Gender Apartheid and Cultural Relativism under the Taliban and Iranian Regimes

A flyer promoting Afghanistan's Powerful Women's Movement by Fawzia Wahdat A flyer promoting Afghanistan's Powerful Women's Movement by Fawzia Wahdat

Gender Apartheid and Cultural Relativism under the Taliban and Iranian Regimes

By : Omar Sadr

[This article is part of a roundtable on "Ignoring the Local in Afghanistan." Click here to read the introduction to the roundtable and the other articles in this collection.]

Mass deprivation and transgression of women’s rights and the establishment of gender apartheid are often presented as a reflection of cultural and ideological norms and assumptions. This does not suggest that certain cultures are more prone to gender apartheid than others; rather, a state or actor opts to neglect the universality of the regime of rights and appropriates a cultural justification for its policies.

Viewing such a situation through the lens of cultural relativism counters the universality of human rights and presents culture, religion, and customs as bases for the entitlement of rights. In other words, cultural relativism restricts women’s rights as they apply to “their” ascriptive cultures or religions. This contribution considers the cases of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Islamic Republic of Iran and argues that relativism denies human rights by demarcating a false line between the universal and the local.

The Taliban, Iran, and Cultural Relativism


While practices of mainstream Muslims across the world defy the limitation of fundamental rights, authoritarian and in certain cases sultanistic regimes in the Muslim world have enforced a conservative form of Sharia law in an idiosyncratic manner. Of all of them, the Islamic Emirate of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Islamic Republic of Ayatollahs in Iran share a common policy of subjugating and segregating women, to the extent that it constitutes what scholars such as Abdelfatah Amor, Ann Mayer, and Karima Bennoune have termed “gender apartheid.”[1]

Moreover, Juan Cole has argued with respect to the first Taliban rule (1996-2001) and the Ayatollahs of Iran (1980s) that both regimes privatize women by redrawing the line between public and private and bringing medieval motifs to “the modern re-creation of power as representation” and exercising “power as spectacle.”[2] The same logic prevails in the second, current phase of the Taliban, whose project of political Islam emphasizes the privatization of women.

As the Taliban regime is an ethno-religious group that relies both on Afghan ethno-nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism, cultural relativists justify gender apartheid with reference to both Pashtun culture and Islam. Cultural relativism, in this case, is based both on local culture and transnational Islamic fundamentalism. Similarly, narrators and defenders of cultural relativism are both local and international.

For instance, Pakistan’s Permanent Representative in the United Nations, Munir Akram, said in a UN meeting in February 2023 that the Taliban’s restriction on women’s rights is rooted in Pashtun culture. He argued, “[T]he restrictions that have been put by the Afghan interim government flow not so much from a religious perspective as from a peculiar cultural perspective of the Pashtun culture, which requires women to be kept at home.”

A few months beforehand, in December 2022, Prime Minister of Pakistan Imran Khan made a similar argument in an OIC meeting: “[E]very society’s idea of human rights and women’s rights are different…If we are not sensitive to cultural norms of these people, even with stipends people in Afghanistan won’t send their girls to school.”

Such remarks by a neighboring country that has been accused of having a vested interest in supporting and preserving Taliban rule can be considered colonialism in that the use of cultural relativism by a foreign actor to justify the deprivation of a group’s rights is a mark of such a system. In other words, colonialism deprived the colonized of their right to self-determination based on relativist assumptions. As Maryam Namazie has argued, cultural relativism is a “racist phenomenon” as it legitimizes the deprivation of rights by segregating people in the same country based on religion. This can be observed in a few cases in Western democracies where Muslim asylum seekers and refugees are treated based on Sharia law. In some of these cases, this has led to ghettoization.

Though many secular nationalists in Afghanistan denounced the remarks from Pakistan, their narrative is also reductionist in that it portrays the Taliban exclusively as Pakistan’s proxy. Such an approach prevents a holistic perspective that considers the domestic sources of the Taliban’s conservative communalism. For instance, on 11 September 2022, the Taliban Minister of Education, Noorullah Munir, framed Taliban practices and beliefs as cultural during a visit to the southern province of Urozgan, arguing that residents do not want their daughters to attend school: “The culture is clear to everyone,” he said. Similarly, on 4 December 2022, Taliban Minister of Higher Education Nida Mohammad Nadim claimed that “education for women clash[es] with Islam and Afghan values.” One should not be surprised by the resemblance between the Taliban phrase “Afghan and Islamic values” and the Saudi Arabia Basic Law of Governance’s phrase “Arab-Islamic values,”[3] as both regimes implement a patriarchal system of segregation and the subjugation of women.

Despite these domestic cultural arguments, it is clear that the Taliban’s gender apartheid is not simply due to culture. Rather, it stems from specific political forms and decisions. First, the Taliban constitute a heightened authoritarian regime that manifests features of sultanism. According to Weber, a sultanistic regime is a government in which domination “operates primarily on the basis of discretion.” Totalitarianism is distinguished from a sultanistic regime through the level of autonomy of its state institutions. A totalitarian regime rules through its institutions, but in a sultanistic regime state institutions cannot veto the leader’s decisions; they must simply obey. While certain Taliban figures disagree with some of the gender policies of the regime, they cannot challenge the discretion of the decision of Habitullah Akhunzada.

Alfred Stepan and Juan Linz argue the transition from a sultanistic regime to democracy is less likely to happen peacefully compared to other types of authoritarian regimes as the soft liners would be suppressed by the Sultan.[4] If peaceful transfer to democracy is not an easy process, definitely addressing apartheid in a sultanist regime would also not be easy.

Second, Taliban apartheid is based on denial. For instance, in 1998 Said Shahidkhayl, the Taliban deputy minister of education, claimed that the Taliban have not only “recognized personhood and private autonomy of women” but also “improved women’s conditions.”[5] Zabiullah Mujahid, the Taliban’s current spokesperson, claims the same. The group also obscures reality by justifying their policies as short-term measures to be reversed. Suhail Shaheen, the Taliban representative in Qatar, for instance, stated that provisions with respect to women are temporary and will be removed as soon as appropriate conditions are developed. As Ann Mayer has written, the authoritarian Muslim state resorts to “equivocations, obfuscations, and hypocrisy”[6] with respect to women’s rights.

When in 2007 Saudi Arabia was challenged on its denial of the ban on women driving at the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) committee, the Saudi delegate claimed that “[t]here is no legal provision banning women from driving cars.”[7] Many restrictions on women in Afghanistan and Iran are also not stipulated in statutory laws. This lack of formal provisions can be understood in two ways. First, some restrictions originate from customary provisions such as Mullahs’ and Ayatollahs’ fatwas that are not regularly documented. Second, the Taliban does not have bureaucratic capacity and is still unaccustomed to running the state through formal regulations and bureaucracy. Hence, it at times rules by its leader’s verbal decrees. For the same reason, their policies are not implemented in a consistent manner. Therefore, one should be conscious of not falling into the trap of Taliban equivocations. Instead, their denials should be exposed.

The public execution of violence against women is also a political exercise of power as a spectacle through which the Taliban affirm their authority. Like their first era in the 1990s, the second phase of the Taliban is engaging in public whippings and amputations, as well as the public display of corpses.

Scholars’ analyses of cultural relativism reveal the tensions in coming to terms with communal values versus individual autonomy and human rights, and ultimately demonstrate the danger in using culture and religion to justify gender apartheid. 

Cultural Relativism and the Academy


Relativist scholars such as Alison Renteln advocate for ethical relativism, arguing that no truth assertion is acceptable if it is based on an abstract universal principle ignoring specific culture. Accordingly, she believes that a cross-cultural base for human rights increases the likelihood of its acceptability.[8] On the contrary, refuting the relativist argument, Reza Afshari believes that relativism overemphasizes the cultural significance of state administration of societies in the Muslim world, while Islamist rule such as that of Khomeini is driven by political interest. According to Afshari, “[T]he unrealized Islamic expectations in Iran indicate the problems of a discourse that assumes cultural primacy for a legal foundation for human rights in the modern state.”[9] Afshari argues that drawing a cultural foundation for human rights in a context where the state redefines culture and “subjects it to its modus operandi” is highly unlikely to ensure rights.

To end the gender apartheid regime, global human rights defenders and the international community must not only reject cultural relativism but should also use all available tools to end the Taliban’s exercise of power as spectacle. Working with the current campaigns for women’s rights in Afghanistan is critical.

For Afshari, the Muslim cultural relativists who aim to amend the universal human rights scheme fall into two groups. The first includes those who want to Islamize modernity and human rights. They reject the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), labeling it as a Western value and instead offer a human rights scheme in accordance with Sharia. The second includes those interested in presenting an Islamic base for a modern human rights scheme. In other words, their project is the “modernization” of Islam.

The Islamic Emirate of the Taliban and the Islamic Republic of Iran belong to the first group as they reject the regime of human rights by calling it Western. As Mayer has noted, the Taliban label Afghanistan’s women activists as “servile imitators of the West” and “agents of Western cultural imperialism”[10] Conservative opponents of the Taliban who tend to draw from Islam for a rationale of women’s rights belong to the second group. However, the inability of the Muslim world to amend the gender apartheid policies of the Taliban and Iranian theocratic regimes’ persistent gender apartheid demonstrates that neither the Islamization of modernity nor the modernization of Islam has been able to address this problem.

This failure stems from a multiplicity of human rights schemes that are inherently paradoxical and at times contradictory. According to Mayer, “The relevant textual authorities are conflicting and scant.”[11] For instance, the reconciliation of women’s Islamic rights to enjoy legal rights, to own property, and to do business while avoiding contact with men has not been resolved. Mayer’s research highlights that each Muslim country has developed its own scheme of human rights at the national level that it claims as Islamic though there is no consistency among the various schemes. What unifies them, according to Mayer, is their provision with respect to the regulation of women. Comparing the 1979 Iranian constitution, the 1978 Al-Azhar Drafted Constitution, the 1990 Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam (CDHRI), and the 1992 Saudi Basic Law of Governance, Mayer finds that none firmly acknowledge gender equality and instead contain provisions that confine women to the domestic sphere. A stark commonality between these laws and Taliban rhetoric is the use of the vague phrases, “within the framework of Sharia” or “principles of Sharia.”

Rejecting Cultural Relativism and Advocating for Women’s Rights 


To end the gender apartheid regime, global human rights defenders and the international community must not only reject cultural relativism but should also use all available tools to end the Taliban’s exercise of power as spectacle. Working with the current campaigns for women’s rights in Afghanistan is critical.

In Afghanistan, the women’s movement has three forms: social movements, transnational networks, and professional organizations. The women’s social movement is a grassroots movement inside the country of students and women who previously worked as civil servants, teachers, librarians, and journalists; this group continuously organizes non-violent protests. Transnational networks are composed of former female politicians, parliamentarians, and civil society activists, as well as women human rights defenders, who are mainly in exile in the West. Finally, professional organizations are a small set of the remnants of republican Afghanistan enterprises, civic organizations, and educational institutions that are now partially underground. They support women by providing humanitarian support, access to the legal system, domestic violence shelters, and skill development.  

These campaigns transcend the Muslim relativism stance and attempt to follow the universal human rights scheme. This is necessary, as advocating for the recognition of gender apartheid is based on international law and universal norms of human rights. In the words of the feminist scholar and sociologist Valentine Moghadam, “The women’s rights movement is not ‘identity movements’ but rather democratic and democratizing movements.”[12]

At the same time, the Afghanistan women’s movement and other peaceful resistance show that human rights do not need a common moral foundation as the universalists call for. The mere fact that people claim their rights against Taliban oppression and subjugation proves the appeal of a human rights claim. In this regard, Michael Goodhart’s argument, which suggests that contestation over human rights should not be considered contestation over moral truth, rings true. The global appeal of human rights does not require a common moral foundation, and the fact that modern human rights norms are not incompatible with local values and cultures does not make them irrelevant to society. Rather, Goodhart argues that “human rights may appeal to people enduring subjection because of their transformative potential, both of which depend on compatibility with oppressive social arrangements and the conceptions of dignity that suffuse and legitimate them.”[13]



[1] Bennoune, Karima. 2022. “The International Obligation to Counter Gender Apartheid in Afghanistan,” Columbia Human Rights Law Review 54 (1).


[2] Cole, Juan. 2003. “The Taliban, Women, and the Hegelian Private Sphere,” Social Research 70 (3): 777.


[3] Article 10 of Saudi Arabia’s Basic Law of Governance (1992) states: “The State shall aspire to promote family bonds and Arab-Islamic values.”


[4] Stepan, Alfred and Juan Linz. 2013. “Democratization Theory and The Arab Spring,” Journal of Democracy 24 (2): 26-27.


[5] Cole. 2003, 796.


[6] Mayer, Ann Elizabeth. 2013. Islam and Human Rights: Tradition and Politics. (Boulder: Westview Press), 99.


[7] Mayer. 2013, 124.


[8] Afshari, Reza. 1994. “An Essay on Islamic Cultural Relativism in the Discourse of Human Rights,” Human Rights Quarterly 16 (2): 247.


[9] Afshari. 1994, 250.


[10] Mayer. 2013, 102.


[11] Mayer. 2013, 101.


[12] Moghadam, Valentine M. 2013. “What is Democracy? Promises and Perils of the Arab Spring,” Current Sociology 61(4): 396.


[13] Goodhart, Michael. 2018. “Constructing Dignity: Human Rights as a Praxis of Egalitarian Freedom,” Journal of Human Rights 17 (4): 412.

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    • Scholars in Context: Omar Sadr

      Scholars in Context: Omar Sadr

      My current research explores the crisis of liberalism, democracy, and pluralist coexistence with a particular focus on Afghanistan. I am trying to understand why Afghanistan’s democratic experiment from 2001 to 2021 failed so miserably.

Revisiting Gezi through a Queer and Feminist Perspective: An Interview with Evren Savcı

[This article is part of the Roundtable Discussion: “Remembering Gezi—Beyond Nostalgia Ten Years On" produced by Jadaliyya’s Turkey Page Editors. Read the roundtable introduction by guest editors Birgan Gökmenoğlu and Derya Özkaya and see the other articles of this roundtable here.]

Sexual politics in Turkey, particularly during the reign of the neoliberal conservative AKP, have represented both the embodiment of moral standards and various forms of opposition. The queer movement experienced its most prominent public presence during the Gezi uprisings, which subsequently opened up new avenues for expressing their demands and concerns within existing political institutions along with their own organizations. They aimed to reclaim their rights within the public sphere and advocate for recognition through diverse collective actions within the post-Gezi political landscape.

Birgan Gökmenoğlu and Derya Özkaya interviewed Evren Savcı, who provided insights into the potential of the commons, the politics of othering, dispossession, and more revisiting the Gezi uprisings from a queer and feminist perspective to examine their promise and the potential for re-enchantment. 

Could you remind us of how you situated the Gezi protests in the sexual politics of Turkey?

Gezi was an unexpected and magical answer to the polarizing regime of the AKP government and their dispossession politics that avoided falling into the trap of age-old materialism/idealism and economy/identity politics binaries. The various publics that made up the demonstrators made it clear in their chants and slogans and banners and stencils that there was a link between dispossession and, to evoke a more useful word than identity, “difference.” Life chances and well-being was distributed unevenly across difference (ethnic, religious, gendered, sexual) and the economy was evoked by the government officials, and especially by Erdoğan as an enchanted stand-in for the nation that is under constant threat by alleged lobbies and “international forces” as well as those who question/critique/betray the government. Gezi protests pushed back against this frame, and they emphasized the material dispossession of the people, the privatization of public goods, the environmental destructions that usually accompany the greedy construction plans devised and approved by the government alongside protesting its various morality politics –the pro-natalist, sexist, racist, queer-, trans- and sex work-phobic narratives of the regime. The protestors’ ability to see the ways in which the government wove together the economy and morality, the ways in which economic behaviour itself was moralized, and how moral “others” were ultimately positioned as threats to the Turkish economy was critical to the capaciousness and effectiveness of the protests. In my book, I attribute the “re-enchantment” of Leftist politics during Gezi to the physical co-existence of demonstrators in the space of the park, through their coming together with people they might not otherwise come in contact with, sharing stories and listening to others and forming a commons together. I argue that if Leftist politics will have any success, they have to shift from an exclusive focus on critique to building worlds and showing people what they promise. Just a glimpse of that promise during Gezi created weeks of resistance to state-sanctioned violence.

Ateş Alpar ©2022

Looking back at 2013 from today, what were some of the achievements and shortcomings of Gezi for sexual politics in Turkey? Do you observe continuities or changes in LGBT/LGBTQI+ politics over these 10 years that are informed by the practices, values, and oversights of Gezi?

In some ways, Gezi is something that has been seen that cannot be unseen, something that has been experienced that cannot be un-experienced. It showed us all what is possible. I do not mean by this that Gezi is beat-by-beat repeatable. I rather think of the experience of possibilities of forming genuine alliances and reaching an understanding that we do not need to live by the mandates of a system that consolidates its power by crafting enemies out of difference – the difference that it exploits materially and ideologically. The breaks, the shifts that happened during that time are real and will not be forgotten. This is true for both those for whom Gezi was a dream and those for whom Gezi was a nightmare. Erdoğan has said on more than one occasion that they will “not allow a second Gezi.”

At the same time, in the last few years, the AKP government has increasingly focused on targeting LGBTI+ activists and subjects so much so that an anti-LGBTI+ stance has become the backbone of AKP’s politics. The government has done this with the hope that it will help consolidate votes, that many will ultimately not stand by queer and trans people, that we are expandable for the sake of an ominous “morality.’ In Queer in Translation, I wrote about the expansion of the category of “terrorists” to de-legitimize any and all critique of and dissent against the government. Queer and trans subjects are currently some of the favorite terrorists of the government. I wrote about this more extensively in the KaosGL magazine in a piece titled “Bir “Silah” Olarak Gökkuşağı” (The Rainbow as a “Weapon”), especially departing from the police bust of Boğaziçi University’s LGBTI+ Club and the confiscation of rainbow flags as evidence of ties to terrorism.

I am not sure we can connect the singling out of LGBTI+ subjects to Gezi (its shortcomings, its failures), but this is an important post-Gezi development. The government has certainly not given up on targeting specific groups to divide up the public. How successful this is as a strategy is hard to tell, but I do find that after Gezi these schemes have less popular purchase. Politics of Othering simply do not work the way they did in the past –something happened to staunch secularism and old-school popular nationalism. Something also happened to the religious/secular binary, and the ways bodies are assigned political and social meaning. I guess I am saying something happened to old-school bigotry. So, this is a big success of Gezi. Yet these politics persist to an extent and they are still extremely harmful.

It has become undeniable that public space is after all state- and police-controlled space. There are streets and parks but we cannot access them collectively –Gezi Park was not destroyed at the end, but good luck gathering or demonstrating there. That is precisely why we need commons, and not public space.

In the last two decades, the neoliberal Islamist regime accelerated privatization and even the destruction of public goods through a strong network of dispossession. How has neoliberal Islam changed after Gezi, as it interacted with Gezi? How would you reflect on the post-Gezi commoning attempts in Turkey’s socio-political transformation in the last decade? Do you think that they had a significant impact on Turkey’s domestic political realm?

One important change that took place after Gezi that I must note is how hard and in fact near-impossible it has become to have access to the streets, parks, and other physical spaces in which to gather. First the LGBTI+ then the Trans Pride march and finally in 2022 all of the Pride Week events (panels, workshops, film screenings, picnics in the park, etc.) were banned. No one besides LGBTI+ activists is openly standing up against this. Especially last summer when the sponsoring venues went along with the ban there was a lot of (rightful) hurt and upset on behalf of queer and trans organizers and all other LGBTI+ people who would have attended the events –everyone felt isolated. Public spaces and otherwise LGBTI+-friendly venues are life-lines of queer and trans organizing. It has become undeniable that public space is after all state- and police-controlled space. There are streets and parks but we cannot access them collectively –Gezi Park was not destroyed at the end, but good luck gathering or demonstrating there. That is precisely why we need commons, and not public space. People are still trying to find ways to be together, but it is hard. That makes organizing very difficult of course. I also find that the more people are confined to interacting on social media the more there are misunderstandings, mistrust, aggression directed towards each other –we need to gather and converse in actual physical spaces.

I am not sure what to say regarding post-Gezi communing attempts. The political forums, the urban farming initiatives that had followed right after Gezi either died down or were rendered impossible by the government. The non-AKP municipalities are trying to support some movements that loosely gather around “right to the city/just cities” but the government is intent on rendering any and all operations and even imaginaries that do not work to further their agenda impossible. I really do not want to sound pessimistic because I also see all the beautiful people and amazing activists struggling every day to change this regime of greed, corruption, theft, and violence. But I also would be remiss not to acknowledge how much the militarized policing and securitization of public spaces has rendered anything remotely similar to communing impossible.

Recently, we witnessed a devastating natural disaster that immediately turned into a humanitarian tragedy and a political crisis. As the attention quickly shifted to the upcoming elections, are there any lessons learned from Gezi to deal with such crises that are reproduced or deepened by the neoliberal Islamic regime in Turkey?

Perhaps the most important lesson from Gezi was the undeniable interconnectedness of all dispossession, exploitation, extraction, extortion, and inequality. “Either all of us or none of us” –those were the terms of liberation. Even as the protests were initially against the demolition of Gezi Park and its replacement with a shopping mall, one of the reasons they reverberated throughout the country was because the privatization of both public goods and the enclosure of previously unenclosed spaces were palpable everywhere, and dispossessing and otherwise harming lots of people. To give just one example, Gezi Demands were followed by Dersim Demands, demanding among other things the cancellation of licenses that allow the parceling and sale of Dersim mountains for mining purposes. The proposed demolition of Gezi Park was the spark but the fuel had been spread all over the country by this regime.

The recent earthquake is another reminder of this. Construction licenses were handed out without a care for the safety of those whose homes turned into their graves. The calculus of their lives up against bribes for politicians and profits for construction companies left at least 50,000 dead, though the actual numbers are likely much higher. President Erdoğan in a predictable fashion claimed this to be a “natural” disaster the way he had claimed mine explosions at Soma to be in miners’ fate, their fıtrat (Allah-given nature). The government’s response to the earthquake? More construction, more permits, and more gain for the Housing Development Administration of the Republic of Turkey (TOKI) and AKP-friendly construction firms. Nothing new under the sun: unfettered privatization and construction against the warnings of various professional organizations and chambers, accompanied by a quasi-religious acceptance of fate. This particular evoking of fate to avoid any and all accountability, to turn political disasters into “natural” ones, into “humanitarian crises” is one important way in which neoliberal Islam operates. Of course, the “humans” who profited from those constructions and those who were killed by it are not the same. Those who continuously benefit from the human-made disaster that is called the Turkish economy and those who are hurt by it are not the same. There is nothing “natural” about deaths following unsafe constructions on fault lines.

Ateş Alpar ©2019

Besides the 10th anniversary of the Gezi uprisings, 2023 also marks the centennial of the foundation of the Turkish Republic that has witnessed different waves of protest movements and organized struggles in different forms and intensities at different times of contention. Considering the promises and inspirations of protest movements and collective resistance that have been reproducing waves of hopes and disappointments for socio-political transformations in Turkey, how would you locate the Gezi uprisings in Turkey’s recent political history?

To me, the Gezi movement is unique both in its scope and its endurance. All protest and dissident movements, all organized struggle in the history of the Republic are valuable, and they have informed what has come after, but we experienced certain things with Gezi that were absolutely new: The echoes of it across the country, the variety of constituencies it brought together, and the endurance of it for weeks. Hrant Dink’s assassination had a similar effect of bringing together various constituencies, many of whom organized under the 19 January Platform. It was also similar in the sense that those who organized around it refused the turning of a political issue into a “human” issue. This was not simply any murder, any taking of life that we might stand against but the taking of a political and minoritized life that spoke on behalf of just and peaceful co-existence of Armenian and Turkish citizens of the country, that stood up against violent nationalism. This was a political assassination, a nationalist murder, and the only reasonable response to it could be a political one. Yet sadly Dink’s assassination did not lead to as vast and long-lasting protests as Gezi. People came together in organizations and platforms and that was very important, but the way Gezi constituted a loud and clear NO to the regime of ongoing dispossession and Othering is unique.

Lastly, we would like to reflect on queer perspectives as a source of analytical and political struggles against authoritarian, racist, patriarchal, and capitalist politics. What do queer perspectives offer for understanding our current realities, and for resistances against them?

I find that most importantly, queer and feminist critique has always sought to understand, to analyse and to transform social and political systems that produce precarity, uneven life chances and inequality, and oppression. Historically, material inequality (a system we may call racial capitalism) has been distributed along axes of “difference” and various ideological structures have served to justify such inequalities. These range from racial (and racist) stereotypes of “laziness” or lack of ambition or free-loading of minoritized people, to “women” being naturally nurturing and caring and content with providing free reproductive labor and care work, to the naturalness of heterosexuality. Understanding the significance of morality politics to systems of oppression and material dispossession is crucial, and there is no better place to turn to than feminist and queer politics in order to do that. Sexuality in particular has been central to marking and solidifying groups as “perverse”:  We find this in colonizers’ approach to “savage primitives,” to US settlers’ response to Natives’ gender and sexual fluidities, to the ways in which Turkish Sunni nationalism has tried to frame Alevis as perverse incestuous subjects through myths such as “mum söndü.”[1] “Genel Ahlak” (general morality) is codified in Turkish law and it has been for a long time the target of feminist and LGBTI+ activists. In my book I chose to discuss the more capacious concept of “sexual politics” versus LGBTI+ politics because this government has also clearly targeted women (presumably cis and straight) who do not marry or become mothers, has insisted women have three children, has opposed co-ed housing for college students and government officials have even called women who laugh out loud in public “iffetsiz” (unchaste). Sexuality has historically sat at the center of defining subjects (as good and bad, as morally upright and loose, as obedient and disruptive/dangerous) as well as governing populations. That is why we need the structural critiques of feminist and queer thought of what work sexual morality has done and continues to do –in order to understand not only how dispossession and inequality unfold, but also how they are made to seem ethical and just.



[1] The “mum söndü” is an allegation and a historic accusation directed at Kızılbaş-Alevi communities claiming that the Alevi Cem rituals culminate in the candles being extinguished, and in sexual orgy.