Abstract
The volume edited by Feride Çiçekoğlu and Ömer Turan lays the foundation for the (re)contextualization of masculinities and militarism at a moment of immense social, political, and cultural transformation in Turkey. As a vital contribution to the growing literature on men and masculinities in Turkey, the volume places the coup attempt of July 15, 2016, within a temporality in which a regime of state of emergency and militarization was disseminated via “violence through symbols.” In order to unpack the complexity and dynamism of masculinities within this context, the volume incorporates a spectrum of studies on football, cinema, video games, literature, psychoanalysis, military veterans, and performance. Gender scholars have hitherto underlined the deep-seated role of hegemonic militarism and nationalism within constructions of masculinities, especially in Turkey where military service is compulsory for male citizens.
In this particular architecture of a “military nation,” multiple forces circulate through the symbols and instruments of the nation-state. Yet the edited volume exhibits a peculiar return to reloaded militarism and puts the spotlight on its discursive, symbolic, and tangible effects on reproductions of masculinities. Contrary to the previously applauded role of the military as a formative institution disciplining citizens, the 15th of July, by juxtaposing civilian heroes with putschist soldiers and incorporating Muslim religious symbols, has fortified hegemonic gendered constructions. The authors attentively demonstrate that the heretical juncture of the failed coup, while productively enabling new normative constructions of hegemonic masculinities, at the same time, echoes a resurgence of deeply rooted traumas.
Under the climate of an authoritarian turn and the violent curtail after the coup attempt, the volume unpacks the patriarchal conditions in which masculine agents are cultivated, promoted and reproduced. Chapter 4 by Başak Alpan and Chapter 5 by Feride Çiçekoğlu specifically build on Connell’s formulation of hegemonic masculinity through analyses of football and movies vis-à-vis July 15 and militarism. Both authors demonstrate that the construction of hegemonic masculinities contextually builds upon language, imagery, and symbols glorifying violence, nationalism, militarism, and heroism. This construction also acts as a gaze of subordination against those who are outside of the Turkish, Sunni, cis, heterosexual, and male archetype. Both chapters carefully point out the designated role of the state apparatus generating religious-nationalist ideologies and neo-Ottoman narratives in this new era of militarization. Alpan, for instance, argues that football, already a field of performative hegemonic masculinity in this temporality, enables a holy alliance in which AKP sponsored political and cultural manifestations are embodied in stadiums.
Çiçekoğlu analyzes films about the Turkish military in the last decade with high box office numbers, revealing how they replicate the recent history of military in relation to power and politics alongside its influence in society. Yet, this microscopic analysis of filmic images of Istanbul, at times of de-militarization, re-militarization, and an Islamic turn, exhibit representations of military that always involve glorification of hegemonic masculinities and disparagement of the feminine. The repulsion towards the latter, the author points out, is depicted in these films through sexist, nationalist, and homophobic narratives.
The other chapters in the volume do not directly engage with hegemonic masculinities. Rather, they disclose the momentous political, sociological, and cultural terrain of July 15 and its inducement of masculine subjects through interdisciplinary perspectives. Nurseli Yeşim Sünbüloğlu, for example, examines the life worlds of disabled veterans of the Kurdish conflict in a contested position with the new heroic veterans of the coup attempt, demonstrating how—through boundary-making and discursive strategies of suffering—the former as the old guards reconstruct their relationship with the state restraining the male privilege and the honor of veteran-hood.
In the final chapter, Ömer Turan examines the dynamic political landscape of Turkey with raptures and continuities of militarism, contextualizing the anomalous case of reloaded militarism preceding the failed coup within two decades of the AKP regime. Maneuvering through the violence through symbols, Turan argues that the current return of militarism with the collapse of the Kurdish peace process, and the July 15 event via de-democratization and regime of state of emergency, generate a particular domain in which masculinities are constructed.
The Dubious Case of a Failed Coup revisits construction of masculinities within the temporality of re-militarization and its multiple forces, providing a thorough cultural analysis of the failed coup. Still, it would benefit substantially from incorporating sexuality and the body on the analysis of masculinities. The volume will be of interest to all readers who wish to unpack the dynamism of contemporary discussions of masculinities in Turkey. As it analyzes the coup attempt thoroughly from different angles, issues, and perspectives, no prior knowledge is needed to engage with the book.