My research is built on the productive tension between the field and theory. I see theory as a method of understanding here and now and an analytical tool that provides insights to transform the status quo. At the same time, it is vital to acknowledge that contextual knowledges challenge, mold, and improve our theoretical approaches. Synthesizing the two enables me to maintain an up-to-date and public facing research agenda.
In my research, I challenge two central epistemic hierarchies: those between the academic and activist knowledges and between knowledges produced in the “center” and the “periphery.” My theorizing prioritizes the field and the voices of the actors who work in it. By centering findings and literatures from subaltern and previously or currently colonized contexts in my research, I also make a case that the so-called “particular” knowledges have a significant capacity to shed light on transnational phenomena. My use of political theory plays a vital role in making this possible since it helps me identify complex power relations and explicate the connections among them. It also equips me with the necessary vocabulary, opens up venues to identify the problematic aspects of the language of politics, and provides analytical tools to reconstruct it.
Current Projects
What I've been working on
Letting Kill: The Politics of Femicide
Hundreds of women are killed annually in Turkey. Despite skyrocketing femicide rates in the country, state actors fail to institute necessary measures to prevent it. Tolerance of perpetrators, victim-blaming, the lack of access to justice for the disadvantaged, and negligence are defining characteristics of Turkey’s femicidal context. Instead of addressing these problems and securing women’s right to life, Turkey left the Istanbul Convention with a presidential decree issued by President Erdogan in March 2021. This led abusive men to think that violence against women and LGBTQ+ individuals is no longer a crime. Femicide rates and public(ized) torture of LGBTQ+ people have peaked immediately while men who were in prison on account of gender-based violence awaited their sentences to be terminated early.
I’m currently working on a book manuscript that theorizes these dynamics and investigates femicide (i.e., the murder of women enabled by institutionalized gendered power relations) as a structural, rather than an interpersonal problem. Applying the insights of the critical femicide literature to the understudied case of Turkey, I seek to understand the contemporary origins and operations of deadly gender-based violence in contexts where the state pledges to protect all citizens’ lives. Rather than scrutinize why males kill females, I problematize institutional processes that render women disposable by asking how. How is killing women with impunity normalized and enabled? What roles do state apparatuses and agents play in perpetuating femicide? What is the relationship between the sovereign’s political right and the masculine “right to kill”?
Documenting the processes that enable the killing of women without significant social or legal repercussions, I develop an engaged theory of femicide. I propose that femicide is a systemic violation of women’s right to life enabled by a specific exercise of state power, which I term, letting kill. “Letting” signifies deliberate acts by the representatives of the state’s executive, legislative, and judicial branches, which do not kill women, but authorize others to do so. Thus, letting kill explicates how the state actors, who do the “letting,” and individual perpetrators, who do the “killing,” are both implicated in the crime of femicide. Though the state actors do not singlehandedly cause the problem of gender-based violence, they create the conditions that facilitate it through material institutional practices that increase women’s precarity, discursive practices that justify gender hierarchy and violence, and criminal justice practices that institutionalize gender norms and materialize impunity. Cumulatively, these practices create a femicidal feedback loop, signaling to perpetrators that violence against women has institutional legitimacy. My theory of letting kill contributes to the efforts to expand the boundaries of the discipline of political science, which has broadly failed to recognize gender-based violence as a “political” phenomenon.
Kadın Cinayetlerinin Politik Boyutu: Türkiye ve Meksika Örnekleri [Political Dimension of Femicide: The Cases of Turkey and Mexico]
Latin Amerikalı akademisyenler Meksika’da 1990’lardan bu yana meydana gelen ve çok yüksek oranlarda seyreden kadın cinayetlerinin (feminicidio) bir insanlık sucu olduğunu ve kurumsal aktörlerin iş birliğiyle gerçekleştiğini ileri sürerler. Bu çalışma, üzerinde çokça araştırma yapılmış Meksika örneğiyle, daha yakın zamanda akademik araştırmaların konusu olmaya başlamış olan Türkiye’yi, kadın cinayetlerine verilen kurumsal tepkiler ekseninde karşılaştırıyor. Bu karşılaştırma ve biyosiyaset teorileri ışığında, Türkiye’deki kadın cinayetlerini kurumsal aktörler ve şiddet uygulayan erkekler arasındaki sembolik ve somut ilişkilere odaklanarak teorize ediyor.
The Virtual is Embodied
In the wake of #MeToo, and some critics that demand “real political” action, Alyson Cole and I theorize the complex ways in which digital political participation is embodied.
Recent Publications
Published lately
Atuk, Sumru. “Femicide and the Speaking State Woman Killing and Woman (Re)making in Turkey.” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 16, no. 3, (2020): 283-306.
High rates of gender-based violence and sexist political rhetoric are central features of contemporary Turkey. This article explores the complex relationship between the two by drawing on the literature that investigates the (re)making of the category of “woman” in the Middle East and the scholarship on femicide/feminicide. The article employs critical discourse analysis of ruling politicians’ gender-normative statements and shows how they reconstruct the category of “proper woman” as one with institutional and social consequences that compromise women’s safety. Using John L. Austin’s theory of performative speech acts, the article develops a theory of the speaking state to explain the effects of political speech. Ultimately it argues that the politics of “woman making” is central to “the politics of woman killing.”
Cole, Alyson, and Sumru Atuk. “What is in a Hashtag?: Feminist Terms for Tweeting in Alliance.” philoSOPHIA: A Journal of TransContinential Feminism 9, no.1 (2019): 26-52.
This article analyzes a crucial aspect of the #MeToo phenomenon overlooked in all the commentary: the sign under which this activism has been taking place. Our premise is that to comprehend the novel politics that #MeToo incites, we need to understand the political grammar of the sign. #MeToo hails individuals to recognize their serial collectivity and assembles them into a fluid yet cohesive group. Straddling the particular and universal, the sign allows for a range of genres of speaking out and joining in, thereby reconfiguring the possibilities of feminist political assemblage. We begin by providing an overview of the arguments summoned in opposition to #MeToo that have dominated public discourse. Next, we examine #MeToo in the context of debates within feminism, demonstrating how #MeToo addresses enduring tensions over the terms of coalitional politics. Finally, we analyze the sign itself, focusing first on the distinctive grammar #MeToo deploys, and then on the politics it facilitates. We argue that #MeToo allows feminists to grapple with the challenges of difference in innovative ways—not only contextually or with respect to the varying positionalities of individuals assembled under the sign, but also in upholding a continuum of sexual violation.