, Power and the West: Gendered International Relations and Foreign Policy, released in late 2016. The full series is collected here. Clemens Hoffmann is a Lecturer in International Politics at Stirling University, UK.

Ali Bilgic’s book is a timely and sophisticated contribution to the analysis of Turkish foreign policy as well as gender theory in IR. It combines a convincing analysis of the puzzle that is Turkish Foreign Policy (TFP) through an analytically as well politically original lens: that of gender. It identifies and problematizes practices of gendering underlying the relationship between the ‘West’ and the ‘Non-West’, of which Turkey is held to be a part. Apart from its rich and sophisticated historiography, its major contribution lies in analysing a ‘non-Western’ society from within, offering a rich and original narrative, which, no doubt, will benefit future generations of Turkish foreign policy and feminist IR scholars alike.

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The View from Elsewhere Turns the World Inside Out

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This is the second post in a series of posts by several guest authors The Disorder Of Things on Ali Bilgic‘s new book Turkey, Power and the West: Gendered International Relations and Foreign Policy, released in late 2016. The full series is collected here. Terrell Carver is a Professor of Political Theory at University of Bristol, UK.

Ali Bilgic’s Turkey, Power and the West contributes in highly significant ways to three literatures not normally brought together. Firstly, foreign policy studies, approached from what – for Anglophone writers and readers – is a novel, de-centred vantage point. Secondly, gender studies and feminist research, using masculinity as a highly relevant and essential analytical ‘lens’. Thirdly, postcolonial perspectives, from which the East/West binary is reimagined and pluralized (which, quite naturally, plays into the de-centred approach to foreign policy studies).

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Turkey, Power and the West: Gendered International Relations and Foreign Policy

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This is the first in a series of posts by several guest authors The Disorder Of Things on Ali Bilgic‘s new book Turkey, Power and the West: Gendered International Relations and Foreign Policy, released in late 2016. This is an introductory post by Ali Bilgic. Ali is a lecturer at Department of Politics, History and International Relations, Loughborough University.  Following this introduction, there will be posts by Aida Hozic, Terrell Carver, Swati Parashar, and Clemens Hoffmann, as well as a response by Ali Bilgic posted during the course of this week. The full series is collected here.

Introduction

‘What is this research really about?’ is a question we ask ourselves. Naturally it often invites more questions: what is the importance of this research? Why am I doing it? And finally, what is so puzzling about it? When I was writing Turkey, Power and the West: Gendered International Relations and Foreign Policy, I asked myself these questions and tried to produce academically sound answers. The book is about gendered power hierarchies between the West and non-West and the insecurities that these power hierarchies generate. More specifically, it examines how the changing standards of hegemonic masculinities in global politics are predominantly defined by the West(s) and how the inability of ‘subordinated’ non-Western masculinities to catch up with these changing standards becomes a source of insecurity. I define this ‘gendered ontological insecurity’: the anxiety about not being accepted as ‘man’, or better to say, ‘state’ enough by the West(s). A corollary objective is to situate domestic politics in a non-Western country in the context of foreign policy and evaluate it through the prism of gendered ontological insecurities.
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