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Abstract

This article analyses the #HerYürüyüşümüzOnurYürüyüşü (Every Parade of Ours is a Pride Parade) hashtag campaign for 2019 Pride month in Turkey, expressing the collective frustration of the LGBTI+ community against long-lasting bans for LGBTI+ events and public assembly. Drawing on a digital ethnography from Twitter, the article explores networked resistances within the complexity of online and offline entanglements of activism during Istanbul Pride 2019. The multimodal discourse analysis conducted in this article focuses on the interactions of digital affordances and embodied street actions in rearticulating queer political places. The study emphasizes the important role of hashtag activism in the (re)making of place as a trans-located experience, as well as affording emergent LGBTI+ resistances.

Keywords

LGBTI+politics of location digital space multimodal discourse analysis networked resistance

Introduction

Turkey forms one of the major spaces for the LGBTI+¹ rights struggle, where the community’s subjectivities are placed up against antagonisms from the right-wing conservative coalition² of the government. In Turkey, LGBTI+ community have been demanding their right to assembly and recognition with activism through LGBTI+ organizations and initiatives for Pride demonstrations since the early 1990s. Yet, the bans on Pride and other LGBTI+ events across the country that began in 2015 made public spaces increasingly inaccessible. As the authoritarian and neoliberal agenda of Turkey’s government has depoliticized and commercialized the public sphere, the political contestations of places have become even more apparent between LGBTI+ citizens and the government. The increasing inaccessibility of political places made activists furthering their resistance on digital platforms more visible and political. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has also revitalized the role of the digital in public space, as the country has experienced lockdown measures and restrictions of rights to public assembly.

This article focuses on the online activism that took place during Istanbul Pride in 2019 in order to explore its interconnections with physically embodied activism before and on the day of the Pride march. The analysis aims to explore the politics of location and situatedness in online action, starting with a hashtag campaign that took place on Twitter, Every Parade of Ours is a Pride Parade (#HerYürüyüşümüzOnurYürüyüşü). This campaign was part of a collective action by several LGBTI+ organizations in Turkey that took place while the Istanbul Pride Committee was preparing for a soon-to-be banned Pride event in the city. I analyze this campaign, along with the events that followed Istanbul Pride in 2019, to explore how LGBTI+ activists in Turkey (re)articulate political places through digital activism. In my analysis, I focus on resistance as a trans-located practice by revealing online and offline entanglements that occur from practicing activism.

This article is an interdisciplinary study that draws on the fields of resistance studies, informatics, gender, and sexuality studies. In studying digital activism, some scholars have attributed an ontological division between online and offline practices, considering online activism as a form of “slacktivism” (Morozov 2009) or “clicktivism” (Karpf 2010; White 2010), suggesting that online activism involves a lower form of political engagement that is distinctive from physical togetherness. In contrast to this, the literature on digital LGBTI+ activism in different contexts emphasizes the fundamental role of online spaces in facilitating the politics of “coming out,” queer community-building, and collective action by activists (Ayoub and Brzezinska 2015; Ciszek 2017; Friedman 2007; Gruszczynska, 2007). In the Turkish context, Görkemli (2012:83) highlights the importance of advancing digital technologies in providing alternative media for queer socialization and politicization from the early years of activism. İnceoğlu and Çoban (2015) also argue that the use of digital spaces by physically organized groups and embodied movements, such as the LGBTI+ movement, cannot be considered slacktivism. In line with this literature, drawing on the LGBTI+ movement’s digital struggles that move beyond slacktivism, this article highlights the political and embodied engagements of the activists from Turkey, along with the resulting impacts on their spatial resistance.

The role of hashtags (#) in digital activism has been discussed by scholars, particularly in view of their ability to afford collective action. In contrast to earlier human-centric perspectives for analyzing protests and social change (Aguirre 1994; Turner and Killian 1987; Weick et al., 2005), Oh et al., (2015), study on Twitter highlighted the agential role of digital technologies in collective sense-making preceding collective action. According to Oh et al. (2015), hashtags function as a “technolinguistic grammar” for making this process possible via human–machine collaboration, where people’s collective interests are anchored by the hyperlink, allowing ideas to be spread with a unifying principle. In addition, in a recent study on anti-racist, feminist, and queer activism on Twitter, Jackson et al. (2020) argue that hashtags facilitate diverse networks of marginalized communities as counter-publics, where their online-offline networking transforms the mainstream conceptions of the public sphere. For Benkler et al. (2013), such emergence of digital technologies provided a “networked public sphere,” that is, an alternative to the domination of mainstream media, which has less government control. For techno-sociologist Zeynep Tufekci (2017), this digitally networked public sphere allows personal (and previously privatized) narratives and preferences to meet with larger publics, blurring the boundaries between private and public, individual and collective action. This study reconsiders the public sphere from a networked perspective, examining the role of the #HerYürüyüşümüzOnurYürüyüşü hashtag campaign in facilitating LGBTI+ collective sense-making and spatial resistance. The article contributes to deeper understandings of LGBTI+ activism beyond online-offline and private-public boundaries, in a context where rights to public assembly are constrained and politics of location are (re)articulated in the digital sphere.

The discussion of the changing relationship between the private and public arenas has been a central discussion in resistance studies. Whereas some scholars focused on feminist and queer resistances taking place within the “contentious politics” of the public sphere (Della Porta 2014; Pile 1997; Tilly 2008), others highlighted the subtle forms of “everyday resistance” that are harder to detect (Baaz et al., 2017; Vinthagen and Johansson 2013). In recent feminist and queer perspectives on resistance, however, such divisions of public and private spheres are challenged, where knowledge of resistances are to be found at their intersections, or in “gray zones” of activism (Çağatay et al., 2021; Murru 2020). Inspired by these latest scholarly discussions, this study explores the intersections of small- and large-scale resistances, from individualized everyday resistances to public solidarity gatherings. In addition, digital ethnography scholars have highlighted that human lives have been transformed into inseparable networks of offline locations and online mobility (Leander and McKim 2003; Postill and Pink 2012) as the Internet has become an embodied part of our lives, moving beyond simply being a communication tool (Hine 2017). From this vantage point, I explore how locations, bodies, and technologies interact with each other. The article analyzes these interactions by looking at embodied collective actions, such as the everyday walk of activists as a resistance practice and street demonstrations during Istanbul Pride.

Placing LGBTI+ resistance in Istanbul: An overview of the struggle

Istanbul Pride in Turkey is considered one of the oldest and largest Pride events in all the Balkans and the Middle East, taking place annually in June. The first initiative for Pride took place in 1993, but it was prevented by authorities (Ince 2014); subsequently, it was continuously permitted to take place on İstiklal Street between 2003 and 2014 (Bianet 2019). The event has been held by the Istanbul Pride Committee, a collective of LGBTI+ activists. 2013 was a special year for Istanbul Pride due to its intersection with the Gezi Park Resistance near Taksim Square. The LGBTI+ community was one of the first groups to occupy the park to protest the government’s demolition plans, due to the park’s historical significance as a cruising spot for gay men and trans people since the late 1970s (Özbay 2017; Yıldız 2014). The Gezi protests prevented the government’s³ project to build a shopping mall, which would mean depoliticization, as well as the erasure of the LGBTI+ presence and collective memory around the area. The Pride event held at nearby İstiklal Street during this activity of resistance welcomed up to a hundred thousand participants, the highest participation in the history of any Pride march in Turkey (Pearce 2014). The public opposition was shaped around two main concerns: the neoliberal reordering by the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government, causing the commodification of nature and public space (Tuğal 2013), and an “authoritarian turn” closely observed by the political discourses of the President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, whose personal authority is depicted as moving the country toward a significant transformation into an illiberal democracy (Benhabib 2013). This had already caused neoliberal economic policies to be imposed by an authoritarian agenda, which had become regulatory for the daily life of citizens (Tansel 2018). Such a form of governance is conceptualized as authoritarian neoliberalism, where ruling elites are “less interested in neutralizing resistance and dissent via concessions and forms of compromise that maintain their hegemony” (Bruff 2014:116). In this regard, the commodification of public spaces in Turkey became a hegemonic process that did not involve seeking public consent. In the aftermath of the Gezi Resistance, the AKP was increasingly criticized for reducing democracy to parliamentary majoritarianism and increasing discrimination between social groups (Gençoğlu Onbaşı, 2016; Yörük 2014). Whereas formal and direct interventions in mainstream media made oppositional voices and views invisible on TV and newspapers (Yesil, 2018), the organized troll teams of the government produced provocative content on Twitter (Bulut and Yörük 2017). The AKP’s religious-conservative populism, which promotes creating “pious generations” (Gökarıksel et al., 2019), has resulted in the imposition of familial delimitations of gender and sexuality (Acar and Altunok 2013). Therefore, LGBTI+ identities have been marginalized on different occasions through tactics such as producing hate speech on Twitter and taking LGBTI+ activists and students into custody during Pride demonstrations. The annual Pride march has been banned by the Istanbul Governorate since 2015. Similar bans have also been implemented in other major cities with Pride events, including in Izmir, Mersin, Adana, and Antalya (Association for Monitoring Equal Rights, 2019). As Pride was celebrated under contestations on the rights to public assemblies, digital media have been increasingly becoming alternative sites for resistance.

Methodology

This research takes Istanbul Pride, 2019 into its empirical focus and conducts a multimodal discourse analysis on Every Parade of Ours is a Pride Parade campaign and Pride-related public tweets shared on Twitter in June 2019. An important entry point here is that analyzing Pride in Turkey and many other countries may put emphasis on LGBTI+ resistance as an urban-only political practice, which can easily dismiss the important LGBTI+ struggles taking place in rural communities. Acknowledging the risks derived from an urban/rural divide, I have chosen Istanbul Pride as the focus of this article since this event historically attracts the audience from different geographies in Turkey and abroad, helping trans-local and transnational solidarities to take place.

Epistemologies of resistance and spatiality

From a poststructuralist standpoint, this study places the resistance practices of LGBTI+ activists at the core of its queer epistemology. In Foucauldian terms, resistance resembles a process of forging counter-power against intended regimes of totality (Pickett 1996). Such epistemological focus highlights the knowledge production that occurs from LGBTI+ activists as counter-publics in pushing the public sphere, alternating heteronormativity, and depoliticization (Asen and Brouwer 2001; Fraser 1990), which are imposed on citizen-subjects by the authoritarian neoliberal regime. Laclau and Mouffe (2014) discourse theory and ideals of radical democracy suggest that knowledge production comes with recognition of the political agonisms of the social, where defining the society and identities is an ongoing discursive struggle (Jørgensen and Phillips 2002:24). Inspired by Laclau and Mouffe, my discourse perspective takes the knowledge of LGBTI+ subjectivities and political places as articulatory rather than static, and as (re)defined through queer resistances. Following transnational feminist scholarship, the article recognizes “the politics of location” as important in defining collective identities and struggles (Grewal and Kaplan 1994; Mohanty 1995, 2013). Massey (2013) also attributes a relational role to space, as it is co-constituted from the multiplicity of global and local experiences. These places are online and offline, local and transnational, yet complex. They are where “locations” can go beyond their geographic limits and be reconfigured in the digital realm. In this regard, queer reclaiming of symbolic locations, such as Taksim Square, Gezi Park, or İstiklal Street, does not only depend on the organized presence of queers at these places, but also through the temporal or quotidian presence of queer bodies that are digitalized through social media platforms. Knowledge of resistance, therefore, is formed at the intersection of individual and collective actions, as places can be digitalized into trans-locality and transnationality.

Framing multimodal discourse analysis

The emphasis on the interconnectedness of digital and physical spatiality in this article has influenced the decision to use a multimodal perspective on discourse analysis that considers different communicative modes. Baskerville et al. (2019) argue that we have arrived at a phase where the digital technologies of today are increasingly shaping our physical reality through computed human experiences, shifting the meanings of time, place, artifacts, and actors (Yoo 2010:219). Their argument emphasizes the articulatory role of the digital, as technologies not only reflect certain representations of reality, but are also able to make them. Therefore, we need to consider the ontologies of technology in understanding the human–machine relationship. The communicative modes in the case of Istanbul Pride activism consist of various online and offline elements, namely, the embodied actions of LGBTI+ activists; digital media content, such as texts, pictures, and videos; the affordances of Twitter as the main digital platform for Pride activism; and the materiality of mobile devices. In this study, the emphasis on multimodality refers to the task of explaining how meanings of places and subjectivities are created with the interaction of these different modes (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2001; Royce 2007). The affordances of digital platforms, therefore, have important articulatory roles for the knowledge of resistance, as affordances are dependent on “historically situated modes of engagement and ways of life” (Bloomfield et al., 2010:415). The situatedness of multimodal connections of devices, applications, videos, pictures, texts, humans, and collectives provides a certain sociomaterial assemblage, where the emergent forms of affordances that are enacted in the practice of technology can be observed (Zheng and Yu 2016:309).

In the data collection, I made a detailed monitoring of Pride-related tweets from 1^st of June to 5^th of July in 2019. For such monitoring, I used the advanced search tool, using my personal Twitter account, to identify key public discussions that were initiated by LGBTI+ organizations’, individual activists’, and Istanbul Pride Week’s accounts. Acknowledging that such searching tools have an algorithmic bias, I find it particularly interesting how algorithms led me to identify certain struggles as an active follower of LGBTI+ political content. My positionality as a queer researcher from Turkey has been helpful for obtaining contextual knowledge and being reflexive about the decision-making process for the research focus. As a result, two major hashtags that had become popular for Istanbul Pride; #HerYürüyüşümüzOnurYürüyüşü (Every Parade of Ours is a Pride Parade) and #Pride2019 were chosen for the analysis. These two hashtags were actively shared under tweets posted for the purpose of activism, and they helped me navigate the identification of major patterns of actions taken by users on Twitter. After identifying public tweets with multimodal content, I used the Atlas.ti qualitative data analysis program to organize my collected data. Categorizing my data with the coding function helped me to narrow down the large amount of content that is involved in determined hashtags. As a result, I identified two important moments that developed during the Every Parade of Ours is a Pride Parade hashtag campaign, respectively: (1) the “acts of daily walk” as individual political action by activists and (2) networked street action on the day of the Pride walk.

My approach to the field is inspired by Tufekci’s conceptualization of networked public sphere, which refers to a “complex interaction of publics, online and offline, all intertwined, multiple, connected, complex, but also transnational and global” (2017:6). Tufekci emphasizes that this digital networking does not attribute any primacy to online spaces, but rather, digital technologies reconfigure spatiality and social movement actions (ibid.). From such a perspective, an important analytical task is to combine the multimodal approach of micro-interactions of signs with a social theory at the macro-level, including historicity of subjectivities and places (Bou-Franch and Blitvich 2018; Jewitt 2016). Therefore, I analyze networked resistances initiated by LGBTI+ activists in Turkey in line with the historicity of the movement and theoretical discussions on queer politics of location.

Analysis and discussion

Digitalizing pride walk: profile of a twitter campaign

On 10 June 2019, the Istanbul Pride Committee in collaboration with different LGBTI+ organizations and Pride committees from the cities of Ankara, Antalya, Denizli, Izmir, and Mersin announced the hashtag campaign #HerYürüyüşümüzOnurYürüyüşü (Every Parade of Ours is a Pride Parade). They prepared a joint statement calling on LGBTI+ rights groups and supporters in Turkey and around the world to share the hashtag on Twitter.

We are not only walking one day, #HerYürüyüşümüzOnurYürüyüşü!

We are getting together against all kinds of attacks towards our lives, our bodies, our labour, our pleasures, our ideas! We advocate love against hate, solidarity against violence. In spite of those who want to close us in the closets, we open up, we spread from the places where we are squeezed in to the whole city and even the whole country. As we prepare to celebrate the Pride Month in our cities, together we make our voices heard on social media.

We are meeting on social media on the evening of June 10 at 21.00 with the hashtag #HerYürüyüşümüzOnurYürüyüşü! It will be useful to be TT if we pay attention not to share the tag before the time comes.

(Author’s translation)

The statement above was posted by Istanbul LGBTI+ Pride Week’s account on Twitter earlier on the same day of the targeted time of the campaign. The manifestation of “we” in connection to Every Parade of Ours is a Pride Parade defines the LGBTI+ community as part of a collective sense-making process, articulating a subject position that formulates a collective identity. The imagination of a collective identity is always constructed through the very definition of its antagonistic boundaries (Glasze 2007). These boundaries establish an arbitrary and unfixed relationship with a constitutive outside (Laclau 1990:18), a formation of the other as an affirmation of difference (Mouffe 2005:2). The “self” is identified with values, such as togetherness, love, solidarity, and freedom, situated against an opposing hetero-masculine state power and its policing of the streets. LGBTI+ emancipation is defined by a measure of access to a wider public sphere, as the text declares: “in spite of those who want to close us in the closets, we open up, we spread from the places where we are squeezed in to the whole city and even the whole country.” A visual mode supports this message with a group of people sitting and standing at the seaside with their rainbow flags waving toward the infinite space of the open sea, challenging the limits of LGBTI+ presence in public space. The digital space here appears as a site of resistance and a queering of the cities that have banned Pride events. This articulation here is defined by a negative connotation of the constitutive outside in a particular historicity, a construction through opposing forces of identity (Keith and Pile 1993).

For Istanbul Pride 2019, even though a variety of digital platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, and organizational websites, were used by Pride organizers and activists; Twitter was the main platform where this digital campaign was initiated. Twitter provides more of a public platform for users, since each post can be seen in the feed of their followers, everyone who has access to the post’s link, through hashtags, or from a suggestion by Twitter algorithms. Users are limited to tweets with a 280-character limit⁴; however, it is also possible to incorporate visuals, videos, sounds, permalinks, and longer texts in image format. The hashtags as “technolinguistic grammar” appear to be a major mode of tactics of the campaign; as Oh et al. (2015) suggest, they “help identify clusters of focal themes and makes them rise to the surface among a whole population of chaotic tweets” (p. 213). This grammatical feature makes hashtags functional for analysis, enabling observation of the process of collective sense-making and action. The intended campaign was successful in providing online visibility, as it became a trend topic (TT)⁵ in Turkey on June 10, posted by not only various LGBTI+ organizations, human rights groups, celebrities, and other individuals, but also by transnational organizations and LGBTI+ activists beyond borders.

From the launch of the hashtag campaign, many of the following tweets highlighted the importance of spatial resistance and the right to assembly for the LGBTI+ community in Turkey. The posts include a set of collective memories in a multimodal setting, such as street pictures from previous Pride marches across Turkey, hyperlinks to news articles, pictures or videos of users with rainbow flags or banners, and retweets of previous posts. In this regard, the hashtag #HerYürüyüşümüzOnurYürüyüşü forms that unifying principle, not only for the flow of intended campaign but also for historicity of the movement to be united, visualized, and reproduced, accommodating all the statements, visuals, and hyperlinks under a collective action, thereby challenging the limits of public space. Through these repetitive actions and the retweeting of popular content, Twitter allows a counter-hegemonic statement from LGBTI+ activists to circulate in digital spatiality and challenge heteronormativity.

Walking as an act of resistance

In the hashtag campaign, the act of the “everyday walk” as a form of resistance is not an arbitrary, but an intended choice in response to an authoritarian neoliberal reordering of public space. This message contained by the campaign hashtag led to a networked resistance on Twitter. Several LGBTI+ activists from different parts in Turkey uploaded their videos walking on the streets of their city or town while going to work, socializing, performing, or whatever everyday reason they were walking, showing their everyday walk as a Pride walk and as a form of resistance. The #HerYürüyüşümüzOnurYürüyüşü hashtag plays an important role, not only by spreading this act of walking as a collective action but by turning a digital mode into a physical embodied action. This action then returned to the digital space and visualized a contested history for queer visibility, a mapping of collective resistance to heteronormativity going together with a constant struggle of reclaiming the streets, squares, and cities for queer bodies, or queering the place. As is discussed in transnational feminism, these locations provide a certain genealogy of the LGBTI+ rights struggle as a located practice, understanding scattered hegemonies and resistances by recognizing particularities of queer experiences (Grewal and Kaplan 1994). In these formations of sexual rights assemblages, we see “place, body, and environment integrate with each other; that places gather things, thoughts, and memories in particular configurations” (Escobar 2001:143). This situation puts heteronormativity in an ongoing political contestation, where politics of location become a discursive domain for challenging it. As convincing as it may be, my intention is not to declare a cultural relativism based on absolute contingency. This is rather a manifestation, where located experiences and practices of place become important in knowledge construction on gender and sexuality for challenging globalized fixations. In her discussion on the politics of location, Mohanty (1995) focuses on the interaction between political place and the subject, seeing unity in identity struggles not as a precondition, but as something to be produced in locations and in history. The hints of the global queer movement, in this regard, are to be found in situated inequalities that are experienced on the streets of Turkey on a daily basis, and their interconnections with different locations. Therefore, it is important to understand locations of struggle themselves as an indicator of how LGBTI+ resistance is shaped and sustained over time. If streets are assumed heteronormatively, then these acts of resistance are able to produce their counter-hegemony of place, as queer bodies always existed and will always exist at every corner of “our streets.”

Challenging depoliticized and commodified public space

Discrimination toward the LGBTI+ community in Turkey is also driven by injustice based on maldistribution. As a result of a neoliberal reordering of the landscape and the precariousness of queer lives, transgender subjects in particular are targets of employment and housing discrimination (Acar and Altunok 2013). These redistributive concerns were manifested in the main theme for Istanbul Pride in 2019, which was “What is economy, ayol?”⁶ In their declaration of the theme, the Istanbul Pride Committee pointed out that the economic crisis in Turkey is not new to its LGBTI+ citizens; it is rather a structural and continual crisis; as they state, “we are in a crisis every moment with jobs we cannot get, schools we cannot study, houses we cannot live, and the precarity in our lives” (BirGün 2019). Such precariousness of queer lives in Turkey resides upon a long history of exclusion. The long-lasting neoliberal agenda of the Turkish governments from the 1980s had prioritized urban transformation and gentrification projects by forming an antagonism with queer visibility and presence in Istanbul. Gezi Park, Taksim Square, and İstiklal Street in Istanbul have been historically targeted (Keyder 2010; Batuman 2015), as these very central locations are politically contested, representing the spaces of resistance, activism, sexual encounters, and queer solidarity. These places are in close proximity to each other in Istanbul’s Beyoğlu district. This area has been a scene of numerous incidents, from the systemic displacement operations of transgender citizens by the authorities in Ülker Street in 1996 (Selek, 2011), or as part of urban transformation processes in Tarlabaşı (see Tsavdaroglou 2020; Ünan 2015:82), to attempting a removal of a cruising spot, Gezi Park, to build a shopping mall in 2013. Especially after the Gezi Park Resistance, the AKP’s authoritarian neoliberalism took on an ever more aggressive approach toward LGBTI+ citizens, resulting in a ban on all LGBTI+ events in urban centers of both Istanbul and the capital, Ankara. Such efforts to commercialize and depoliticize these spaces have only increased resistance by LGBTI+ activists.

On the Pride march day of 30 June 2019, the Istanbul Pride Committee announced their press statement on Twitter, as they do annually. The press statement of Istanbul Pride differs from the conventional understandings of such texts, as the mainstream media in Turkey (such as the TV and newspapers) reproduce gender norms and heterosexism (Görkemli 2012), rather than reporting important political events such as Pride demonstrations. The press statement of Istanbul Pride challenges this contestation in different ways. First, it serves as a political manifestation to the wider public by activists in defining the main discourse of the Pride march of the year. Second, the text has been read out loud in different locations by activists during the Pride march, which allowed the statement to serve as a performative document for embodied street action and as a substantive mode of communication for “queering the place.” Third, it took different forms, such as podcasts, tweets, and Facebook posts, which made the message of Pride travel across platforms. The press statement from 2019 had a strong emphasis on the right to assembly and took a reactionary stance against the ban on the march. Below is the first two paragraphs from the longer statement:

17th Istanbul LGBTI+ Pride March, which we organize today, has been banned by the Istanbul Governorate for the fifth time! The Istanbul Governorate, which closes İstiklal Street to all social opposition groups for security reasons, has unlawfully rejected our application to gather in Bakırköy - a legally announced public demonstration place - with the claim that we are a group which society is ‘hesitant’ about. This ban shows that not only Taksim but Istanbul as a whole is prohibited for LGBTI+ people. The hostility towards LGBTI+ community has even become a state policy with other bans in Antalya, Mersin, METU, and Izmir.

It is one more time demonstrated that those who ban our Pride March with copy-and-paste reasons such as public peace and security, terror, public morality, and public health cannot govern the state. Previously organized in a peaceful manner, the Pride March does not threaten the public peace – it is the law enforcement who has attacked the public in Pride Marches in the last five years (…)” (Istanbul Pride Committee, 2019)

The press statement of the Istanbul Pride Committee visualizes the violation of the rights to assembly for LGBTI+ community, as it is not only taking place in Taksim Square but all parts of Istanbul and other cities of Turkey. The statement connects different spatial resistances to each other, from locations where the state powers have imposed depoliticization of public demonstration places. The contestation of the public sphere is also translated to the normative understandings of “the public” defined by the AKP government through hegemonic articulations of public morality, public health, and public security. In response to such hegemony, this statement can be taken as declaration of a counter-public, a statement of queer spatiality against heteronormative constructions of urban space (Fraser 1990). The closing of İstiklal Street and Taksim Square to “all social opposition groups” articulates the political antagonisms of these places. The ending of the press statement declares: “we neither abandon our lives and solidarity, nor collective struggle! We are here! Get used to it—we are not going away!,” thereby reclaiming the right to the city and antagonizing “the public” concept that has been imposed by the government with its authoritarian neoliberal agenda.

Networked resistance and online-offline entanglements

Using digital spaces is not a new phenomenon for Turkey’s LGBTI+ movement for initiating activism. From the early 1990s, the Internet became an alternative media, as it “provided the means by which otherwise isolated individuals with non-mainstream gender identities and/or sexual orientations could connect with each other to form communities” (Görkemli 2012:73). However, the widespread usage of the Internet for activism in Turkey has flourished since the expansion of social media since the late 2000s. Today, digital technologies are highly embedded in our daily lives, and this has consequences for activism on the streets as well. It is impossible to ignore the power of digital technologies and spaces in effectuating, mobilizing, and organizing collective actions. However, a major challenge in emphasizing digital spaces is disvaluing or disappearing what is happening in the physical spaces. Stewart and Schultze (2019) suggest that online and offline forms of resistance are hybrid, rather than being in a state of opposition to each other (Lim 2013; Postill and Pink 2012). On the day of the Pride march in Istanbul, we saw such hybridization via the political action of Pride participants. LGBTI+ Pride participants came together at Mis Street for a Pride march on 30 June 2019. The Pride participants were faced with police attacks using rubber bullets after they read their press statement at Mis Street (Kepenek and Adal 2019). After this violence occurred, the protesters dispersed around Taksim Square and İstiklal Street to read the press statement at different locations. Whenever they gathered or identified police intervention at a location, Istanbul Pride Week shared tweets. Alongside the posts, the campaign hashtag was also frequently used to unite and spread the messages. To protect the safety of the community and keep the original tweets confidential, I provide a paraphrased translation of tweets.

TWT1 – We carry on dancing and celebrating as we are dispersing from Mis Street onto every streets in Taksim!

TWT2 – We are attacked with rubber bullets and tear gas at Aga Camii and Ögut Streets! #Pride2019 #HerYürüyüşümüzOnurYürüyüşü #onurhaftası

TWT3 – People are under blockade in bars and cafes on Mis Street!

TWT4 – We are gathered to read our press release at Hayriye Street. #Pride2019 #HerYürüyüşümüzOnurYürüyüşü

These and more tweets were accompanied by pictures or videos of what has been happening at the scene, such as the gatherings of Pride participants reading the press release or police interventions. The tweets were helping Pride participants to follow the updates around İstiklal Street, be aware of the police presence, or let the wider publics know about what was happening. In this regard, Twitter was used as part of the spatial resistance, in struggling and protecting each other from being targets of violence. This formation of networked solidarity also visualized the violence LGBTI+ subjects are exposed to in Turkey and showed how affordances of social media work to develop new forms of resistance. Oh et al. (2015) state that a “collective sense-making developed through Twitter, requires recognition of the existence of Twitter’s grammatical rules and its connective computing powers as its constraining enabler” (p. 221). Zeynep Tufekci (2017) also emphasizes that hashtags provide a more organized digital connectivity, contributing to the formation and spread of collective identities (p.111). Such collective sense-making had already been initiated by the hashtag campaign that I introduced before, and #HerYürüyüşümüzOnurYürüyüşü connected these acts of resistance by collectively informing the public. Jones et al. (2001) state that human agency in digital actions is not arbitrarily amplified or constrained by digital technologies, but that digital affordances are rather open to being alternated by the offline action. Human agency in the case of the Istanbul Pride march appears in the form of embodied action that occupies multiple streets in a row, using Twitter as a navigational tool of the spatial resistance. Human agency and social media rearticulate these “places” with their digital and material manifestations (Mislán and Dache-Gerbino 2018:677). Twitter revives the political antagonisms of these places, showing the “queer alternative” to constantly heterosexualized public space. In other words, Twitter is taken as a platform that provides marginalized groups, who would not be able to participate in the public sphere otherwise, with a space for capturing “real-time insights” (Carney 2016; Chaudhry 2016:297). Such a collective action eliminates the boundaries between online and offline, moving the practice of place to a networked public sphere.

Conclusion

This article focused on digital activism by the LGBTI+ movement at times of a deepening authoritarian neoliberalism in Turkey. Every Parade of Ours is a Pride Parade campaign is only a moment in the long history of the social justice struggle by Turkey’s LGBTI+ movement, yet the campaign visualizes the strong spatial historicity of a resistance culture with digitally amplified emergent forms of resistance. The multimodal discourse analysis of the article highlights that the interactions of queer bodies, spaces, and technologies rearticulate places of activism, making new forms of political presence and encounters possible. The networked public sphere facilitated by the hashtag campaign supported activism to challenge the political oppression and dominance of heterosexism in media. The analysis of the political actions of LGBTI+ counter-publics ratified the co-constitutive character of online and offline spaces in networked activism. This article particularly (re)emphasized the ontological importance of situated knowledge productions as being integral for LGBTI+ resistance and political subjectivity. The spatial symbolisms of Taksim, İstiklal Street, and Gezi Park in Istanbul are present in digital activism as spaces of resistance. In contrast to the discussions that designate online political action as slacktivism, the multimodal analysis of the Twitter campaign pointed out that digital technologies can carry the locations of struggle beyond their geographical limits and contribute to the queering of places with their affordances.

This article also discussed poststructuralist and transnational feminist contributions to the politics of location, as resistance claims are made with a strong spatial dimension, even in digitalized settings. The analysis of the hashtag campaign Every Parade of Ours is a Pride Parade provided an overview of the collective sense-making process at the digital, as the hashtag’s technolinguistic grammar connected individualized actions to collective ones and local resistances to trans-local ones. The discussion of authoritarian neoliberalism revealed the genealogy of political contestations of the public sphere for the LGBTI+ counter-publics. In this way, the role of digitalization is acknowledged as an important process for alternating protest cultures, making spatial resistances ever more visible. Regarding this new form of visibility, a networked resistance perspective can contribute to the analysis of LGBTI+ movements and their struggles, which are situated, yet multi-sited and multimodal.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

This article was written within the frames of the cross-disciplinary research cluster TechnAct: Transformations of Struggle. I would like to express my deepest thanks to Mia Liinason for all the support and insightful feedback during research and writing process. I am grateful for the constructive comments from the anonymous reviewers of this article.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

This work is part of the project TechnAct: Transformations of Struggle funded by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet) under reference number 2018-03869.

ORCID iD

Onur Kilic

Notes

Onur Kilic is a PhD candidate in Gender Studies at the University of Gothenburg and a member of research cluster TechnAct: Transformations of Struggle. He has an interdisciplinary background in the fields of communication studies and political science. In his research, Onur explores the impacts of digital technologies on LGBTQI+ movements and emergent communities in transnational sphere. His work also involves studies on sexual citizenship, online-offline entanglements in activism, politics of Pride, and networked resistance practices.

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