Embodied spaces of resistance

SynopsisMay 27, 2013 marked the beginning of a series of nationwide public protests in Turkey, which originated as a small scale sit-in at Gezi, a central park in Taksim, İstanbul, to protest urban renewal plans for the area. Shortly, their agenda broadened to cover the authoritarian policies of the Prime Minister and his Islamist government. The protests are open to interpretation and analysis at many levels ranging from economics and politics to cultural and social issues. Here I focus on the articulation of space, discourse and subjectivity by looking at specific instances of the Gezi movement. Drawing from the work of critical theorists of space, I argue from a Deleuzian perspective that during the protests, spaces and spatial practices have been not only explicitly sexualized but also binary pairs of woman/man and private/public have been creatively deterritorialized, and paved the way for alternative trajectories of political action.