Keeping hope in the Neverland through resistance and struggle: the Saturday mothers

Identifier:  TDX:3901

Handle: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11797/TDX3901

Authors:  Alkan, Eren

Abstract:
The thesis is about the Saturday Mothers struggle of Turkey. They have been asking for their sons’ and daughters’ whereabouts who were forcibly disappeared in Turkey. They have been struggling against enforced disappearances and impunity in the most crowded street in Istanbul, Turkey, since 1995, every Saturday at 12:00 p.m. demanding justice and truth. There are three main aims of the thesis which are (1) to raise awareness by defining where the Saturday Mothers stand in the world, in women’s peace movements, (2) to contribute towards the claims of the Saturday Mothers in their struggle by defining the key terms and concepts in the field of human rights and human rights violations, and (3) to stress the presence of the Saturday Mothers within scientific ethics and human dignity. The thesis focuses on the question of how the Saturday Mothers create social reality ontologically in the public sphere. It examines (1) how they transform motherhood in their struggle through memory, truth, mourning, politics of emotion, insistence, and resistance and how they recreate the concept of motherhood; (2) how the Saturday Mothers are interpreted by various media tools; (3) how the Saturday Mothers struggle is interpreted by the Saturday Mothers Activists; (4) how the Saturday Mothers struggle is interpreted by the members of the Saturday Mothers’ group. Within these aims and research questions, qualitative feminist method and critical narrative analysis method are used through various document analyses and semi-structured interviews with 38 subjects. It is concluded that the Saturday Mothers struggle transformed the concept of motherhood on the public sphere by redefining such terms like memory, truth, mourning, insistence, and resistance through a politics of emotion. This results in creating their own selves and the enforced disappearances at Galatasaray Square where they have gathered since 1995 – which is where they can ontologically continue to exist with their lost loved ones.