Gülnur Acar Savran

The quota campaign organized by the Association for Supporting and Training Women Candidates (Kadın Adayları Destekleme ve Eğitme Derneği, KA-DER) has provoked various debates both among feminists themselves and among feminists, anti-feminists and the misogynists. Within these debates, one of the criticisms leveled against feminists’ –outspoken by Nuray Mert- told that women did not constitute a “political category.” Indeed Mert did not really clarify who can actually be taken as a political category or if under any circumstances she defended the quota demand for groups “testified” as a political category. But according to what she writes, it seems that she does not recognize groups that have various differences -to the better hierarchies- among themselves as “political categories.” In this paper, I will try to discuss the quota issue in relation to the concepts of “social group” and “collective political subject”. Because these concepts have a direct relation with the reasons why quota is defended and this is in return directly related to what we understand from feminist politics. By the way, in order to be understood correctly I find it useful to state this right in the beginning: Despite its various shortcomings and defects I find KA-DER’s campaign important. In this paper, by doing this, I will try to discuss some of the peculiarities and problems of feminist politics. Before anything else it is useful to remember the idea of citizenship on the basis of which quota demands appear in politics: The category of citizenship is a category that abstracts individuals from their concrete differences. The inclusion of women in this category has always been problematic though. Because while women are citizens they also have a concrete identity coming from their private lives; they are citizens, mothers and wives at the same time. Throughout the history whenever they tried to fully partake in the category of citizenship, the differences they experience in their private lives, their identities as mothers and a wives have stood against them. It turned out that women could not be the abstract and autonomous individuals, indeed citizens, as men did. It is because of this asymmetry in women’s and men’s citizenship that women’s demands for citizenship can only be met with positive discrimination. There are two basic reasons behind the defense of increasing the number of women in elected, appointed, local and national committees and assemblies through the quota. Yet, in most of the cases where quota demand has been voiced both of these reasons are referred at the same time. For the purposes of theoretical and political consistency, I am in favor of dealing with them separately. The first among these is a reasoning based on abstract equality. It can also be defined as an argument based on justice. According to this reasoning women compose half of the total population and therefore it is in the name of justice and equal citizenship that they should be represented in the parliaments on the basis of this ratio or approximately to it. The ratio of women in the parliaments should reflect the one in the society just like the ratio of those elected should reflect the ratio of the electors. Shortly, here the demand for representation is based on quantitative equality. Time to time, this kind of demand for equal representation can be made in the name of democracy and the rule of law as well. I am in the opinion that basing the quota demand on equal citizenship has a theoretical weakness in the first place. As long as one remains within the limits of the category of abstract citizenship or the mentality of representative democracy that is unless one refers to a category of dominated social group, to gender, it is quite likely that the quests for quota would involve some kind of inconsistency. Because representative democracy is based on the representation of abstract citizens not of sociological characteristics. Therefore there is a contradictory side in claiming for equal citizenship and at the same time for the representation of women as women in a representational democracy. It is not very easy to be integrated into this democracy as women. To criticize this democracy by saying that the number of men and women is not equal in the parliament involves an inconsistency within itself. But more importantly this type of arguments has a political weakness as well: Within this framework the quota demand is apolitical and contentless. In the absence of a concrete program the struggle for the entrance of greater number of women in the parliaments brings with itself the question of to do what. To what extent representation is possible without a program? Why these women are expected to defend the interests of other women, to defend policies that are in favor of women? Here, it is unnecessary to once again repeat those examples showing how simply being a woman is not a guarantee for defending policies in favor women. However it can be argued that an increase in the number of women in the parliaments would make it easier to claim and defend the policies in favor of women. But then under these circumstances and in the absence of a program, it would be very problematic to decide which policies are actually in favor women. We all know that a lot of women who claimed that they are making politics in the name of women’s freedom have actually defended the exclusion of girls from the universities with the reason that they wore headscarves. Taking the military and militarism on their back, they thought that defending this policy would bring a victory in the name of women. Coming back to the second reason behind demanding quota demand for women in politics, this is directly connected with the feminist understanding of politics. It is because women constitute a dominated social group that they have peculiar needs and demands due to this domination. Therefore they should be represented on the basis of programs which express these demands and which constitute the direct interests and the different needs of women caused by their different positions as common interests. It is because men, who dominate women have interests in patriarchy/male domination that women should be represented by the women they themselves choose on the basis of these programs. In other words, the quota should have two aspects if it’s going to have a real content: programs prepared by women on the basis of their own demands and their own organizations within which they will choose their representatives. It is very important to create channels that will sustain news and information flow between women and their representatives; the channels through which women can also control their representatives and call them to account. What can be the concrete political extensions of this? According to this reasoning the most ideal political strategy would possibly be this: Nominating independent candidates coming from women’s movement on the basis of programs that are developed by this movement, working for the entrance of these candidates into the parliament with their feminist programs and putting an effort to make other women who enter into the parliament through the quota system defend this program. The second approach that I discuss here is based on representing women as a social group. This politics, which pushes the limits of representative democracy, supposes the representation of women on the basis of their social group interests, which are politically constructed and collectivized through their program. In today’s West, the commonly shared perspective to quota also recognizes women’s belonging to a social group but quota is defended there in order to overcome the limited representation of the individuals within this group. In other words, women who participate in politics through this quota are seen as the representatives of the individuals who carry the specialties/disadvantages of being women and are thus discriminated. The main difference is that: These women are not expected to talk in the name of a group and they have no political loyalty to account for. Today, under these conditions it seems that this is what we can best hope for. Here at this point we come to the issue of “collective political subject.” Women form a social group to the extent that they are the dominated side within the patriarchal relationship, which constitutes one of the two basic constitutive structural elements of today’s society. Within this social group, the capitalist patriarchy that is shaped by racism, ethnic discrimination, nationalism, heterosexism, homophobia, discrimination against handicapped, ageism, and etc. locates/condemns women into different and hierarchical positions of womanhood against one another. And there is no need to extend; within this social whole women have direct interests differentiated from one another. It is for this reason women can more easily come together for a general and abstract quota demand or for a rebel against oppression, exploitation and discrimination caused from their social group belonging. As Aksu Bora says, they can establish a “negative partnership” simply based on the consciousness of being oppressed. An additional condition is needed for them to act as a collective political subject, to make forward-looking politics for the common interest of all that is for the erosion (and total elimination) of patriarchy. A politics that bridges the gap between different situations of womanhood, showing how they feed and reproduce one another and how they have been constituted by patriarchy; indeed a feminist politics. That is the meaning of the program which renders the quota that much important and indispensable in the ideal situation: Such a program can embrace the direct interests of veiled women, Kurdish women, lesbians, proletarian or artisan women at the same time for instance. It can also show the positions of each and every one of them within the capitalist patriarchy. On the other hand the importance of accountable candidates coming from within the women’s movement lies here: If the salvation of women is going to be the result of their own struggle, such kind of a political mobilization should involve the active participation of women within this process either as candidates or for those who have not been candidates themselves, as political subjects. Perhaps it is a very important thing for women’s movement to make other political subjects claim women’s demands in the parliament. But it is questionable whether this constitutes a step towards the establishment of women themselves as collective political subjects or not. I will try to reconsider the things I’ve said so far in the light of the equality/difference dilemma or to say it in Nancy Fraser’s terms the dilemma of redistribution/recognition . In my opinion the dilemma I am talking about here constitutes one of the primal and structural tensions of the feminist politics. Feminist politics is obliged to establish itself over this tension. This means that on the one hand women should express their difference or express their special needs and demands caused by the patriarchal domination, exploitation, oppression, and discrimination. But on the other hand they should also make their claims for being equal with men. Focusing simply on one of these series of policies or demands, in any case signifies a deadlock for the feminist politics: In the case of making equality policies absolute to a deadlock within the equal citizenship-representative democracy framework and in case of the glorification of the difference/recognition policies to being left without politics… Indeed transforming feminist politics can flourish out of the dynamism caused by this tension. Even though from time to time this tension reveals itself in the form of a “trap of the dilemma” it has a hidden potential for dynamism as well: To start from gender in order to go beyond gender as a hierarchical relation, to use methods of positive discrimination such as quota in order to overcome quota and render it unnecessary or to recognize difference for a true equality… Making of gender a transitory category and of the quota a transitory strategy is possible only with a politics that integrates the demands for equality and difference. The thing that will integrate the demands of equality and difference within the issue context of equal political participation is the thinking of program and quota together. Otherwise, the quota demand alone itself results in a demand for abstract equality. And to reject entering into spaces of men unless they are transformed in the name of difference is similar to running the car towards the horse, reducing feminist politics to an abstract criticism. Moreover, defending the quota in the absence of a program means taking the quota demand solely as a demand against discrimination. The disadvantages of this is that within the limits of the existing representative democracies such kind of precautions are seen as discriminations themselves, soliciting criticisms and most of the time they are taken back: The cases that come to European Court of Justice are full of examples of how women’s demands for quota has been put on the defensive in each case. On the other hand, the direct consequence of being put on the defensive is to be forced in each case to once again prove that women actually constituted a social group and talk about a homogenized women identity in order to do that. Let me make a quotation that expresses what I try to say here from a reverse but a very concise way: “Man has the luxury to [claim] theoretical consistency in this area because they don’t need to make any claim in order to be recognized as ‘men’… What is to be questioned is the power of one group to call another as ‘different’ and oblige it to explain the reasons as to why it has a status of category.” Then the most efficient way to get out of this deadlock in the long run is to support quota with a program that targets the structural relations, which establish the mechanisms of men’s power and patriarchy. With this quotation we have returned to the beginning of this paper. To “the obligation of explaining the reasons as to why you have a status of category”…On its own, the quota demand imprisons us to our “negative” partnership, forcing us to a position of continuous defense and explanation of the fact that we constitute a social group and are discriminated. It is our program, our feminist policies that will be voiced altogether by ourselves and with the aim of eroding the foundations of men’s domination/patriarchy rather then being integrated into it, is what is going to render us political subjects. Under this condition, it will see us as a friend/enemy category then.

Feminist Politics, Quota and Women as a “Political Category” by Gülnür Acar Savran, PDF Version

From Amargi- Issue 5