From Icons to Emblematic Cases - Brill

Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 8 (2015) 124–145

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From Icons to Emblematic Cases The Media and Murders of Women in Turkey Åsa Eldén Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul, Turkey [email protected]

Berna Ekal École des hautes études en sciences sociales (ehess), Paris, France [email protected]

Abstract Over the last few years Turkey has seen a changed media visibility of gendered violence, mainly reflected in news and discussions about femicides (murders of women). Once treated as fait-divers, such news now appears on the first pages, or is given the status of ‘special news’. In this process, some cases have become what we call emblematic: stories given an importance reaching far beyond the individual case and thus important in the production of politics on violence against women. Analyzing the dynamics that create emblematic cases by way of the story of Ayşe Paşalı, we argue that not only important public figures, but also ‘ordinary’ people can gain iconic status in the media; this in turn enables the media to demand, on behalf of the women’s movement, that the state take action. Here the strategy of linking ‘ordinary’ cases was picked up by the media and contributed to push the state to show engagement.

Keywords emblematic cases – femicide – women’s movement – media – Turkey

Introduction Theoretical discussions of and ethnographic explorations on the public presence of persons with iconic status, and the process through which they receive this status, most often revolve around the ‘famous’ or ‘extraordinary’. This is

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self-evident: people who are given an iconic status in public arenas are predominantly ‘famous’ persons that are defined through their ‘extraordinariness’ (Kuzmanovic 2013). However, while studying icons, we should not overlook the fact that there are ‘ordinary’ people among those given iconic status, including those who have become symbols of resistance against established orders and the powerful. Hence, to elaborate on this idea, we introduce the concept of emblematic cases that we derive from our research on gendered violence and its visibility in the media in Turkey. Over the last few years, Turkey has seen a changed media visibility of gendered violence; this is mainly reflected in news and discussions about the murders of women. While once treated as fait-divers, in the period of our research (2010–2013) it was possible to observe that news about the murders of ‘ordinary’ women by close relatives appeared more and more in the first pages of the newspapers.1 These were also given the status of ‘special news’, in which the newspapers emphasized the alarming situation represented by these murders. One aspect of this visibility is quite striking: some cases received substantial attention in the media when they happened, and were then brought up repeatedly in relation to other cases and general discussions. Another aspect was the fact that the protagonists in some cases gained symbolic status not as extraordinary persons, but rather the opposite, as ordinary people. Such cases, in which ordinariness constitutes the grounds for the making of a symbol, contribute to theoretical discussions about the meaning of iconicity.

1 This paper is part of a larger joint research project carried out in two intertwined projects: ‘Gendered Violence in the Turkish Media’, financed by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation and the Swedish Royal Academy of Letters and Antiquities, and ‘The Media and the Women’s Movement in Turkey—Love, Hostility and Dependence’ financed by the Consulate General of Sweden in Istanbul. We also extend our warm thanks to our informants who have made this research possible, to Professor Elisabeth Özdalga and Professor Eva Lundgren for constructive reading and comments and to Professor Nükhet Sirman for continuous discussions and suggestions. Thanks also to our two anonymous reviewers, to colleagues in Turkey, France and Sweden, and to others who have contributed to our research. As part of the larger project we have conducted formal interviews with forty-five interlocutors, including activists from the women’s and the lgbt movement, journalists from mainstream and alternative media, academicians, and lawyers, and discussed these issues with many people during meetings, demonstrations, and other events. We have also collected thirteen widely distributed printed newspapers (Akşam, Bir Gün, Cumhuriyet, Günlük/Gündem, Habertürk, Hürriyet, Milliyet, Posta, Sabah, Radikal, Taraf, Yeni Şafak and Zaman) in five different 2-week periods in 2011 and 2012 and a broad selection of news and columns concerning gendered violence that have been put high on the agenda.


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To explore these issues, we focus on the murder of Ayşe Paşalı by her husband in Izmir, Turkey in December 2010, a case which gained iconic status in media discussions because of its ordinariness. By analyzing this story, we aim to show how ordinariness may constitute the grounds for a case to gain iconic status that generates affective ties and produces commitment to a cause. We introduce the concept of emblematic cases to speak of femicide cases (kadın cinayetleri in Turkish) that are given symbolic meaning that reach beyond an individual story. These emblematic cases are evoked through various stories of individual cases, which the media hereby defines as belonging to the same kind, and the cases thus become important in discussions of how the issue of violence against women is framed in the media context of Turkey. Through these cases, not only women’s groups, but now the media itself raises demands for greater state responsibility and involvement in the struggle to end violence against women. In our analysis of such media dynamics, we identify an important prerequisite in this shift: a gendered understanding of violence grounded in a feminist logic that is put forward by the women’s movement. When we speak of a feminist logic, it is because their campaign is organized by the Istanbul Feminist Collective, an umbrella organization of several feminist groups in Istanbul, and it is thus possible to talk about a consensus among different positions. As the framing of the cases of interpersonal violence against women demonstrates, these cases must be understood in relation to norms for men and women and notions of masculinity and femininity. In other words, violence functions both as an expression of and as a means of upholding unequal gender relations (Meyers 1997; Lundgren 2004; Moorti and Cucklanz 2009). Through such feminist logic individual cases are inter-related, rather than treated as unique, isolated cases. In a Turkish context, we identify a course of events in the media arena, which opened up to involve columnists in the discussion, this led to heightened demands for state involvement, and ultimately the authorities claimed that the state is actively involved in combating violence against women. Hence, we argue that feminists, media and the state alike (and in interaction) contributed to the formation and proliferation of emblematic cases, by granting ordinary people an iconic status.

From Icons to Emblematic Cases When discussing public icons in the context of Turkey, the founder of the republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, is of course the prime and inevitable example. In the making of a rather homogeneous nation-state out of the remnants



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of the multi-national and multi-religious Ottoman Empire, his status resembles that of a ‘secular saint’ (Haugbolle 2013). Political persons and politics in Turkey are still, to a large extent, defined in relation to ‘the doctrine of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and the mythological history of the Turkish Republic’ (Kuzmanovic 2013; cf. Navaro-Yashin 2002), although the divine status of Atatürk has been increasingly contested over the last decade (ibid.). However, as Daniella Kuzmanovic points out, the acknowledgment of the existence and importance of ‘icons’ or ‘saints’ in Turkish politics rarely goes beyond recognizing and analyzing the importance of Atatürk. Instead, he ‘becomes a unique example rather than a refraction of how politics is produced in Turkey’ (Kuzmanovic 2013: 188). On the other hand, through the case of the doctor and civic activist Türkan Saylan, whom she argues in many ways personifies secular, patriotic Kemalist ideals, Kuzmanovic offers us a distinctive way to think about the role of icons in contemporary Turkish politics. She argues that ‘public figures as icons are central to the production of politics’ and ‘(p)erson and personal biographies are integral parts of the production of politics because they constitute a means to produce public imaginaries of the social and of politics as well as being a prime means through which collectives emerge’ (Kuzmanovic 2013: 188). In the context of Turkey, as elsewhere, public, iconic figures are often defined through their ‘extraordinariness’ (Kuzmanovic 2013; cf. Ghosh 2011), that is, their supposed difference from the ordinary. However, as Esra Özyürek shows in the case of Atatürk, in the last decades, his iconic or divine status has not always meant that people relate to him as alien to and distant from the ordinary. On the contrary he has become an intimate part of everyday life. She places this development in a global trend of ‘the privatization of state ideology’ (Özyürek 2006: 4). Thus, iconic status does not necessarily mean that the person is estranged from the ordinary and the everyday. Rather, what gives the icon its meaning— also in the context of the ordinary—is that ‘what is at stake is the political positioning of individuals whose actions—or the narratives thereof—transcend the ordinary’ (Bandak and Bille 2013: 7). These actions become ‘evidence of the extraordinary’ (ibid.). The death of an icon, particularly if it involves tragic circumstances and the possibility of martyrdom, becomes an important resource in this construction of extraordinariness. Furthermore it becomes possible to form new interpretations of the actions of the icon and their significance, without him or her interfering. However, ‘the ordinary’ can itself form the basis for how people come to gain iconic status. A recent example in Turkey is the children and young men who died during the Gezi resistance in June 2013. This is particularly true for one of them, the 14-year-old Berkin Elvan who was shot by a policeman at an intervention in the district of Okmeydanı in June 2013 and died in March


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2014 after 269 days in a coma (Bianet 11 March 2014). Thousands of people gathered at his funeral, and his image and name is repeatedly used as a symbol of resistance against police violence and the oppression by the powerful of the powerless (Bianet 12 March 2014, 19 March 2014). The fact that not only public figures gain iconic status, but also ordinary people can become ‘central to the production of politics’ (Kuzmanovic 2013: 188), points to the need to include such cases in theoretical discussions on the meaning of icons. These are persons that, like Berkin Elvan, are unknown when they are alive, but become public figures after and through their deaths; indeed their ordinariness plays a central role in their identity as icons. By focusing on the media discussions of murders of women in Turkey2 and by introducing the concept of emblematic cases, we aim to explore how ordinary people, or ordinary women strictly speaking, can gain iconic status—not through their extraordinariness but on the basis of their ordinariness. When defining emblematic cases we proceed from Jenny Kitzinger and Lance W. Bennett and Regina Lawrence’s understanding of the meaning of ‘media templates’ and ‘news icons’ respectively. Media templates, Kitzinger argues, are powerful in ‘helping to shape the ways in which we make sense of the world’ (Kitzinger 2004: 47). They serve as tools to make sense of news stories and are ‘instrumental in shaping narratives around particular social problems’ (ibid.). This is in line with Bennett and Lawrence’s use of ‘news icons’ as ‘an image that lives beyond its originating event by being introduced into a variety of subsequent news events’ (Bennett and Lawrence 1995: 20). Icons, they state, ‘survive the conclusion of the story in which they first appear’ (ibid.: 22). In the concept of emblematic cases, we merge this understanding of media templates and news icons as shaping narratives reaching beyond the original story, with Kuzmanovic’s emphasis on the personal character of an icon. In her argument that icons are central to the production of politics, she puts into focus the fact that the icon is a person with a personal biography. We argue that it matters whether the emblematic case is ‘only’ a media event, or a story about an ordinary person whose life, and death, is given a symbolic status. First, by being connected to images, stories and discussions about other persons’ lives and deaths, and second, by being connected to a phenomenon/social problem, and thus contributing to the formation of public imaginaries of the social and of

2 For this article we have selected news and columns concerning gendered violence that have been put high on the agenda, including the emblematic cases. When defining which news and columns to choose, we were guided by the extent of media attention, our informants, and the women’s and lgbt-movement’s activities.



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politics. As we show, these emblematic cases become important in the production of concrete politics on a social problem, here gendered violence (Moorti and Cucklanz 2009; Humphries 2009).

Feminist Movement and its Critique of Media in Turkey Istanbul, November 2010. A crowded women’s conference, and the prime minister begins his opening speech. A row of women stands up, silently, with posters: ‘Men’s love kills three women every day’ and ‘While you keep on saying that we are not equal to men, more of us are killed’. The cameramen and journalists leave the prime minister alone and give all their attention to the standing women, while guards firmly show them to the door. Excerpt from fieldnotes

This was the second major protest organized by the campaign Kadın Cinayetlerine Karşı İsyandayız (We rebel against the murders of women), run by the local umbrella network of feminists, Istanbul Feminist Kolektif (Istanbul Feminist Collective). It took place in the WomanIst/KadınIst conference, organized by Istanbul Kadın Araştırmaları Merkezi (Istanbul Research Centre on Women), and financed by the municipality of Istanbul. The conference was part of the official celebration of Istanbul as the European Capital of Culture 2010, and thus an occasion for the stakeholders to show their engagement in women’s rights. It was also an opportunity for feminist activists to question the sincerity of this engagement. At a women’s meeting some months before, the prime minister had stated that he did not believe in gender equality (Vatan 20 June 2010), a statement picked up and rephrased on the posters held by the feminists during the protest referred to above. Indeed, in the newspapers the following day, the slogans were quoted and the event was referred to as a women’s protest against ‘murders of women’ that forced the prime minister to interrupt his talk (Hürriyet 5 November 2010; Milliyet 5 November 2010). Thus, the intersection of and interaction between the women’s movement, the media and politicians, or in other words the ‘tangled processes of cultural communication’ (Bennett and Lawrence 1995: 38), proved crucial to an analysis of how gendered violence has become a widely discussed and accepted social problem in contemporary Turkey. The driving force behind the discussions was, expectedly, the feminist movement. But independent media also played an important role. In 2009, the independent website bianet.org started a monthly listing of murders and other


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forms of violence against women, which helped to raise general awareness among feminists, and also highlighted the rising number of murders. Kadın Cinayetlerine Karşı İsyandayız3 was founded to focus on men’s murders of women as the most severe phenomena within the spectra of unequal power relations between men and women, and on the lack of interest from politicians in coming to terms with the problem. The contemporary feminist movement in Turkey gained its momentum in the 1980s (Arat 1994). However, as scholars demonstrate, it would be erroneous to start the history of the feminist movement in Turkey at that date. The beginning of the twentieth century is marked by women’s struggle for enfranchisement and equal rights, as manifested in a growing number of publications on women and by women (Tekeli 1995; Sirman 1989; Çakır 1994; van Os 2005; Zihnioğlu 2003). On the other hand, the peak of these activities came to a standstill in the 1930s, when the state repressed the efforts of women to found a political party (Kadınlar Halk Fırkası) on the grounds that women had already been given all the rights they needed (Zihnioğlu 2003). Hence, the power of women’s initiatives diminished until the 1970s. The organizations that were founded in the 1970s, like İlerici Kadınlar Derneği (Progressive Women’s Association), set the grounds for later women’s organizations, although they did not claim to be feminists, as they were influenced by leftist thought, which regarded feminism as a bourgeois ideology (Kılıç 1998). After the coup d’ état of 1980, the power of leftist movements over women diminished and hence women found the opportunity to organize through ‘consciousness raising groups’.4 After the heyday of the 1980s, the movement became more plural, encompassing a variety of ethnic and religious claims. To the core of the contemporary feminist movement in Turkey the visibility of and the struggle to end violence against women gained a prominent place (Sirman 2007). Two demonstrations in 1987 constitute landmarks in this regard. As Nükhet Sirman has argued, ‘women were [here] not marching for their nation, their class, nor for their husbands, brothers and sons, but for themselves’, and thus this became the starting point for a new ‘visibility of women’ in the political arena of Turkey (Sirman 1989: 1). Since then establishing platforms

3 Another campaign in the same period, Kadın Cinayetlerine Durduracağız (We will stop murders of women), is mainly composed of women’s groups who are part of the socialist movement. 4 Tekeli (1995) argues that this caused a negative labeling against feminists, who were called ‘Eylülist’ (September is the month of the coup), and accused of taking advantage of the coup and siding with power.



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and organizing campaigns using the media as a primary arena have constituted important tools for feminist, women and lgbt-rights groups. They have also played a pivotal role in forcing politicians to enact legislation to further women’s rights, like the campaigns on the Civil Code (2001) and the Penal Code (2004) amendments (see Ela et al. 2005). These campaigns also supported victims of violence. The concern of feminists with the media has also constituted a basis for current initiatives. In 2006, the media watch group mediz was founded with the aim of ending human rights violations of women in the media (mediz 2006). Within the framework of this campaign/media watch group, Hülya Uğur Tanrıöver and her colleagues at Galatasaray University carried out research on the representation of women in the media, verifying that a ‘sexist discourse against women is dominant in media in general’ (mediz 2006). However, this study did not explicitly deal with how violence against women was represented in the media, something that might lead one to the conclusion that the issue was not, at that point, addressed by the media in a significant way. Around the same time, bianet.org initiated a project to publish a journal, Gender Based Journalism. The meetings and workshops taking place in the project covered a wide range of issues relevant to women’s rights violations in the media, including ‘showing how the present practice of journalism may be transformed’ (Alankuş 2007), and emphasizing the media’s responsibility in (re)shaping how violence against women and their relationships to political initiatives on the issue is presented to the public (Gülbahar 2007). There are also examples of initiatives from within the mainstream media. The campaign Aile Içi Şiddete Son (End violence in the family) run by one of Turkey’s most powerful media groups, Doğan, is a prominent example. The campaign engages in activities to raise public awareness, and runs a helpline that informs women about their rights and directs them to the necessary institutions, like the shelters run by the social services or courts (see http:// aileicisiddeteson.com/). Thus, one may say that the struggle to expose women’s vulnerability to violence at the hands of men, the initiatives to criticize sexism in the media, and the other initiatives in the mainstream media have, in combination, led to the situation we face today. Throughout this article we argue that these efforts, with the event at the WomanIst/KadınIst conference as an important prelude, played a crucial role in how mainstream media covered murders of women in Turkey and demanded state intervention.


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Media Visibility of Violence against Women in Turkey When the campaign Kadın Cinayetlerine Karşı İsyandayız had its preparatory meetings in 2010, the media was identified as the main arena through which politicians, alongside the wider public, were to be reached.5 The main focus of the campaign was to show women’s frustration that legal and other political changes had not led to any substantial change. This was later summarized under the slogan ‘murders of women are political’ (kadın cinayetleri politiktir). It was decided that the best way to achieve change was through the media. In the following years the aim of the campaign was met, at least in some aspects. The visibility of violence against women, particularly in the form of murders, increased both quantitatively and qualitatively. Indeed, in a study analyzing Turkish newspaper reports on violence against women in 2006 and 2007, Gencel Bek and Altun conclude that during this period, ‘domestic violence can hardly find a place on the first page’, which they see as an indicator that the media ‘does not attribute enough importance’ to the issue (Gencel Bek and Altun 2009). However, during the period of our research (2010– 2013) a different conclusion can be drawn, since violence against women is now more often a first-page news story. For instance, in 2011 during the week leading up to the eighth of March, International Women’s Day, there was a crescendo. The number of first page news stories on these topics rose to fortyeight, whereas in the week prior it was fifteen in the thirteen newspapers we examined. Although today’s media arena is increasingly characterized by governmental restrictions (Akser and Baybars-Hawks 2012), historically newspapers were an important tool in the modernization processes in Turkey, and women’s position and role in the creation of a modern country were key (Özcan 2009). In today’s media arena, television and social media probably reaches more people, but newspapers still lead in setting the agenda, and in developing discussions and maintaining positions around controversial issues, including discussions about gender (Özcan 2009). This is especially true for newspaper columnists. Columnists have a high status both in the media and in society, and they are more independent than reporters (Finkel 2000). Their voices are thus important in Turkey’s political and social landscape and in the shaping of public opinion. During the period of our research the engagement of columnists in putting femicides on the public agenda was highly important.

5 Interview with lawyer/activist, 7 November 2010; see also the website of the campaign, http:// www.kadincinayetlerineisyandayiz.blogspot.com/.



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Our interviews and informal discussions with journalists and activists clearly point to the key role of columnists in highlighting this issue. One interviewee saw, already in 2010, a substantial change in the way columnists address the problem in the sense that the approach changed from asking only that the women’s movement solve the problem, toward a recognition that they too had a responsibility.6 She argued that it is relevant to talk about general trends, but that beyond this, the great difference that individual women (and some male) journalists have made should also be emphasized. This tendency that was already discernable in 2010 was enhanced during the time span of our research. Hence we argue that visibility is no longer the issue. Violence against women is not only reported about as everyday criminal cases of scandals, or as human interest stories on the third page; instead, fatal violence or murders of women are also first page news, and increasingly during the period of our research, the subject of columns. Yet over the years the relationship between the women’s movement and the media has been ambivalent in most cases (cf. van Zoonen 1992; Camaeur 2000).7 Visibility has not been sufficient to render a solution, but is rather a ‘double-edged sword’, as ‘silence and invisibility is not the only way through which power may operate’ (Kitzinger 2004: 47). In the case of Turkey, Ayşe Saktanber argues that when issues concerning women’s experiences during the 1980s moved from being more or less invisible in the media, to a quick and constantly growing visibility, there was not necessarily an accompanying critique against the values and norms underlying the subordination of women (Saktanber 1995). Nevertheless, media recognition seems undeniable. As for the understanding of violence reflected in this visibility of gendered violence in the media, on the one hand reports and discussions confirmed the common patterns that previous research revealed. Men’s unemployment was mentioned, along with, for example, poverty, geographical location and/or insanity (Gencel Bek and Altun 2009), or different aspects of the woman’s (supposed) behavior, making the crime a matter of jealousy or honor (Alat 2006; Sirman 2009; Alan Held 2012; Karakuş 2012). What these explanations have in common, is their description of the violent man (and/or the abused woman) as

6 Interview with lawyer/activist 3 November 2010. 7 A highly debated aspect that makes the issue of the visibility of violence problematic is the question of whether there is a link between the visibility of violence in the media and acts of individual violence (Weaver and Carter 2009), or whether the visibility of human suffering evokes compassion and engagement against violence (Höijer 2009). This point is connected to a wider discussion of the influence and power of the media on its audience.


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deviant in relation to ‘normal’ men (/women) and to culturally and socially accepted and normative conceptions of masculinity (/femininity) (Lundgren 2004; cf. Altınay and Arat 2009). In other words, violence is conducted by men, against women, who are in one way or the other not like ‘us’ but different (Benedict 1992; Narayan 1997; Sirman 2009; Eldén 2011). Since 2011, however, another pattern has also become visible. During the winter and spring following the WomanIst/KadınIst conference, part of feminists’ slogans, namely ‘every day three women are murdered’, was repeated again and again in the media, along with formulations in headlines or logos— i.e., pictures and/or signs used repeatedly as illustration and that serves to identify something as an article on femicides—such as ‘yet another murder of a woman’. The slogan is still used as a headline when the topic is a murdered woman. Through the recurring use of these expressions, formulated by feminists and partly picked up by the media, connections between different stories of violence were established as a result of the interaction between supposedly different actors, or ‘tangled processes of cultural communication’ (Bennett and Lawrence 1995: 38). Here, as in other parallel initiatives like bianet’s ongoing systematic listing of murders,8 individual murder cases were linked together, hereby recognizing that they were not isolated events, but had something in common. Although the gender of the perpetrators (men), and the feminist interpretations of the violence (lack of gender equality) expressed in the slogans were not widely picked up by the media, the media’s reporting about the cases indicated that women were murdered because they were women.9 Thus, the media’s continuous establishment of links between different femicides can at least, to some extent, be seen as reflecting the understanding of the campaign (We rebel against women’s murders) in the sense that underlying connections between these cases of fatal violence were made visible. The (feminist) slogans picked up and used by the media pointed to a gendered pattern in cases that until then were only reported about as separate cases. The feminist logic proposed by the campaign was used in parts of the media reporting, which led not only to a visibility but to a gendered visibility.

8 See also a study by the journalist Emine Özcan, presented in a panel in Istanbul in November 2010, see http://www.kadinininsanhaklari.org/documents/a84e9a4c807ccb4d415fedfe33f675 e1?1330091406. 9 When discussing this interpretation with feminist activists, they have pointed out that the use of slogans like ‘yet another murder’ may also be seen as describing the murders of women as something ‘ordinary’, as piling one case on top of the other. This is a relevant interpretation and criticism against our interpretation.



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An ‘Ordinary’ Woman Becomes a Concern For All: A Success Story for the Media? In turn, through the emblematic murder of a woman, the gendered visibility made it possible to argue for state responsibility in preventing femicides and/or properly condemning the perpetrators. The murders of women began to be connected to each other as ‘yet another’ murder of a woman when a woman named Ayşe Paşalı was murdered in December 2010 in Izmir. This murder, which followed a number of similar cases that were brought to the attention of the media attention starting with the murder of Güldünya Tören in 2004, became what we call an emblematic case. Ayşe Paşalı’s violent murder was portrayed in the media in a way that came to represent and be given meaning reaching far beyond the case itself. As noted in previous research, there is a strong tendency in the media to portray women either as helpless victims or (overtly or covertly) responsible for the crime perpetrated on them—or sometimes both, a helpless victim responsible for the crimes committed against her. Marion Meyers calls this the ‘engendering’ of blame (Meyers 1997), and in the Turkish context Zeynep Alat’s analysis of some mainstream newspapers shows that this violence is described as a consequence of the woman’s position, or of her own actions (Alat 2006, see also Karakuş 2012; Alan Held 2012). The media discussions following the murder of Ayşe Paşalı facilitated discussions about responsibility in another way. When she was murdered by her husband, a court case regarding his violence against her was in process. She had applied for protection from the police, prosecutors and the court, but had been rejected (Bianet 21 January 2011). The court case was covered by the media, though not widely. When she was killed the media thus had access to their own, ‘first hand’ stories about the background of the murder and not only, as in most cases, ‘second hand’ information from police and/or relatives, witnesses, etc. The media coverage of the murder was extensive and continued over a substantial period of time. The photographs of Ayşe Paşalı’s ‘purple eyes’, shown in court during the abuse trial before the murder, were crucial. According to the journalists and columnists that we have interviewed throughout our research, the very availability of the photos was a prerequisite for this case to become as important as it did. But also other aspects were important in the process of giving an emblematic status to the murder of Ayşe Paşalı. One of them was her middleclass background and her ‘modern look’: Ayşe Paşalı was a modern looking woman. Most of the time the victims are, I mean, you know about them after they are dead. They have their


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headscarfs, bad pictures which the media just wants to show like this you know, very small […] these people are poor, ordinary people, with their husband’s violence and nobody knew about them, maybe just some neighbors, that’s all. But Ayşe Paşalı had a story […] she was blond and she was a modern looking woman. Interview with journalist 2 May 2011

The columnist referred to the victims of violence who do not receive media attention as ‘ordinary’ people, in contrast to Ayşe Paşalı who ‘had a story’. The ordinariness that she referred to relates to the usual explanations for violence against women as discussed above, including poverty and presumed religious affiliation (also a class marker in Turkey). In a Turkish context, geographical location is also a common explanation for violence; there is a particular distinction between the (Kurdish) southeast and the (Turkish) west.10 But Ayşe Paşalı was neither poor nor from the southeast. Instead she was ‘modern looking’. Thus she did not look like the imagined ‘them’ and it was difficult to dismiss her or what her husband did to her as deviant and abnormal (cf. Lundgren 2004; Sirman 2009). Ayşe Paşalı differed from the ‘ordinary people’ that the columnist above referred to as previously occurring in media reports about violence against women. But seen from a different vantage point, she was ‘ordinary’ in another way. She is just like (an imagined) ‘us’, representing an ideal womanhood—married, blond, modern looking—and still she was murdered. The trial of the perpetrator was completed within six months, and given the usual lengthy trial times in the courts in Turkey, this was rather a quick and effective trial. The perpetrator was sentenced to thirty-six years of imprisonment. Habertürk, the paper that claimed to be the prime actor behind making Ayşe Paşalı a symbol, boasted the long sentence prominently on the front page alongside the picture of the purple-eyed Ayşe Paşalı (Habertürk 13 May 2011). The paper claimed that it was a ‘record sentence’. However, some authors also pointed to the fact that even though the media coverage was effective in the verdict, there were many others who are not properly punished, as their cases and did not attract such media attention (Bianet 17 May 2011). Thus, while the media celebrated its power to help bring justice in the case of Ayşe Paşalı, this did not actually mean a full-scale change. 10

Nükhet Sirman talks about this construction of difference as ‘a power operation that serves to obliterate the fact that women are subjected to the violence of their kin in many different parts of the world’, and she argues that the ‘Turkish society, with its legal apparatus, social services, media and police force applies the discourse the west used to other the east, to its own east, the Kurds’ (Sirman 2009: 42).



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Front Page of Habertürk 13 May 2011

The case of Ayşe Paşalı was then introduced into other news events, thereby becoming a tool to understand other cases of violence against women. Through the generalization of Ayşe Paşalı’s experiences as something that concerned all (women), and because of the way this story was referred to in reports about other cases, her case was given emblematic status. Hence, Ayşe Paşalı’s name was used in headlines such as ‘Every woman’s name is Ayşe Paşalı’ (Habertürk 23 February 2011), ‘I don’t want to be like Ayşe Paşalı’ (Sabah 28 March 2010), and ‘An Ayşe Paşalı event took place also in Ümraniye’ (Trabzon Manşet 9 February 2012), and through this direct and explicit connections were made to other stories of women exposed to violence. She became an ideal of an ordinary woman, portrayed as a woman to identify with, as a woman among a (real or desired) ‘us’. And this ordinariness was crucial to her story becoming an emblematic case. In addition, through the justness of her story, the media that continued to unfairly narrate such events was criticized. For instance, in his column in Milliyet on 16 May 2011, Derya Sazak quoted a letter that was critical of the coverage of the perpetrator. Sazak furthermore added that he agreed with the criticisms against the two headlines that were used in his paper: ‘We won victory against my father’, a sentence allegedly uttered by Paşalı’s daughter, and ‘He said he loved her, but there was no reduction in his sentence’. The columnist concluded:


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The titles that focus on the father do not only diminish the importance of the event and the court verdict, but in terms of communication, they also make the struggle against violence more vague in the eyes of the readers. Milliyet 16 May 2011

Thus, through the power of the ordinariness of the Ayşe Paşalı case, the nonconforming media was the first domain to be criticized for their coverage of murder cases. The second domain to be criticized was, as we describe below, the state, for not engaging in necessary measures to prevent gendered violence. Through this case, the media raised its voice and asked for the state to intervene.

State Responsibility: The Perpetuation and the Transformation of an Emblematic Case She [Ayşe Paşalı] went to the police, she went to the court, she did everything. Most of the women who get killed, they don’t have that opportunity to take these steps. So all of a sudden it looked like oh my god, this woman had a problem, she has been divorced, and then she went to the police and the court. Nobody could protect her. She was killed in spite of this. Interview with journalist 2 May 2011

The photos with Ayşe Paşalı’s purple eyes became a ‘media-proof’ that she had sought help before the murder. She did not hide the fact that she was abused. Instead she did what the state expected her to do and went to the police. In the first-hand media story about her life and death, the state had a chance—and failed—to intervene and prevent the murder. The way Ayşe Paşalı’s story was used as an emblematic case foregrounded in the media the crucial lack of state intervention in dealing with violence against women. Hence, the responsibility of the state in dealing with violence against women was emphasized. We argue that a prerequisite for the case of Ayşe Paşalı to become emblematic, and thus for the media to facilitate discussions about men’s violence against women as a responsibility of the state, was the ongoing process, picked up from the feminist campaigns, to link individual murders to each other and talk about ‘yet another murder of a woman’. When individual cases were connected to each other, it made it possible for the murder of Ayşe Paşalı, in which the failure of the state was so obvious, to become an emblematic case that made visible patterns of state failures. The media visibility of the murders of women by men could hereby be transformed into a discussion about responsibility, and



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the media could become an actor that overtly and/or covertly makes feminist demands for the state to act. During the latter part of 2011, the issue of state responsibility continued to come to the fore. One example is the news on 22 November, when four newspapers, Taraf, Zaman, Posta and Yeni Şafak published news about the same cases of husbands’ violence against their wives, that is, violence against women in the domestic sphere. The news was presented under titles such as ‘State should take care of me, I don’t want to die’ (Taraf 22 November 2011), ‘The neighbors protected her from her ex-husband who didn’t want to get a divorce’ (Zaman 22 November 2011), ‘Got divorced, but couldn’t get away’ (Posta 22 November 2011), and ‘I don’t want to die’ (Yeni Şafak 22 November 2011). In the news texts, the women who face violence are quoted as having demanded that the state protect them. We do not know of course, whether the women answered a journalist’s question about the failure of the state to protect them, or if this came from the women themselves. However the demand for state protection is supported by the women, and by covering the issue on the first page, the media used the voices of abused women to put forward this demand. On 22 November 2011 we see that even in Sabah, a pro-government paper, state responsibility for violence against women made big news, but from a different angle. On the first page, the headline reads ‘Women are protected now’, with the subtitle ‘An exemplary decision against violence against women’: In Kırklareli, 7 women obtained protection orders by saying ‘I’m being threatened’. The article talks about seven different cases of death threats against women. In a court in Kırklareli, all the threatened women got protection orders, a decision that the paper calls ‘an exemplary decision for violence against women’ (Sabah 22 November 2011). Thus, while many other papers on the same day wrote about the failure of the state, Sabah did the opposite by claiming that ‘there [was] now protection for women.’ In March 2012, that is after the ‘state’s responsibility’ had been established as a demand in media discussions on femicides, a government amendment was enacted to protect the victims of violence. Hence, Law No. 4320 was amended under a new number and a new name: ‘The Law No. 6284 on the Protection of Family and on the Prevention of Violence Against Women’. The content of this law as well as its name was criticized by activists and academics. According to bianet.org, an academician stated that the ‘[g]ains of Law No. 4320 as currently in force have even been taken back. We see a serious turnaround. The protection of the family was once more chosen instead of the protection of the life of women’ (Bianet 5 March 2012). After the new law was passed, the issue of murders of women did not disappear from the media’s agenda. On the contrary, in 2014, it is still an issue


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that often appears on the front page, and Ayşe Paşalı continues to be referred to as an emblematic case. The continuity is clear from the very fact that it is also treated as an important case by the state. In August 2012 newspapers in Turkey wrote about an upcoming kamu spotu, a public awareness tv-spot, produced by the Ministry of Family and Social Affairs. Here, the ministry explains the struggle against violence with reference to Ayşe Paşalı: […] Ayşe is represented as a woman who was forced to abandon her home because her husband exposed her to violence. The moment Ayşe left her home […] not knowing what to do, she was embraced by the citizens around [her]. The tv-spot says ‘Don’t be afraid Ayşe! We cannot bring back exactly the joy of the old days, but we can add other new joys to your life. You just have to reach us for that.’ Habertürk 23 August 2012; Milliyet 22 August 2012

The ministry turns the story into a positive one, and the message seems to be that what happened to her in 2010 would not happen today. Today, citizens know how to take care of a woman exposed to violence (or at least they are in the process of learning, because the state is teaching them), and today she would not be abandoned by the state. In March 2013, Ayşe Paşalı’s purple eyes were again made visible. The Zeytinburnu municipality in Istanbul, in cooperation with the Ministry for Family and Social Affairs, launched an exhibit called 8 Mart 8 Kadın (8 of March, 8 Women), in which eight celebrities wore makeup to look like eight murdered women at the moment of their death. The front figure was Ayşe Paşalı, whose beaten face was recreated by the famous actor and tv personality Hülya Avşar. The ministry’s use of the story of Ayşe Paşalı—the rewriting of her life and death in a kamu spotu, and the recreation of her face on that of a celebrity— shows the power of the emblematic character. As an emblematic case in the media in Turkey, a status that was made possible through the feminist logic and understanding of violence picked up by the media, her story has shaped the narrative of what violence against women is. In this story, the failure of the state was impossible to deny. The state then transformed the symbol of Ayşe Paşalı from symbolizing the failure of the state to protect women from men’s violence, to its success in doing so.



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An Ordinary Icon Ayşe Paşalı was not ‘famous’ nor was she a prominent public figure before she was murdered. She did not publicly express any political opinions, or represent any political agenda that could be noted after her death. Nevertheless she, or rather the media story about her and her death, became crucial for how violence against women as a social phenomenon and the politics around it was framed in the public discussion in Turkey in recent years. Ayşe Paşalı was not only an ordinary person, whose fate and the crime committed against her made her case emblematic. It was the ordinariness of her person and her personal biography, and also the ordinariness of her husband’s crime that became the grounds for her emblematic status. In addition to her lack of extraordinariness as a famous public/political figure, she was ordinary in the sense that she could not be defined as different from an (imagined) ‘us’. Through the ordinariness of her person, her case became extraordinary as an emblematic case, which facilitated discussions of violence and responsibility. Ayşe Paşalı as an emblematic case became central to the production of politics and the ground for making demands in the name of a collective: women in general, as women. The state’s failure to protect ordinary women, ‘us’, from violence by men became obvious, a general concern and a collective demand. The kamu spotu, in which Ayşe Paşalı’s story is given a happy ending, and the recreation of her purple-eyed face on the face of a celebrity, both show the strength of the emblematic character of the case. The state saw a need to convince people that it is ‘in control’, and the officials did this by transforming the symbol. We have argued that this was made possible through the media discussions of murders of women in Turkey. That is, the media have partly picked up a feminist logic from the campaigns against the murder of women. Hence, the visibility of violence against women became a gendered visibility according to which women are murdered because they are women. That has paved the way for turning visibility into a question of state responsibility. The media visibility of violence against women is, however, by no means the end of the story. When we look at the cases that receive an emblematic status in the media, through their definition and through the use of the media by the state to define such cases, it becomes necessary to ask questions about which women are seen as worthy of state protection, and for what reason (i.e., married, honorable). These are questions to explore in further analysis.


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