The nation’s happiness,women’s altruism and the affective politics of self-blame: Generating a ‘mood of commitment’

Abstract

This article contributes to the growing interest in affect and emotions in sociological research, with a specific focus on ‘mood’, developing the concept ‘mood of commitment’. It approaches political commitment as a mood, an affective lens, a dedication to a greater cause, asking how political commitments might be a low intensity affective relationship, and also a heightening, high intensity rhythm at the same time. I conceptualise ‘mood of commitment’ as an object of analysis that can be engaged to critically understand a wide range of political commitments. This article focuses on the case of Ottoman Muslim women’s movements in the early 20th century, amid the turmoil of nationalist movements and ‘modernisation’ processes. It firstly analyses objects of desires that are circulated to be persuasive in the political movements, and attunement of women’s movements with already existing nationalist movements. It secondly unpacks the kind of work involved in claiming to be in the ‘right’ mood of commitment, emphasising the production of hegemonic positions.

Introduction

When I moved to the UK years ago, struggling to speak English for the first time in a context in which it was the main language, one word, in particular, stood out for me: mood. I used to say, my mood is up or down, or I am in a weird mood. I even remember once saying my mood was ‘tipsy’. I do not remember how I picked it up in my everyday speech; it certainly did not emerge from any of my tedious grammar classes. Later, after beginning to engage with mood studies in my research, I reflected on my usage of this word, and I realised that I used to use it to refer to a durable, ambiguous set of complex and contradictory emotions. The word ‘mood’ signified something I found hard to explain through the English vocabulary familiar to me. It was a warning to my audience, indicating that I was trying to explain something complicated, for which I did not have adequate English words. It served to say, please bear with me, I am trying to say something that I know you would know, maybe you are somehow in the same mood, I sense that we can attune, my mood might resonate with yours once you understand it. After engaging with the mood literature, I concluded that the challenge was not, after all, due to any deficiency in my language skills. One finds oneself in a mood, and somehow figures out that others are, or are not, in that same mood, and yet, the mood often remains indescribable. Back then, I thought people had to explain their moods in words in a different language in order to attune, in a setting in which I could not speak my native language, Turkish. I came to understand that it was a shared and collective mood I was trying to describe, which I mistakenly saw as my individual responsibility to communicate intimately.

There is growing interest among a range of scholars in the conceptualisation of mood, and especially so among those who are engaged with discussions of theories of affect, emotion and feeling. Mood is ‘shared, collective, and social, shaping our experience of being with others’ (Felski & Fraimen, 2012, p. vii), informing our rhythm of connection (or the lack of it) with others, rather than an individual state. Mood is an ambiguous concept, and researchers working on mood appreciate this ambiguity for its conceptual potential for analysing the complexity and contradictions of our relationship to the social world (Pedwell, 2014). Investigating mood for social, historical and cultural analysis allows us to analyse what is ‘diffuse but unmistakable, private and generalised’, it is an ‘attempt to describe something that escapes description’ (Pereira, 2019, p. 178). Mood often refers to a more durable, persistent inertia, it ‘lingers, tarries, settles in, accumulates, sticks around’ (Felski & Fraimen, 2012, p. v). While acknowledging the contribution of such analysis of low intensity and low-key affective relations through mood analysis, in this article I am interested in thinking about mood both as an inertia, but also, conversely, as a high intensity, heightening atmosphere. I do this through focusing on political commitment. Inertia, combined with a heightening call for commitment aiming for social transformation, might, at first glance, seem contradictory. It is this very contradiction I intend to tackle, through developing a concept of ‘mood of commitment’. What happens if we think about commitment as both?

This article considers commitment as a mood, an affective lens, a dedication for a greater cause both as a highly uplifting and stimulating mood, and as a stable rhythm enveloping those engaged in a certain political movement. Imagining political commitment as a mood can be contagious in sociological enquiry. Once we start thinking about it, we can start seeing it everywhere: in a young person’s concentrated engagement with politics though social media, in a feminist’s hanging a poster of their political heroes, in a state official’s way of promoting anti-gender ideas, or in a discussion during a political meeting about who cares the most about the political cause. Mood of commitment can be analysed empirically in social movements, state policies, political discussions, everyday life and so on. This is the joy of thinking about mood of commitment, as well as the importance of the concept: it enables us to see what typically escapes explicit attention; once we pay attention, a low-key, yet galvanising rhythm may become an object of analysis.

Among the many ways of thinking about mood of commitment, this research empirically focuses on Ottoman Muslim women’s movements in the early 20th century and analyses texts from a women’s magazine, Kadınlar Dünyası (KD, meaning Women’s World), in order to unpack how women’s political positions are negotiated in the mood of commitment. This magazine was produced in order to demand women’s rights in a context in which nationalist ideas were widely circulating in the political arena, articulated with ‘modernisation’ debates. Women’s rights demands, entering into the political space when ‘the woman question’ was already around and linking with masculinist nationalist ideas, offer us a valuable chance to analyse political commitment in its turmoil. Nationalist affects have already become a theme of interest to many researchers, including those writing on mood (Ahmed, 2014a; Hemmings, 2012). Looking at Ottoman Muslim women’s movements allows me to unpack the complexity of commitment as a mood, being caught up in the intensity of nationalist engagements. KD magazine in particular is helpful in this analysis, due to its writers’ interest in explaining how they see the world for women, and whom they want to convince of the need for women’s rights, which offers opportunities to think about which hegemonies they produce while doing so. The writers of the magazine publicly intended to galvanise their audience about commitment in their writings, which makes it possible for me to develop the concept by zooming in on how an urgent call for commitment sticks around and lingers.

This article engages with and hopes to contribute to mood studies in problematising mood and affect by unpacking the overarching dedication to a greater cause, which is constituted both as an inertia and simultaneously as a high intensity, intending to boost a galvanising and mobilising atmosphere. It does so by drawing on a feminist genealogical methodology and by focusing on Ottoman Muslim women’s writings. It starts with explaining my approach to mood literature in relation to thinking about it through commitment, then moves to a discussion on the ‘national modernisation room’ that Ottoman Muslim women entered into, and later discusses methodological enquiries regarding a feminist genealogical approach in analysing the text. The concept of ‘mood of commitment’ developed in this article analyses the objects of desires circulated that enable a persuasive (and pervasive) atmosphere, and attunement of women’s movements with already existing nationalist movements. It also unpacks the kind of work involved in claiming to be in the mood of commitment and delineating who is allowed to attune to this mood, with particular emphasis on the production of hegemonic positions.

Moods and commitments

Ahmed (2014a), one of the significant scholars who has contributed to affect theories from a feminist and queer perspective, conceptualises ‘mood’ inspired by Heidegger’s concept of attunement. In her definition, a mood is an affective lens that allows us to focus closely on particular issues. She notes that moods and feelings do not necessarily have different logics or belong to different orders, but ‘we might have a feeling but be in a mood’ (Ahmed, 2014a, p. 13). A shared mood involves an affective valuation and allows a certain rhythm. ‘Moods become almost like companions; what we carry with us is how we are carried’ (Ahmed, 2014a, p. 15). Highmore, also conceptualising mood and inspired by Heidegger’s attunement, refers to the phrase ‘how is it going?’, and suggests that mood belongs to the ‘it’ of this phrase; ‘it points to the situation in which the subject finds itself’ (Highmore, 2013, p. 434). Thus, mood is a ‘pervasive atmosphere’ (Highmore, 2013, p. 434), ‘like the weather’ (Felski & Fraimen, 2012, p. v).

The research on mood provides a very original framework for understanding our orientation to the world, in addition to our attunement with others such that our mood might or might not resonate with them (Erdoğan, 2022; Felski & Fraimen, 2012). Although this conceptualisation is useful for the analysis of a wide range of topics, the orientation to the world and our attunement often reminds me of political commitment itself. Our moods are highly linked with our political imaginations. One might have a mood based on how one sees the world, which is related to how one thinks the world is and could have been. At the same time, the world presents itself with the mood one has, maybe focusing on the potential of that world to change, or not. However, the association between commitment and mood was mainly brought about for me by the Turkish word ‘çalışmak’, which appears often in the ‘modernisation’ process of the Ottoman Empire and Turkey.

In Turkish, ‘çalışmak’ literally means ‘to work’; during the period of modernisation, it was used by writers, intellectuals and political figures to mean working altruistically for the common good, mostly for the nation’s good, rather than simply having an occupation. It signifies being collectively occupied towards a set of shared objects of desire. Although this ‘work’ was sometimes evoked to aim for specific, concrete actions (such as ‘developing’ the education structure and enriching industrialisation during modernisation), it generally referred to becoming active and engaging with modernisation. ‘Becoming active’ was usually ambiguous. Bora (2017) highlights that efforts to become active and proactive during Ottoman modernisation formed a general strand of Ottoman political and intellectual thinking. He argues that for Ottoman intellectuals the word çalışmak meant something similar to the Protestant work ethic in Weber’s conceptualisation, or occasionally Hannah Arendt’s ‘vita activa’. These terms refer to actively dedicating oneself, with a sense of belonging. Thus, I use ‘commitment’ here to denote a form of dedication to a common good (such as the nation) that should be constantly active, characterised by giving one’s ‘body and soul’ to one important cause. The mood of commitment can be considered as a public feeling (Cvetkovich, 2012) and as a part of a politics of national belonging (Yuval-Davis, 2011). The concept is similar to Hemmings’ (2012) usage of ‘revolutionary mood’, which considers mood through acknowledging its typical inertia and also as potentially a sparking or triggering atmosphere (Felski & Fraimen, 2012).

Affective political commitment to a particular form of social and political change is both everywhere and nowhere; commitment is often seen as a ‘measure’ of one’s ‘sincerity’ in pursuing a cause. Some researchers, asking why people engage in social movements and stay in there, approach commitment as a form of instrumental calculation or morality, and seek to understand cognitive beliefs and moral visions for their analysis (Goodwin et al., 2004). Others, pursuing a cognitive interest, attempt to understand commitment through analysing activists’ minds during political action (Passy & Monsch, 2020). This article is less interested in cognitive analysis or implied mind/body dichotomies. Rather, it analyses commitment as a moodful orientation, turning to feminist and queer contributions to affect theory, specifically in mood studies. Conceptualising commitment as a mood allows an appreciation of the blurred boundary between what seems like either subjective or objective, private or public, cognitive or non-cognitive; it allows us to rethink commitment as an affective tone, a mode of attachment to the world around us, and a way to invite others to form attachments to the world in a certain way. Particular political aims can change over time, or the strategies to achieve those aims might transform based on a range of factors but zooming in on commitment as a mood displays how commitment can be durable, while still triggering an alarming political atmosphere in orienting to the world collectively.

Imaginary ‘national modernisation room’: Ottoman Muslim women’s movements

In my interpretation, the modernisation process of the Ottoman Empire produced a ‘tense atmosphere’. Changes in political regimes and administrative governance, ongoing wars within and beyond the country, and the intensification of the ethnic and religious based nationalisms in the late 19th and early 20th centuries contributed to the tension. I do not explain the historical context in detail in this article; other scholars have already provided thorough analysis of this tension (Altınay, 2004; Kandiyoti, 1991). Having said that, the following problematic is important: sociologists have highlighted the negotiations between the loss of the Ottoman imperial past, and the desire to both ‘catch up’ with the power of ‘modern’ Western countries whilst also retaining a distinctive ‘Ottoman essence’ (Ahıska, 2003; Akşit, 2010; Altınay, 2004). This is a common historical and contemporary conundrum associated with modernisation and nationalism in ‘non-Western’ and (semi) peripheral contexts (Chatterjee, 1993; Pereira, 2014). Different religious and ethnic groups in the Ottoman Empire, including Armenian, Circassian, Greek, Kurdish, Muslim and Turkish women and men, actively discussed ‘the woman question’ in the context of modernisation within the national imaginations as part of the public agenda, and several different perspectives emerged from such discussions (Köksal & Falierou, 2013). This article focuses on Ottoman Muslim Turkish urban women’s demands and their commitment during modernisation.

Some Ottoman Muslim women themselves actively started discussing women’s rights, mostly after 1908, with the declaration of the Second Constitution, in their own circles (Arat, 1999). Before that, ‘the woman question’ was actively on the modernisation agenda as mentioned (Kandiyoti, 1992), but it was mostly (although not exclusively) Ottoman Muslim elite men who intensively debated it in the political realm, through an emphasis on a ‘new woman’, by publishing magazines on women’s modernisation, and making legal changes affecting women and the family (Çakır, 2016). ‘The woman question’ had been discussed before, but it was possible to see a change in the level of intensity of discussions about it by women themselves. The discussions of the new woman formed in a context in which the Ottoman Empire came to be known as the ‘sick man of Europe’ during the 19th and early 20th centuries, after a significant loss of land in addition to political and military power. Balkan wars had a particular significance for the rise of Turkish and Muslim nationalism, acting as a catalyst, and encouraging Ottoman Muslim-Turkish women to engage with women’s movements in the context of nationalist movements (Bora, 2017).

The nationalism of Ottoman and Muslim circles was commonly triggered by the notion of ‘saving the Ottoman Empire’ with several emphases; some would underline Islam as the ‘essence’ and suggest that the Empire should develop a nationalism based on its Muslim identity; some would emphasise Turkish nationalism; and some might defend an Ottoman identity inhering a concept of citizenship as based on the numerous ethnicities and religious identities inhabiting the Ottoman Empire (Altınay, 2004). However, such an analytical separation of nationalistic positions was not clear-cut, the terms Ottoman, Muslim and Turkish were used in highly ambiguous ways with sometimes extreme ethno-nationalist tones, or in a relatively inclusive way, as I observe in KD. Whichever category was emphasised, or whichever tone was used, the discussions around ‘the woman question’ were at the centre of such positions based on the argument that neither saving the Ottoman Empire nor creating an ‘ideal nation’ would be possible unless Ottoman women changed.

In a way, Ottoman Muslim women made a late entrance into what I call an imaginary ‘national modernisation room’, while the imaginary ‘room’ was already heavily occupied by Ottoman Muslim men. I use the ‘room’ analogy here inspired by Sara Ahmed’s (2014a) rereading of bell hooks’ explanation of the ‘room’. I define the anxiety which preoccupied some Ottoman people as a ‘panic room’, inspired by Chakrabarty’s (2000) ‘imaginary waiting room’. The idea that the Ottoman Empire was not as developed as Europe, or at least that it was ‘not there yet’, but could progress further, served to occupy a hegemonic position. The panic was based on the idea that action for the progress of the Ottoman Empire needed to happen immediately, because the nation was under threat. In this framework, when the ‘national modernisation room’ was already tense with panic, alarmism and a sense of being under threat, the entrance of Ottoman Muslim women to the room exacerbated the tension.

With which demands did Ottoman Muslim women enter the imaginary room? Feminist research tends to frame women’s demands in this context by focusing on calls for girl’s and women’s education, having an occupation outside of the house to earn income, and political participation (Çakır, 2016). All of these demands can be found in the women’s magazines of the time, to a greater or lesser degree; but I argue that feminist research has been selective in emphasising certain demands, based on what seems compatible with common contemporary feminist expectations. Based on my engagement with several Ottoman women’s magazines, I argue that a spectrum of demands was present, ranging from taking revenge for a recent war, to building factories that could produce national goods; from learning how to practise motherhood in a ‘modern’ way, to understanding ‘European knowledge’. Defining women’s demands in a broader way, and analysing their mood of commitment, not only helps to avoid isolating women’s movements from the tense atmosphere, it also enables me to unpack how women’s positions in the political arena were negotiated, and how their demands articulated with and affected the political atmosphere.

Methodological enquiries

I investigate the mood of commitment by focusing on the women’s magazine Kadınlar Dünyası (KD or Women’s World), exclusively the first 100 issues published in 1913. KD writers engaged with nationalist perspectives and the modernisation process with an emphasis on demanding women’s rights. Contributors to KD were nearly exclusively Muslim and Turkish women, with only a few exceptions. Drawing on archival research, I trace ‘accidents, disparities, conflicts, and haphazard conditions’ (Eichhorn, 2013, p. 8), reflecting a similar desire in the work on affect and mood theories (Highmore & Taylor, 2014). Rather than attempting to ‘explore’ what has ‘actually’ happened in the past, this article is triggered by a desire to critically understand ‘the present through a reorientation to the past’ (Eichhorn, 2013, p. 7), in line with feminist genealogical perspectives (Scott, 2018).

Being committed to a political cause might be understood as stemming from individual volition which is itself rooted in a desire to change something in the world. Alternatively, it might be considered as automatically emerging in and from social and political movements as a side effect. Such understandings of individual will as contrasting with social determination have been criticised by scholars engaged with affect theory, as well as the sociology of emotions in social movements (Goodwin et al., 2001). Rather than dichotomous understandings, providing descriptions of emotions in the past or referring to emotions only as a passing example, asking ‘what do emotions do?’ is central to my methodological approach (Ahmed, 2014b). ¹ Thus, I am interested in affect in the texts as a site of the political negotiation of commitment in women’s movements. The reason I refer to text is not simply because KD magazine’s articles appear as a text in the archive. Rather, drawing on Ahmed’s conceptualisation, I analyse how the text is produced affectively, investigating ‘the way in which texts name and perform different emotions’ (Ahmed, 2014b, p. 13), looking at ‘what the materials [such as texts] are “doing”, how they work through emotions to generate effects’ (Ahmed, 2014b, p. 19). This does not mean to understand the effects of the texts on an audience, its reception by readers of the magazine; but to analyse how the texts themselves ‘hold together’ through affective relations, produced for the public arena.

KD magazine is very rich in content, and Ottoman Muslim women writers contributed to the magazine as a part of the main writers’ committee, or through their letters sent from various cities. It is likely many KD writers were coming from elite backgrounds, and they were commonly home educated. The content includes an urgency about women’s rights, childcare, the importance of motherhood, and discussions about how Europeans and Ottomans see one another. The analysis in this article is limited to the first 100 issues of the magazine and pays particular attention to articles reflecting women’s engagement with commitment, during the transformation of modernisation and nationalism, which allows me to ‘read the room’. ² I choose to highlight some parts from the articles for a close analysis but not others; this is not random. The selected texts illustrate the most typical and common perspectives towards commitment. However, I have selected them not so much for the frequency of the themes and perspectives they exemplify, but rather because they reflect the affective relations of ambiguous, complex and contradictory constitutions of a mood of commitment, including the negotiations of women’s positions and the associated hegemonies.

What is worth committing to, and how is one persuaded to commit? Objects of desire and attunement

In the following quotation, a KD writer, Nedime, mentions ‘working’, which refers here to the Turkish word çalışmak that I explained above. In addition, she specifically writes about women’s sadness and happiness, in her article ‘Being Hopeful for the Future’. Nedime points to KD magazine itself, using its full name, Women’s World (Kadınlar Dünyası), to discuss the situation of women during Ottoman modernisation:

Women’s World! . . . What does ‘women’s world’ mean; or rather can one imagine a world that belongs to women? Maybe it is a wrong expression, because women lived in hell for all of these years, not in the world. We have no connection with the world. Women’s hell has bottomless wells, fire, screams. . . . Oh, our time will come in the future, and we will also have a world. . . . And yes, we will be happy. . . . It could have been possible for us to tolerate living in this hell, if the important issue was anything else but the life of the country. However, we will keep working [çalışmak] after this point without giving up because we realise the nation’s misery is our fault, because we did not raise healthy strong heroes. . . . We will make our nation, our country and ourselves happy. (Nedime İhsan, issue 12. pp. 120–121) ³

This dramatic language depicts a horror scene, with ‘bottomless wells, fire, screams’ in a ‘women’s hell’ and evokes women’s self-blame for the ‘nation’s misery’ through their ‘motherhood’ capacity. This might seem unexpected for some contemporary feminist perspectives. However, it may also be quite a relatable commitment that Nedime refers to, as she questions the very meaning of women’s being in the world, women’s commitment to the nation (or a ‘higher’ aim) and women’s position for a ‘happier’ future. She imagines a world that belongs to women, but she thinks in her current world physical and mental pain unite women, who are estranged from any ‘liveable world’. According to her, a world for women does not exist; but still, women can become happy, and create a liveable life, if they keep working [çalışmak], if they commit to some higher aims.

In order to achieve a liveable world, Nedime underlines happiness of the nation, country and women. The texts of KD, as above, often start with a negative emotion (such as women feeling that they live in hell, their lack of connection with the world, and the nation’s misery) in order to promote and invite others to engage in active working [çalışmak]. Being active is legitimised through objects of desire such as the progress and happiness of the nation, country and women as an end point (Ahmed, 2010) in Ottoman Muslim women’s movements. In this perspective, objects of desire can only be reached through commitment.

In the excerpt from Nedime’s writing, there are a set of objects of desire to which I have referred, but they are not fixed and determined. In the case of modernist and nationalist movements, objects of desire for commitment reflect the articulation of modernisation and nationalism and can be wide ranging. For example, according to Ottoman intellectuals and political figures, objects of desire are generally related to ‘catching up’ with modern knowledge and the industrial ‘superiority’ of Europe, for the nation’s own progress (Ahıska, 2010). As observed in KD magazine, objects of desire orienting to commitment might be broader, such as ‘creating a better humanity’; or more specific, such as taking revenge for those who died in recent Balkan wars. Whether broad or specific, objects of desire are ambiguous, they can coalesce around a set of ideal-looking end points. Who would not want ‘their’ nation to be happy? Who would not want women to be happy? Objects of desire enable a persuasive and also pervasive atmosphere of commitment. When the objects of desire seem worth it, it is worth it to commit oneself as well. It is this compellingly persuasive atmosphere that one finds oneself in, in the mood of commitment.

It is important to emphasise that the set of objects of desire which circulated in the mood of commitment are ambiguous, pervasive and persuasive. Having said that, they are not random; they resonate together to produce an alarming position in which these objects of desire sound convincing to a certain group of people and catch their attention. While discussing the conceptualisation of atmosphere in affect studies, Kanyeredzi et al. suggest that entering into a space requires ‘becoming attuned to the atmosphere’ (2019, p. 451). In the specific case of this article, women’s commitment to creating a liveable world needed to persuade ‘the room’ and its occupants in order to attune with the political atmosphere into which these women were entering.

I pointed out before that it was Ottoman men who first started to discuss ‘the woman question’ in the public arena. Women demanding their rights, occupying the public sphere to make a set of demands for women, and publishing magazines about the topic, emerged in a context in which any political position had something to say about how women should ‘represent’ the changing national identity (Arat, 1999). In KD magazine, there is a set of arguments directly or indirectly engaging with these ideas that was already circulating before women began publicly demanding their rights. In other words, a prior attunement, built around a masculine nationalist bonding in and through the process of modernisation, was interrupted when Ottoman Muslim women started speaking for themselves. I argue that, by entering the imaginary national modernisation room, some Ottoman Muslim women ‘picked up’ the additional tension generated by their entrance; they ‘read the room’. Thus, they were the ones who had to rebuild the attunement and negotiate their existence in this ‘room’, so as not to ‘kill the mood’. They did so, for example, by proclaiming the need for ‘raising healthy strong heroes’, as in the quotation above, by showing that their existence in the room is not a ‘threat’ to national pride and by demonstrating that they already belonged in the room. In short, Ottoman Muslim women being in the mood of commitment felt under pressure to rebuild their attunement with those who were already ‘in the mood’.

I have suggested that objects of desire in the mood of commitment are not fixed; neither are the ways through which one might rebuild this attunement. There might be several strategies for how to attune with other bodies and ideas. In Nedime’s words above, altruism, a normative position for women, especially insofar as it relates to motherhood, appears as a strategy for keeping the ‘rhythm’. This kind of a strategy allows her to suggest that women’s commitment to work for the nation’s happiness is not only a necessity but an obligation due to their positions as mothers. Women often enter into political spaces for which they, and their political commitments, are not considered suitable (Hemmings, 2012); they enter as moral subjects and need to show that their demands are not selfish, but their work is ‘for the benefit of others’ (Aldikacti Marshall & Sabhlok, 2009, p. 411). Thus, women’s altruistic commitment does not only allow them to attune with the masculine nationalist political atmosphere, but also to claim that women’s commitment itself is the missing essential ‘tune’ in the rhythm.

Any social movement needs to emerge by somehow speaking to a general public and seeking to influence them one way or another (Eyerman, 2005). Being in the mood of commitment through altruism is a common way to do so. Altruistic commitment is not exclusive to women’s movements; rather, it can be considered as a significant dimension of political engagement that scholars analyse through rationalist, culturalist or structuralist standpoints (Passy, 2001). However, altruism is a gendered normative position for women when it is attached to norms of women dedicating themselves to their (or the nation’s) children, and thereby showing that they are already in the mood of commitment. Women being in the mood of commitment becomes convincing through these gendered normative positions which legitimises their entrance into the political space. In short, a group such as Ottoman Muslim women can catch the attention of others by circulating persuasive objects of desire that are already deemed worthy of commitment, and by resorting to political strategies such as altruism – both of which allow them to attune to the mood of commitment.

Having said that, I do not claim that emphasising certain objects of desire or adopting certain strategies such as an altruistic perspective in order to rebuild an attunement with the mood of commitment, stem from deliberately calculated decisions. Rather, as emphasised before, ‘moods are companions; what we carry with us is how we are carried’ (Ahmed, 2014a, p. 15), they are not intentional (Pedwell, 2014). Women’s mood of commitment is what they carry through their normative positions, and how they are carried into the atmosphere of political commitment. It consists not in intentional decisions made by subjects, but in their moodful orientations towards political commitment.

In this picture, objects of desire are attached to larger aims for political change; they are consistently circulated by referring to alarming situations. The imagined end point is a happy nation and happy women, promoted through the disturbing idea of the lack of a world for women. These are quite elevating claims which strive to convince the room into which they are entering, and for attuning with the mood therein. These high intensity objects of desire and the accompanying political strategy of altruism both show the worth of commitment and display women and their demands as fitting to the mood, perhaps even rising to, lifting the mood. However, whatever the objects of desire and the strategies are, commitment here stands as inertia, it is the stable rhythm to be retained. There is no room for giving up in the mood of commitment, and commitment lingers. Who can then find themselves in the mood of commitment, or better put, what work does promoting commitment do, when performed by those who considered themselves already in the mood? These questions will be discussed in the following section.

Who is in the mood of commitment: Complexities and hegemonies of the self

Fatımatüzzehra, another woman writing in KD, also refers to laziness and the failure of motherhood, education and industry in the Ottoman Empire, in comparison to Europe, in her article, ‘If our aim is progress, why don’t we work?’:

The nations that can understand the essence of our grand religion [Islam] are both surprised and sad for seeing us like this. . . . Can we still not understand that we are in a very painful position due to [us] not working [çalışmak]? The truth is so clear, wasting even one hour is a huge mistake, maybe a sin. Working [çalışmak] is a religious duty; since this is an unquestionable truth, why don’t we work? . . . Why can we not understand our duties? Inexperienced nations [referring to ‘Europe’ because according to the writer they do not have a ‘great’ past like the Ottoman Empire] are in happiness since the day they understood this truth [about working and progress] and we are now like a toy that they can play with even though we were much powerful than them before. This happened, this is enough, but let’s pull ourselves together. (Fatımatüzzehra, issue 51, p. 6)

In this quotation, Fatımatüzzehra refers to similar themes to those already discussed: the sadness of the nation and the nation’s potential happiness, in order to promote commitment, with an emphasis on working [çalışmak]. She explains how she imagines that the ‘European’ gaze sees (Ahıska, 2010) Ottoman Muslims. In Fatımatüzzehra’s words, Ottoman Muslims figure as the collective ‘self’ to which she belongs and to which she speaks, excluding the non-Muslim Ottomans from the picture, such as Ottoman Armenians and Greeks. While discussing the sadness and pain of the nation, she directs the blame not towards the Europe who, she thinks, plays with Ottomans like a toy, or the Others of Ottoman Empire whom she excludes from the definition of Ottoman. She instead blames the very group of Ottoman Muslims to which she belongs, for not being able to understand the significance of working [çalışmak]. In short, she thinks Ottoman Muslims are the ones who are guilty of not being in the mood of commitment.

What kind of work is it to imagine the ‘self’, or the long discussed ‘we’, in the mood of commitment? Fatımatüzzehra’s perspective is based on a kind of self-blame, which is an interesting theme to analyse, as it illustrates the complexity of commitment in relation to hegemonic positions. I will here analyse self-blame, but it is important to note that self-blame is not the only way to demarcate who is, is not, or should be in the mood of commitment. Sometimes the self directly and exclusively blames others who do not fit into the category of self (such as external enemies); sometimes the self pretentiously glorifies itself to show its own worth in the mood of commitment. Hemmings (2012), for example, analyses an interesting case of women-blaming in which women themselves, rather than women’s roles, are critiqued in order to explain women’s mood in promoting a revolutionary mood. In addition, blame can serve to shame others in public, producing social stigmas (Scambler, 2018). I hereby zoom in on self-blame to illustrate the nuances of the kind of work that mood of commitment does in inhabiting hegemonic positions. With this aim in mind, I shall unravel two layers of self-blame.

In the first version of self-blame, the self points to itself as the guilty party, responsible for the problem cited. In other words, the guilty and responsible category directly encapsulates the self. The implications are as follows: because the self is guilty, it must compensate, find a solution, and actively work to address and overcome its failings. For example, some KD writers think that the nation is sad because Ottomans are lazy (including themselves in this category); thus, they are the ones who need to commit. Nedime, in the quotation in the previous section, claims that the nation is miserable, and women are in pain because they have failed to be good mothers (she includes herself in this category too); thus, women should be better mothers for the happiness of the nation. Finally, Fatımatüzzehra, in the quote above, thinks that they have ended up in a painful situation (compounded by the gaze of ‘Europe’) because Ottoman Muslims have not practised their religious duty (working); thus, they are the ones who need to engage with working. In all of these examples, the writers blame groups to which they themselves belong, and incite the guilty parties to accept responsibility for solving the problem they have created. In this way, the writers attribute subjectivity to those who are guilty, namely themselves. This is one layer of ‘self’ in Fatımatüzzehra’s writing: by blaming the self, the self assumes subjectivity as an active agent, who needs to change the mood and that must therefore be in the mood of commitment.

However, self in the mood of commitment works in complex and contradictory ways, operated here though self-blame. The second layer of self also points to a group to which the writer belongs but operates differently to the self-blame of the first layer, as the writers separate and distance themselves slightly from other insider selves. In this layer, the guilty category is someone else, but is still strongly associated with the self, who serves as an inner critic. To illustrate this, in the quotation above, Fatımatüzzehra refers to Ottoman Muslims who fail to practise what their religion requires: working [çalışmak]. As the subject inviting other Ottoman Muslims to work for progress and modernisation, she separates herself from the category of ‘not practising Islam correctly’. The self who incurs blame does not include people who are already committed, but those others, who have not yet understood the importance of working, who are not (yet) attuned. By blaming someone associated with themselves, through pointing to this misattunement, these writers again assume the subject position themselves, but this time as the ones who see the importance of working, who are already committed – in the mood of commitment. Self-blame in this specific case does not operate simply by assigning responsibility to a guilty category, namely the self. The self who assumes the guilt is also not guilty; they assign themselves the position of inviting others to attune, to be in the mood of commitment. What is interesting is that both of these layers of self-blame operate simultaneously and in parallel.

The blame directed at the self in the mood of commitment is different from self-blaming in any political situation. Ahmed gives the example of becoming affectively ‘out of tune’ with others, in a situation of a shared cheerfulness that is interrupted when one finds a joke offensive and loses an attunement, leading to a form of self-blame. She argues that a feeling can be directed towards oneself, as when one asks, ‘how did I let myself get caught in this?’ (2014a, p. 17), in relation to a hegemonic position from which one is distanced. In the cases of self-blame occurring in the mood of commitment that I analyse here, the situation does not point to losing an attunement. Being in the mood of commitment requires a claim of responsibility for attuning others, and through it, demarcating those who are misattuned and those who worth attuning with. In other words, the ones who claim to be in the right mood at the same time decide whose attention is needed. Misattunement for the ones who are in the mood of commitment appears only as a problem to solve when the misattuned are associated with the self.

I argued in the previous section that orienting to a set of ambiguous objects of desire and creating a persuasive atmosphere serve to attune those who were already committed to a set of political aims. Thus, Ottoman Muslim women had to rebuild an attunement with an imaginary nationalist Ottoman Muslim men’s ‘room’, in order to ‘fit into’ the mood in their defence of women’s rights. KD writers creating such a persuasive atmosphere can claim that they are responsible for political change. At the same time, however, attuning to the political atmosphere and being in the mood of commitment, they decide who can be in the mood by demarcating the ‘self’ – namely, only Ottoman Muslims can be in the mood of commitment. In this way, the mood of commitment is produced so as not to welcome just anyone who wants to commit, but the ones who appeared to be already committed create a hegemony by taking charge of deciding who is misattuned. Thinking hegemony beyond a dichotomy between domination and subordination (Said, 1995), the legitimation of who has the right to act and who has the right to invite ‘others’ to politically behave in the ‘right way’ (Burton, 1990) is a significant form of creating affective, hegemonic positions. In the case of this article, the hegemony of national and religious belonging allows some subjects to ‘own the room’, for a liveable women’s world, through a sense of familiarity with the self. Inhabiting hegemonic positions allows to show that one is not just moody but in the mood of commitment. In short, those who should attune for a liveable world for women are Ottoman and Muslim women: they are the ones who should not waste any time and commit.

Some researchers claim that the demarcation of ‘we’ in a social movement can be produced through framing an Other that ‘we’ are against (Eyerman, 2005). I have tried to show that it is more complicated; ‘we’ (or the Self) have more layers than an enemy Other in the mood of commitment, and this mood can itself be generative of hegemonic positions, produced through demarcations of the layered self. Hegemonic positions in the mood of commitment are inhabited through a heightening and galvanising urgency because it is the self that is threatened. However, hegemonic positions are pervasive, similar to mood. The belongings of self are based on long-term familiarities; commitment settles in and sticks around the hegemonic positions, permitting the framing of only certain groups of people as worthy of committing.

Conclusion

In this article, I conceptualise political commitment as an affective dedication for a cause, investigating what happens if we think of commitment as a mood, in the case of Ottoman Muslim women’s writing located within modernisation and nationalist movements in the early 20th century. Texts from KD magazine provided the source materials for this investigation, with their strong emphasis on commitment. I argue that women writing in the magazine intended to galvanise their audience by foregrounding a set of ambiguous, yet persuasive-looking objects of desire linked with nationalism, alongside a call for working, for commitment. Women’s altruism, indicated through women’s commitment to the nation, forms a part of that galvanisation, and is mobilised to claim that women are a fundamental part of nationalist movements, analysed here through women’s attunement, a relational aspect of mood. Within the persuasive atmosphere and women’s attunement, galvanisation of the audience is generated through several layers of self-blaming which serve to assign the subject position to those who claim the status of already being committed, who are already in ‘the right mood’, enabling them to occupy a hegemonic position.

The concept ‘mood of commitment’ takes its place in the potentiality of research on mood – that which is diffuse but unmistakable, shared and collective, which shapes our rhythm of being with others. In this framework, conceptualising political commitment as a mood neither suggests that broader movements create commitment, nor that commitment causes broader movements. Rather, it enables us to analyse that which evades description in political movements, with a specific focus on objects of desire, attunement and hegemony. My analysis here is only focusing on Ottoman women’s movements, but it has potential for rethinking concepts in several fields in different contexts, such as the politics of belonging (Yuval-Davis, 2011), homonationalism (Puar, 2007), public feelings (Cvetkovich, 2012) and anti-gender movements (Kuhar & Paternotte, 2017), among others.

Returning to the central question of this article: what happens if we think about commitment both as an inertia, in the way that mood is often described, and simultaneously as a high intensity, heightening, stimulating atmosphere? The reason I refer to commitment as an inertia, as contradictory as it seems, lies in the durability of holding on to the commitment, as a political discourse. In my case study, the invitation to working and commitment is a ‘situation’ that does not change for a long time, as if commitment is the goal itself. It lingers, settles in, sticks around in a stable way during the transformation of modernisation and nationalism. However, I have also shown that a mood of commitment is a heightening one: it is mobilising and galvanising in the very lingering of the mood. A metaphor often evoked among scholars to conceptualise mood is the weather, reflecting its ‘inertia’. In my view, while doing so, scholars often imagine stable weather, whether sunny or cloudy. I suggest that it is also possible to imagine stormy, turbulent weather intercepting this stable state while thinking of mood, as in the case of political commitment, as this article has tried to show.