“I came to theory because I was hurting–the pain within me was so intense that I could not go on living. I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend–to grasp what was happening around and within me. Most importantly, I wanted to make the hurt go away. I saw in theory then a location for healing”
–BELL HOOKS, “THEORY AS LIBERATORY PRACTICE”
One consequence of the major transformations the pandemic has required of our teaching and research has been the separation from our intellectual communities that especially those of us who are marginalized in the profession rely on for care and support. “Social distancing,” the misnomer for physical distancing the pandemic required, captures the sense of isolation many of us felt in the absence of occasions to be together in the same room. This year’s annual meeting of the Society for Women in Philosophy Turkey (SWIP-TR), which like last year’s was virtual, focused on the theme “Philosophies of Life and Death,” inviting reflection on philosophical issues around life and death that have attained much salience during the pandemic. As we continue to go through collective trauma without always being able to rely on our habitual mechanisms of support, the conference has served as a place of reflecting, mourning, and healing.
Even before the pandemic, my research focused on the possibilities of individual and collective healing. Through the past two years, I began to see these possibilities in a different light. One philosophical interest of mine lies in tracing the transmutations of affect in social movements, from grief, loss, and a sense of desperation toward solidarity, growth, and empowerment. My engagements with Friedrich Nietzsche, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Audre Lorde help me think about these transmutations as part of a politics of life affirmation. Up against the severity of systematic oppression, a skeptic may suggest that life affirmation seems irrelevant and even laughable. In line with decolonial feminist thinkers, I argue that this severity is why life affirmation is so indispensable. As we have grown accustomed to living in a reality that is so difficult to accept let alone affirm, I wish to turn to fellow women philosophers for answers. The idea for this year’s conference began from this place of desiring to support and learn from those of us situated as women philosophers who reside in Turkey and/or a part of the Turkish diaspora to see if philosophy could be a therapeutic practice that may assist in working through collective trauma.
Nietzsche quotes Goethe: “I despise everything which merely instructs me without increasing or immediately enlivening my activity.” These conferences are not “mere instruction,” but “enlivening activity.” When I attended the first SWIP-TR conference at Bilkent University in 2018, organized by Saniye Vatansever and Sandrine Berges, it had been two years since I returned to my home country, Turkey, upon completing my Ph.D. at the University of Oregon. The summer I returned, a coup attempt occurred, then a state of emergency was declared and countless dissenting academics were fired by decree. As an adjunct, I had no job security and was perpetually on the job market, which became ever more complicated in the context of this political instability. That was a time characterized by fear for many of us: for our livelihood, of lawsuits and possible imprisonment, of never being able to get a job in academia, of our passports being confiscated and no longer being able to leave the country for employment or otherwise. I remember feeling small and powerless, despite the fact that my situation was better off than many who were direct targets of these hunts.
That is not to say that there was no solidarity. Many held their ground, despite being afraid like everyone else; many refused to be dictated by it; many put themselves at risk for the sake of standing up for what they knew to be true and just. Some gave into fear and became complicit. Some who built entire careers on philosophizing about ethics, justice, and human rights, failed to show up and deliver. What they had to say about justice got stuck in some abstract realm, without any influence on reality. They not only remained silent, but also dissociated themselves from publicly dissenting academics, willingly serving as vessels of oppression while whispering behind closed doors that they did not agree with any of this subjugation.
Attending the first SWIP-TR conference in 2018 showed me that I was not alone. I found support, solidarity, belonging, and the opportunity to develop community. Together we began to reimagine the discipline and work toward our goals of inclusivity in our own departments. Many of us were isolated in our own departments long before the pandemic. We work in a discipline that has historically been, and for the most part continues to be, hostile toward women. Many of us are the only (or one of the few) women in our departments. We have to bear the burden of addressing issues of diversity either alone or with few others deemed “diverse enough.” Gamze Keskin developed a study, whose results she shared last year during the society’s business meeting, which shows that while the vast majority of our undergraduate philosophy students in Turkey are women, the number drops down to 50% for graduate students, and even more for faculty members in correlation to rank and seniority, such that there are only a handful of women who are full professors in the entire country. Many philosophy departments in Turkey have zero women faculty. Many more have only a few; my department at Middle East Technical University, which prides itself as one of the most pluralistic departments in Turkey, currently has three women faculty members out of fourteen faculty members in total. Shortly after I was hired, one colleague had no hesitation letting me know that the department “agreed” to hire a woman this time around, as if my qualifications were irrelevant. The numbers Keskin presented demonstrate that women are driven out of the discipline, with higher numbers as they move forward. Hiring women actively is not an act of charity or tokenism; the commitment to the well-being of women in philosophy is the commitment to the well-being of philosophy. Departments desperately need to hire women, so that long standing injustices can begin to be remedied. As women, we work in a discipline where our contributions may get trivialized as we’re continually pushed to do more administrative work, and become the “mothers” or care-takers of our departments. As feminists, we are sometimes told outright that what we do is “not philosophy.” (See this recent post in this series on how faculty leaders can activate against these inequities.) Resistance often feels like pushing against a wall that won’t budge. We need spaces where we do not have to push, but can grow and thrive together, where we can imagine another kind of discipline together and share tools and strategies to bring that vision into reality. Such spaces allow for cultivating an ethos of care. Building such a space and the community around it requires “tragic optimism,” where nothingness gives way to meaning, tragedy to solidarity. Such solidarity involves living in touch with “the erotic” à la Lorde, where the erotic “is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing.”
The conference has become such a space, a home I desperately needed when I came back to Turkey five years ago and one that showed up just in time. While we are technically no longer in a state of emergency and the government seems to have moved onto other issues, the resonances of this recent history continue to unfold. One of the keynotes of this year’s conference, Yıldız Silier, a professor of philosophy at Boğaziçi University, talked about the ongoing resistance against the government-appointed (as opposed to democratically elected) rector at her institution from the perspective of Spinozist ethics. As “joyful gatherings,” these protests began more than a year ago and have spread to other universities where similar concerns are shared. Banu Bargu in her keynote address focused on what she calls “political disembodiment,” putting one’s body in harm’s way as a form of political action and resistance. Şeyla Benhabib’s keynote presented her notion of cosmopolitan interdependence and the democratic possibilities it elicits. Many of the panels in this year’s conference focused on political resistance as a focal point and discussed possibilities of life affirmation in the midst of growing tensions and isolation and precarity.
Envisioned as a network of women philosophers who reside in or are from Turkey, the idea of SWIP-TR came from other SWIPs around the world, which testifies to how communities like this one are necessarily transnational. The first conference was made possible by a diversity grant from the feminist philosophy journal Hypatia. Organizing this year’s conference, I drew from the lessons learned co-organizing the first Trans* Experience in Philosophy conference at the University of Oregon in 2016, as well as from my involvement with the Association for Feminist Ethics and Social Theory (FEAST), another society that has become something of a second home for me over the years.
Before we sent out the call for papers that Katherine Göktepe and I penned, there were some concerns about the category of “woman,” especially on the part of some of my students who expressed that the category felt too restrictive to account for their complex gender identity. SWIP-TR is committed to being an inclusive safe space and this year’s call adopted the term “woman+” which was coined and popularized by Turkish activists who aim to highlight the expansiveness and inclusivity of the term. We worry that feminist philosophy has come to be misrepresented as trans-exclusionary after having been appropriated by those who continuously make harmful comments against trans individuals. These debates were once again brought to surface during a panel in this year’s conference. For this space to foster the kind of community I describe, it needs to be one of true solidarity. We knew that our conference practices could not merely be about fighting a common enemy (i.e. patriarchy), but also about facing the “oppressor within,” that is, reflecting on and working to undo the internalized forms of oppression that we might be inflicting on others, becoming aware of not only the disadvantages but also the privileges that we have and putting those into good use by practicing solidarity with other marginalized groups. Having been endlessly talked about as naturally inferior to the rational white European man, Third World women know firsthand that people’s lives ought not be reduced to intellectual playthings, but rather, the ways in which those lives are understood and cherished and protected (or not) have a direct bearing on what makes a life livable (or not). As conference organizers, we wanted to create a space where feminist philosophers could be called in to consider how what we assume to be universal knowledge could be experienced otherwise by people with different experiences. In a country where trans women are the most common targets of violence, solidarity with trans women involves attending to willful unknowing.
Spaces like the one offered by SWIP-TR provide the opportunity not to exercise disembodied thought, but rather to exercise accountability and retrain our sensibilities. Worse than being incorrect is to be so stubbornly incorrect that one becomes complicit in injustice. Anzaldúa invites us to practice “spiritual activism,” which takes into account complex ways in which we internalize injustice. Healing involves facing our “shadow beasts” and a perpetual integration with our shadow. Anzaldúa promotes action rather than reaction, listening not for counteracting but for understanding and transforming. This kind of awareness allows us to face our “shadow beasts” and become vessels of social and political healing, through a perpetual integration of the shadow. These spaces are not disconnected pockets of resistance, but a site for transforming the discipline. As we continually move toward life, joy, love, and solidarity, we birth more of that in the discipline and beyond. Loving the work and letting it love us back, or in Lorde’s words, “Within the celebration of the erotic in all our endeavors, my work becomes a conscious decision—a longed-for bed which I enter gratefully and from which I rise up empowered.” I’m grateful to all those who paved the path and to all those who continue walking it side by side.
The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on women in the history of philosophy, posts on issues of concern to women in the field of philosophy, and posts that put philosophy to work to address issues of concern to women in the wider world. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Adriel M. Trott.
Fulden İbrahimhakkıoğlu
Fulden İbrahimhakkıoğlu is an associate professor of philosophy and an affiliated faculty member of gender and women’s studies at Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. Her research revolves around the questions of embodiment, affect, and political subjectivity. Her articles have appeared in journals like Hypatia, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, and Philosophical Topics. She is currently writing a book manuscript about the paranoiac framework that grounds practices around national security premised on racial exclusion from Foucaultian and decolonial feminist perspectives.
