Introduction
In this study, we explore gendered identity formation through the narratives of leftist women remembering their experiences in the post-1980 coup prisons in Turkey. While existing scholarship has examined women’s political imprisonment across various national contexts (Aretxaga Reference Aretxaga1997; Dirsuweit Reference Dirsuweit1999; Fryer Reference Fryer2006; Gready Reference Gready1993; Harlow Reference Harlow1986; Shayne Reference Shayne2004) and the subversive potential of their narratives (de la Mata et al. Reference De la Mata, Cala and Sala2022; Scott Reference Scott2018; Wright Reference Wright2019), it often overlooks the temporal dynamics between lived experience and narration. Drawing on two prevalent approaches to collective memory, one emphasizing the past’s continuous reinvention in the present, and the other underscoring societal pressures to preserve the past’s credibility into the present, we ask whether gender identity was forged during the narrated experiences, or retrospectively constructed through the act of narration itself.
We argue that leftist women construct their gendered identities through retrospective narration that enables a continuous negotiation between past struggles and present concerns. This process generates a counternarrative built on three interrelated claims, allowing for identity to be distinguished, imbued with character, and projected into the future. First, women distance themselves from the masculinized master narrative of the 1980 coup’s prisons. This runs parallel with the distance established within the confines of prisons, justifying women’s claims to distinguish their own memories and emphasizing the gendered specificity of their experiences. Second, they imbue their recollections with a distinct substance of resistance and solidarity that challenges narratives of defeat and submission. This substance is reinforced through the collective publication of their memories. Finally, they assert the persistence of a revolutionary women’s identity forged in prison by sharing their memories, in doing so seeking recognition within the broader history of the women’s movement in Turkey.
The prefaces of each collective autobiography analyzed in this study express an explicit effort to confront the reluctance among leftist women to write their difficult experiences, a silence they aim to break collectively. As they acknowledge, collective memory-work requires not only the courage to remember and write but also brings challenges such as deadlines and disagreements over how events are recalled. For example, these tensions led the women’s group in Mamak Military Prison to split, resulting in two collective autobiographies. The authors persevered through such challenges and framed their work not simply as personal testimony, but as collective acts of remembrance and political intervention, intended to guide ongoing struggles of women. This study responds to their call by amplifying the voices of revolutionary women as part of the women’s movement in Turkey, while also advancing theoretical insights into how temporal dynamics of memory-work shape identity formation.
Collective memory, counternarratives, and gender identity
Scholars have long conceptualized the process of collective identity formation in distinct stages, particularly among marginalized groups. For example, Taylor and Whittier (Reference Taylor, Whittier, Morris and McClurg Mueller1992), in their study of lesbian social movements, identify three stages of identity formation: (1) establishing boundaries to differentiate themselves from the dominant group; (2) developing collective consciousness through shared experiences and goals; and (3) engaging in self-glorification of the group’s emergence as a minority. Similarly, Klatch (Reference Klatch2001) proposed a three-step model for the formation of feminist consciousness in the women’s movement of the 1960s: (1) identifying inequality or mistreatment; (2) discovering a frame to interpret these experiences; and (3) socially constructing a collective identity.
While both models are valuable for analyzing the micro-level dynamics of collective identity construction through interaction, emotions, and boundaries, they overlook the temporal dynamics that are crucial to understand how a group revisits its past, reaffirms its collectivity in the present, and projects its identity into the future through collective narratives. To address this gap, we turn to theories of collective memory and counternarratives. Our theoretical framework rests on three interlinked concepts: memory, narrative, and identity. We begin with collective memory to ground the selective processes of remembering and meaning-making by women in disruptive times. We then turn to narrative, as these memories are shaped into counternarratives, which are meaningful stories of incarceration that expose and subvert conventional modes of storytelling. Finally, we focus on identity to show how these counternarratives articulate a distinct gender identity forged through acts of collective remembrance.
Maurice Halbwachs (Reference Halbwachs and Coser1992) conceptualized collective memory as a social framework shaped by present needs and continuously reinterpreted over time. In this view, memory is not a neutral record but a selective reproduction of the past transmitted to create an available history that fosters a sense of continuity, stability, and heritage (Schwartz Reference Schwartz1991). This search for continuity reflects a distinct preoccupation of modern individuals, caught between the stream of perpetual change and the countercurrent of nostalgia (Boym Reference Boym2001). Accordingly, memories act as bridges between past and present, reconstructing both individual and group identities by linking past to present selves through the transmission of widely accepted, yet often contested, norms, customs, events, and practices (Connerton Reference Connerton1989; Hirsch and Smith Reference Hirsch and Smith2002). This suggests that collective memory also involves conservative forces, as Schudson (Reference Schudson and Schacter1995) argues, reinforcing socially sanctioned narratives and promoting identity stability by preserving a selective and persistent version of the past. People experience the present in a causal relation to the past: present concerns and demands shape recollections of the past, just as past experiences influence current identities and perceptions (Connerton Reference Connerton1989, 2).
Thus, collective memory is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, groups instrumentalize their shared pasts to stabilize present identities, either by affirming themselves or distinguishing themselves from others (Assmann and Czaplicka Reference Assmann and Czaplicka1995). A sense of identity depends on perceived continuity over time, rather than existing solely in a fragmented present (Booth Reference Booth2006). In this sense, collective memory does not merely refer to remembering as groups, but it is the very constitution of the groups through acts of remembering (Olick Reference Olick1999). On the other hand, collective memory can be shaped by disturbing experiences that underpin group formation. These difficult pasts pose challenges in facing political contestations over commemorative practices and mnemonic discourses (Hodgkin and Radstone Reference Hodgkin and Radstone2003).
In both its stabilizing and disruptive forms, collective memory is predominantly shared within groups through narrative. Narratives serve as a cognitive framework through which people recall past experiences and organize them to make sense of their present reality (Patterson and Monroe Reference Patterson and Monroe1998). As Jerome Bruner (Reference Bruner1987, 12) argued, “we seem to have no other way of describing ‘lived time’ save in the form of a narrative.” Through retrospection, representation, and narration, people imbue their lives with meaning, belonging, and purpose (MacIntyre Reference MacIntyre2007), transforming experience into a coherent narrative (Somers Reference Somers1994). As Nora (Reference Nora1989, 15) claims, “the task of remembering makes everyone his own historian.” Thus, this selective process reconstructs one’s past, projects an evolving self-identity, and connects “who a person was, is, and will be” (McAdams Reference McAdams, Schwartz, Luyckx and Vignoles2012, 100).
Yet memory is not a static repository, and sharing it goes beyond recounting simple life narration. As Portelli (Reference Portelli2001, 59) has put it, “to tell a story is to take arms against the threat of time, to resist time, or to harness time.” What is remembered and forgotten, what is excluded and included, actively reconstructs present identity. The meaningful sequences of events recalled by individuals are embedded in broader sociocultural contexts (Erll Reference Erll, Erll and Nünning2010). Sharing stories with others not only affirms, confirms, and sharpens the narratives’ content but also embeds it in memory for further recollection (Lowenthal Reference Lowenthal2013). Recognizing and situating individual recollections within their social and cultural environments highlights the collective nature of memory, indicating how memories are shaped by the social interactions and structures that surround these individuals (Halbwachs Reference Halbwachs and Coser1992; Hirsch and Smith Reference Hirsch and Smith2002).
Reflecting the resonant and dissonant edges of collective memory, scholars have distinguished between conventional narrative frames conceptualized as master narratives, and those that challenge them, referred to as counternarratives. Master narratives guide the understanding and narration of life stories by offering normative, socially accepted blueprints for storytelling (Andrews Reference Andrews, Bamberg and Andrews2004). They facilitate the narration process by providing ready-made frames that simplify the communication of otherwise complex life experiences, and construct and communicate their identities to others (Bamberg Reference Bamberg, Bamberg and Andrews2004). Counternarratives, on the other hand, emerge from dissatisfaction with the limitations of master narratives to adequately capture distinct or marginalized experiences. They challenge and reject the dominant reality constructed by master narratives, seeking meaning “outside of the emplotments which are ordinarily available” (Andrews Reference Andrews, Bamberg and Andrews2004, 1). Thus, counternarratives serve as alternative modes of sense-making when master narratives fail to resonate (Lundholt et al. Reference Lundholt, Maagaard, Piekut, Heath and Johansen2018) with alternative reconstructions of reality. In this sense, counternarratives offer crucial insights into the experiences and identities of excluded groups, highlighting their unique perspectives and the ways they subvert dominant systems of meaning. Often voiced by the disfranchised or marginalized, counternarratives are instrumental in understanding how these groups articulate their collective identities.
Although narrative and gender are fundamental to sense-making (Fivush and Grysman Reference Fivush and Grysman2022), women have historically been denied narratives that empower them (Heilbrun Reference Heilbrun1988). Sharing stories collectively thus becomes a strategy for empowerment through recognition (Leydesdorff et al. Reference Leydesdorff, Passerini and Thompson2017). Their counternarratives not only reveal a shared reality that challenges dominant historical accounts but also lay the foundation for constructing a collective identity. They emerge from the recognition of gender-based discrimination and marginalization within broader sociocultural contexts, fostering group consciousness and purpose rooted in shared experience, and, in turn, empowering its members. In this process, the sense of the group invokes a sense of agency (Snow Reference Snow, Smelser and Baltes2001), which is reinforced through collective action and shared framing (Hunt et al. Reference Hunt, Benford, Snow, Larana, Johnston and Gusfield1994). By recounting the past together, women reaffirm their shared identity in the present and envision a future where that identity remains robust and distinct. In this way, women’s counternarratives demonstrate how past experiences shape present identities and guide the consolidation of collective identity over time (de la Mata et al. Reference De la Mata, Cala and Sala2022).
Building on the role of memory and counternarratives in the formation of women’s collective identity, we argue that gendered identity is constructed through retrospective narratives that enable a dynamic negotiation between past experiences and present concerns. This reflects the tension between the stabilizing tendencies of identity construction and the strategic deployment of memory-work, which produces shifting subject positions across time. In this process, women do more than recall their experiences: through collective narration, they reconfigure themselves as political agents, affirming continuity with past struggles and reshaping their identity in light of present concerns. Thus, they collectively construct and renegotiate identity through memory-work in response to exclusion and marginalization. As the following case study of leftist women’s prison narratives in Turkey illustrates, these women, upon recognizing the marginalization of their experiences, initially distance themselves from the master narrative to articulate their own. Through collective narration in the present, they imbue their past experiences with a distinct substance of resistance and solidarity. In doing so, they forge a persistent collective identity, rooted in past struggles and shaped by present concerns, while seeking recognition and validation within the broader historiography of the women’s movement in Turkey.
Development of the women’s movement in Turkey: the missing part of “leftist women in prison”
Women’s emancipation in Turkey advanced significantly during the single-party regime of the 1920s and 1930s, earlier than many Western countries, through the acknowledgment of civil, legal, and political rights. Reforms included the abolition of polygamy, establishment of equal rights in divorce, inheritance, child custody, and enfranchisement (Arat Reference Arat1994; Kandiyoti Reference Kandiyoti1987). However substantial these reforms were, they primarily served the Turkish Republic’s broader modernization project and, due to the single-party regime’s strict control over associational life, did not promote women’s true liberation (Arat Reference Arat1994; Kandiyoti Reference Kandiyoti1987). As a result, women’s public visibility increased without a corresponding development of autonomous women’s organizations or political spaces in which gender-based demands could be articulated, preventing the emergence of a collective feminist consciousness. Despite greater participation of women in revolutionary movements in the 1960s and 1970s, their mobilization did not foster a feminist discourse as leftist organizations prioritized class struggle, further divided women along factional and class lines, and often imposed conservative gender norms on their women members (Berktay Reference Berktay and Tekeli1995). Women were subordinated and expected to adopt modest appearances by discarding miniskirts and make-up, avoiding romantic relationships, and being seen primarily as “comrades” or “sisters” rather than autonomous political actors (Pekesen Reference Pekesen and Pekesen2020; Türk Reference Türk2023). Berktay (Reference Berktay and Tekeli1995) notes that the left of the time viewed feminism with skepticism, often accusing it of unreliability, irresponsibility, and selfishness. Although some women’s organizations existed within leftist parties, they largely focused on class-based solidarity rather than gender and were criticized for neglecting issues like domestic violence and women’s dependence on men (Akkaya Reference Akkaya2018; Keşoğlu Reference Keşoğlu2010).
The 1980 military coup dismantled leftist organizations, quelled ideological conflicts, and catalyzed the rise of identity politics (Ayata Reference Ayata1997). During the 1980s, women began to assert feminist claims against the patriarchal state and norms, invoking the mantra “personal is political” (Tekeli Reference Tekeli and Tekeli1990) to bring women’s equality and rights to the forefront from a personal standpoint beyond their traditional roles as mothers, sisters, or wives (Arat Reference Arat1994). This shift enabled many women, including those with leftist backgrounds, to interpret their experiences through a gendered perspective by scrutinizing the pervasive impact of patriarchy within Turkish society and the state (Tekeli Reference Tekeli1992). Throughout the following decades, the women’s movement raised awareness of women’s rights and equality, sexual autonomy, and violence against women (Coşar and Onbaşı 2008). It gained institutional footholds through new organizations, foundations, libraries and academic programs, and significant influence over political discourse (Diner and Toktaş Reference Diner and Toktaş2010).
In recent years, the women’s movement has diversified and adapted to changing political contexts. The 2000s witnessed the rise of new feminist organizations and online platforms responding to the conservative backlash on women’s bodily rights and the erosion of legal protections for women under the long-ruling Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi) governments (Sümer and Eslen-Ziya Reference Sümer and Eslen-Ziya2017). Feminist activists continue to challenge not just structural patriarchy but also the governments’ conservative and authoritarian neoliberalism, which seeks to regulate women’s bodies and sexualities through discourses of self-surveillance and discipline (Cindoglu and Unal Reference Cindoglu and Unal2017). In response to intensified state-led anti-gender discourse and policies under an authoritarian turn (Unal Reference Unal2024), scholarship highlights a growing emphasis on feminist+ solidarity that actively embraces intersectional identities facing shared and intersecting forms of oppression (Altınay and Pető Reference Altınay and Pető2022). Despite deinstitutionalization and rollbacks, the women’s movement remains central to anti-authoritarian resistance, cutting across many social divides with egalitarian and emancipatory values (Arat Reference Arat and Kabasakal2016; Kandiyoti Reference Kandiyoti, Kandiyoti, Al-Ali and Spellman Poots2019).
This brief history of the development of the women’s movement in Turkey shows three key benchmarks that underscore the absence of revolutionary women prisoners in feminist historiography. First, despite providing a ground for political mobilization, the leftist movement of the 1960s and 1970s largely ignored women’s rights, often dismissing them as bourgeois or counterrevolutionary. Historical narratives on the Turkish left rarely acknowledge women’s agency and political contributions (Pekesen Reference Pekesen and Pekesen2020). Second, women’s activism gained momentum only in the 1980s in the vacuum created by the coup (Tekeli Reference Tekeli1992). This shift enabled many women to reinterpret their experiences through a gendered perspective, transcending Marxist views and recognizing the necessity of a distinct battle against patriarchy. As feminism was gaining ground during this era, many leftist women were silenced by their physical incarceration and by exclusion from the developing feminist discourse. Third, the recent diversification and expansion of the women’s movement have increased the significance of this historical absence of revolutionary women prisoners in Turkey’s feminist historiography. Recovering their voices and struggles not only addresses this omission but also extends the boundaries of women’s solidarity by recognizing their historical marginalization and affirming their political agency.
Prison narratives of leftist women in Turkey echo a broader tradition of political and social repression Similar to the testimonies of women imprisoned under oppressive conditions in Asia, Latin America, South Africa, or Northern Ireland, they represent collective efforts to challenge hegemonic histories of prison experiences (Aretxaga Reference Aretxaga1997; Dirsuweit Reference Dirsuweit1999; Fryer Reference Fryer2006; Gready Reference Gready1993; Harlow Reference Harlow1986; Shayne Reference Shayne2004). While they stand out for how women articulate gendered resistance within the specific context of leftist factionalism and post-coup authoritarianism, they resonate with broader patterns. Across national contexts, women have transformed prisons into arenas of autonomy, solidarity, and resistance. As seen in South African apartheid prisons or Armagh Prison in Northern Ireland or political prisons in India during the British Colonial Rule and Emergency Rule, women prisoners often reclaimed agency through mutual care, symbolic defiance, resistance, and memory-work (Aretxaga Reference Aretxaga1997; Dirsuweit Reference Dirsuweit1999; Scott Reference Scott2018; Thapar-Björkert Reference Thapar-Björkert1998). These accounts disrupt the view of prisons as solely sites of victimhood. Instead, they reveal how incarceration can catalyze political subjectivity and gender identity formation. Turkish women’s prison narratives echo these practices, portraying prison not merely as a space of repression but as a crucible for cultivating gendered consciousness, solidarity, and collective resistance.
Data and method
We analyze 124 autobiographical narratives of women prisoners across five collective autobiography volumes. The first, Demir Parmaklıklar Ortak Düşler: Üç Dönem Üç Kuşak Kadınlar collected by Mukaddes Erdoğdu Çelik (Reference Erdoğdu Çelik2005),Footnote 1 includes twenty-seven prison narratives documenting the unwritten history of revolutionary women. This was followed by four books on women’s prison memoirs of resistance and solidarity: Tanıklıklarla 12 Eylül: Kadınlar Anılarını Paylaşıyor (2010) with five narratives; Kaktüsler Susuz da Yaşar: Kadınlar Mamak Cezaevini Anlatıyor (2011) containing thirty-five narratives; Ateşe Uçan Pervaneler: Devrimci Yolcu Kadınlar Anlatıyor edited by Kader Çeşmecioğlu (Reference Çeşmecioğlu2015) with narratives of sixteen women; and Unutamamak: 12 Eylül Kadınları (2017) with forty-one narratives.
Our dataset consists exclusively of published collective autobiographies, not interviews, to prioritize collective memory over individually elicited accounts. While interviews such as Meral Akbaş’s Mamak Kitabı (Reference Akbaş2011) provided useful thematic corroboration, we excluded them for methodological consistency, since anonymization and interviewer framing diminish the performative political agency of collective authorship. Autobiographical narratives, though susceptible to distortion, reveal how excluded groups frame their experiences on their own terms. As Patterson and Monroe (Reference Patterson and Monroe1998, 330) argue, “narrative allows room for the teller to provide information the researcher would not generally expect or think to elicit in a more structured interview situation.” Our interpretive methodology, therefore, examines how these women, as agents of their own lives, represent their post-coup imprisonment through narratives, revealing embedded meanings that contribute to a gendered collective identity (see Schwartz-Shea and Yanow Reference Schwartz-Shea and Yanow2012). We argue that the temporal gap between experience, writing, and publication is central to understanding identity formation through memory.
The collective and public nature of these narratives underscores their political intent: to assert agency, recognition, and inclusion in public memory and feminist historiography of Turkey. These collective narratives, authored without external prompts, show how these women retrospectively negotiate their past at the moment of writing, when they seek to make public claims. This is the very dynamic that our study aims to capture. We treat ambiguities, tensions, and omissions not as gaps but as meaningful reflections of the difficulties in narrating marginalized experiences. Where available, we cross-referenced our interpretations with supplementary published interviews and oral histories but did not incorporate them into our dataset.Footnote 2
Our qualitative analysis employed thematic narrative analysis (Riessman Reference Riessman2008), focusing on what is told to trace how these women retrospectively made sense of their imprisonment and constructed gendered identities over time. This method preserves narrative coherence and theorizes from the case itself by drawing on theoretically guided concepts and themes while capturing temporal progression and meaning-making within socially and historically embedded narratives. Our analysis began with a close reading of each narrative as a sociohistorical text shaped by temporal, spatial, ideological, and gendered constraints. We used an iterative process, moving between women’s narratives and relevant scholarship on collective memory, counternarrative, and gender identity to trace recurring themes and embedded meanings. Rather than fragmenting the data, we preserved the sequence of recollected events – what Riessman (Reference Riessman2008) calls preserving the “case” – to understand how self-conceptions evolved over time through collective narration.
Following Deterding and Waters’ (Reference Deterding and Waters2021) flexible coding strategy, we adopted a data-driven, inductive approach to identify patterns across cases. We hand-coded gender-relevant content, identified thematic categories (e.g. autonomy, resistance, solidarity, care), and interpreted how these gendered experiences reflect theoretically informed processes of collective identity formation. From this process, we developed a three-stage temporal model of gender identity formation: distance, substance, and persistence – capturing how women: (1) recognized their marginalization in leftist movements; (2) cultivated a distinct collective identity in prison; and (3) projected that identity forward as a lasting political stance. Distance encompasses themes such as women’s critique of factionalism, male dominance, and feudal gender norms in leftist movements, and claims “autonomy” through gendered frames of “resistance” and “solidarity” while distinguishing women’s experiences from men’s and asserting that “women were not defeated” and “women resisted.” Substance focuses on narratives of “care, joy, companionship, bonding activities” that frame prison as a site of collective defiance, resilience, and solidarity. Persistence refers to women’s claims that project a “revolutionary woman” identity and their efforts to seek public recognition and gain inclusion in feminist historiography.
The empirical study of carceral narratives does not aim to reveal the factual prison experience. While these narratives emphasize collective resistance and triumph, they may understate difficult experiences. This is a strategic choice by women seeking to reconstruct an identity that transcends conventional politics of victimhood (Drechselová Reference Drechselová2024). In line with the emerging memory scholarship that foregrounds struggles and hope over the victim–perpetrator binary (Rigney Reference Rigney2018), our analysis offers an in-depth case study of how difficult pasts are negotiated in the present and strategically mobilized for identity construction, using direct quotations (translated by us) triangulated across the dataset to ensure analytic consistency.
Elements in the counternarrative of women
This analysis section closely follows three interconnected claims made by women prisoners in their narratives. Distance reflects the setting of boundaries as women separate their prison experiences and narratives from those of men. Initially, they acknowledge that their previous leftist affiliations were fraught with factional divisions, entrenched traditional gender norms and male dominance. These factors, they argue, served as barriers to fostering women’s solidarity and resistance both before and during their time in prison. This was further compounded by the perceived submissiveness of leftist men in prison, which heightened the divide. This realization prompted the rejection of the master narrative of defeat by reframing it as a narrative employed and imposed by men. In contrast, women narrate stories of reclaiming autonomy in prison, binding their sense of agency to the act of narrating their own experiences. By distancing themselves from men’s experience and narrative, women imbue their experience with a distinct substance – enriched by the collective experiences of solidarity and resistance. This substance rejects both fragmentation and submission by grounding itself in a bold sense of triumph and defiance. Women recount their prison experiences through a lens of care, joy, and companionship, and they collectively narrate these stories in the present by re-experiencing and reaffirming these emotions. The counternarrative forms a parallel reality that reflects and surpasses their past, culminating in a third element, persistence – the enduring nature of a distinct gender identity: “the revolutionary women.” With this enduring identity, women reassert themselves as a continuous force within their narratives – one that has been overlooked by scholars of the women’s movement and feminism in Turkey.
Distance: autonomy in prison, autonomy in narrative
In one sense, as a prelude to a forthcoming global defeat and its enduring legacy (Traverso Reference Traverso2016), the 1980 coup was a major defeat for the left in Turkey, exposing ongoing internal rivalries and a heavy reliance on violence in revolutionary struggle (Aydınoğlu Reference Aydınoğlu2007). The counternarrative of women contrasts with this defeat, distancing itself from bleak depictions of submission and dissolution in military prisons. It argues that the experience of defeat was gendered – pertaining specifically to men – while simultaneously exposing the masculine dominance embedded in leftist organizations (Türk Reference Türk2023). From a gender-conscious lens, women perceived leftist organizations as ridden with traditional forms of masculine domination, postponing gender-related issues until a post-revolutionary stage where equality for all was supposed to be achieved. In this context, despite the prisons of the 1980 coup being sites of physical and mental torture, women reclaimed these spaces as areas of relative autonomy for experimenting with genuine forms of interaction. The strict sex-based segregation of prisoners enabled women to distance themselves from the male leadership of their political organizations and created a space for relative autonomy. This distance, established in prison experience, empowered women to autonomously narrate their experiences.
The counternarrative of women reveals the contradictions within leftist organizations, where the push for revolutionary defiance clashed with disciplinary attempts to control women’s appearances and romantic relationships. Gülay Özdemir notes conservatism among their generation in comparison to those of 1968, evidenced by organizational pamphlets dictating gender-specific behaviors for revolutionaries (Çeşmecioğlu Reference Çeşmecioğlu2015, 160, 164). İkbal Kaynar remembers how wearing make-up was coded as being a bourgeois wannabe and subjected to disciplinary measures (Tanıklıklarla 2010, 186). Similarly, Asiye Belovacıklı remembers how they were not wearing skirts and making fun of the other leftist factions whose women wore skirts with flower patterns (Çeşmecioğlu Reference Çeşmecioğlu2015, 434). The non-violent “flower power” of the 1968 youth resistance was overshadowed by a more militant appearance in the violent atmosphere of the 1970s. Nurdan Deliorman describes the intrusive control of their organizations over personal relationships to avoid any distractions from the revolutionary struggle. Both men and women were required to get permission for romantic relationships, illustrating a significant contradiction within the movement: “Rebellious souls like us, with our belief in the revolution, we voluntarily obeyed this steel discipline for the future of the struggle” (Çeşmecioğlu Reference Çeşmecioğlu2015, 208–209). Marriages were only allowed for pragmatic purposes, such as renting a house for the organization without attracting the attention of the political police. When leaders and militants gathered in these houses, women were relegated to secondary positions. As Kumru Başer writes:
… not a single man lived his political career according to his wife, but women, despite being a part of the movement themselves, were always positioned according to their husbands. Now, I am mostly a décor. A necessary woman décor to rent a house. Five to six men were coming to our house. For them, the actual person was [my husband,] Yusuf. I was cooking meals. [But] Yusuf was ahead of others in terms of gender equality. One time, he protested [the organization], “We did not bring [her] from a village, will she have an assignment?” (Çeşmecioğlu Reference Çeşmecioğlu2015, 414)
Süheyla Kaya notes another contradiction within leftist organizations: they prohibited pregnancy among women while promoting the leftist anthem “Geliyoruz Dalgalar Gibi” (We are coming like the waves). The anthem includes the lyrics “If our most valiant are gone, our mothers carry the valiant,” venerating the role of mothers in perpetuating the revolutionary spirit (Erdoğdu Çelik Reference Erdoğdu Çelik2005, 113). These women were committed to the leftist cause as revolutionaries; however, their status was burdened with traditional – in leftist terminology, feudal – gender norms that restricted their genuine participation in the cause.
These traditional norms, hierarchies, and organizational methods carried over to prison to an extent and affected women’s interactions and decision-making. Women narrate their criticism of those wearing make-up (Tanıklıklarla 2010, 186) and instances of deferring to men’s decisions, even altering their stance to match that of men (Erdoğdu Çelik Reference Erdoğdu Çelik2005, 175, 207). This deference was evident when women did not participate in a hunger strike in 1981 after men had decided against it (Kaktüsler 2011, 20–21, 270). Mukaddes Erdoğdu Çelik (Reference Erdoğdu Çelik2005, 175) highlights the continuity of gender dynamics from the revolutionary movement into prison life, observing that although women adopted a more democratic approach to managing daily prison affairs, some of their actions were still shaped by decisions made by men.
Communal living characterized the leftist prison experience. The communes with shared property, division of labor, and strict discipline were designed to increase the solidarity in the ward (Erdoğdu Çelik Reference Erdoğdu Çelik2005, 248; Kaktüsler 2011, 335–336). However, this system faced challenges with multiple communes per ward due to factional feuds, leading to limited solidarity and instances of discord (Çeşmecioğlu Reference Çeşmecioğlu2015, 66). Yurdusev Özsökmenler recounts, “There, I have seen people hiding things from their comrades for the first time. It was very hurtful” (Erdoğdu Çelik Reference Erdoğdu Çelik2005, 209). The presence of “guards for the dishes” and separate food supplies further illustrates the fragmentation within communal living (Kaktüsler 2011, 335–336). Fatma Pala Akalp’s account of the “biscuit incident,” where a member of her commune took biscuits of another, highlights the intensity of these divisions:
By the ward’s general decree, we stupidly declared that friend a thief and isolated her from the rest. We did the greatest evil that can be done to a human being. Now, I am still sorrowful for this incident, and I could never ever forget it (Kaktüsler 2011, 200).
These narratives reveal how rigid organizational discipline, male dominance, and factional rivalry hindered the autonomy and solidarity of women in prison. Sorrowful notes on women discriminating against women would not be possible without establishing a critical distance from traditional leftist practices in prison. In this regard, women’s accounts detail a shift towards autonomy and collective action as men’s intervention waned, leading to independent decision-making and enhanced solidarity and resistance. Many claim that compared to their pre-coup docility, disfranchisement, and divisions, prison life left women on their own for the first time and led them to discover and discuss their own problems. Ayhan Sağcan emphasizes that when women were together in a single prison and free from men’s influence, they made collective decisions not only to govern daily prison life but also to resist prison authorities (Erdoğdu Çelik Reference Erdoğdu Çelik2005, 293). Zeynep Turan describes women’s collaborative efforts on the organization of prison life, resistance, action plans, and distribution of tasks without factional limitations (Erdoğdu Çelik Reference Erdoğdu Çelik2005, 122). This newfound autonomy, Erdoğdu Çelik (Reference Erdoğdu Çelik2005, 141–142) observes, was not only empowering but also very educational as it taught women to interact, and, despite differences, enabled them “to trust and love each other.” For her, these experiences must be recorded as part of the history of the independent women’s movement (Erdoğdu Çelik Reference Erdoğdu Çelik2005, 129). These accounts indicate the development of a gender-based, autonomous, and collective identity among women prisoners when they had no or minimal contact with male wards.
Peculiarities of women’s past experiences set their narratives apart from the male-dominated memory that prevails in the present. Gülay Özdemir’s protest provides an adequate picture of women’s frustrations not only in what happened in the past but also in the present sphere of narration:
Indeed, even today, when I look at the books written about that period, I sadly see that the woman’s name is still absent. Books are being written about Mamak Prison, but the male author of the book, for some reason, doesn’t recall the women’s ward and their resistance! (Çeşmecioğlu Reference Çeşmecioğlu2015, 160)
Recounting their experiences grants women a dual form of autonomy: a physical distance forged within the prison environment in the past and, more broadly, a metaphorical distance created in their narratives at the time of writing. This duality has also enabled women to overlook certain contradictions within the new identity being formed, without entirely rejecting their past. Although women distanced themselves from leftist organizations and their traditional doctrines, they preserved their revolutionary core, combining it with an inclusive collective gender identity.
Substance: solidarity, care, joy, and companionship
By distancing themselves from the master narrative of defeat and submission, women construct a gender identity enriched by a substance based on solidarity and resistance against division and compliance. To survive torturous prisons, they built solidarity networks, leading them to develop a sense of sisterhood. Ümit Efe claims that they did not condemn and exclude those who showed weakness in resistance since they were all captive sisters who were “resisting, having will and fate, dedicated and sharing, and loving and believing in each other” (Erdoğdu Çelik Reference Erdoğdu Çelik2005, 294). Their companionship emerged through mutual care during hunger strikes and post-torture recovery, shared humor, emotional support, and educational exchanges, transforming the prison into a site of collective resilience. Despite isolation, their reliance on each other fostered a sense of familial belonging and urged them to build a new home by adapting to prison dynamics. The counternarrative of women not only overrode their segregation but also indicated their lively response against the military regime. Over time, their resistance challenged the military regime’s attempts to crush their psychology through abusing and repressing women’s bodies. Günseli Kaya narrates how women’s solidarity and resistance gained pace over time in prison, based on women’s shared experiences and feelings:
Step by step, slowly, it grew more and more; women’s rebellion was knitted, stitch by stitch, it grew! Nothing was easy. With [the 1980 coup], we experienced a great defeat, each of our bodies and souls was wounded. The batons falling and rising on every point of our bodies, on our hands, arms, feet, calves, shoulders, were binding us to each other, as we applied ointment to each other’s bodies, our souls were healing, and our angers were merging and growing. Individual sorrows, rebellions, personal and group resistances were increasing. In fragmented numbers, separated blocks, different sections, women who were brought back to Mamak at the end of May 1981 became one body before even a year had passed, they were uniting on the front line of struggle (Kaktüsler 2011, 299).
This substance is, again, manifested both during their time in prison and in their counter-narration. Women describe mutual care, joy, and unity in their individual accounts, and they collectively share these narratives in the present by referring to a communal “we” over the individual “I,” underlining how shared experiences, emotions, and actions have molded their collective agency. As Fecire Kocaman notes, despite facing torture and dehumanization, these adversities brought women closer and reinforced their bonds through sharing other’s pain and treating wounds (Unutamamak 2017, 88). Similarly, Latife Türkyılmaz narrates that “there was a beautiful solidarity among the women in the cells. Everyone was practically stripped bare by then … And at that moment, when you feel that, you love them even more. Everyone in their simplest form” (Çeşmecioğlu Reference Çeşmecioğlu2015, 65). Women’s solidarity was evident in acts such as volunteering to endure beatings for others. Many accounts narrate their collective protest, refusing to shout counts loudly by saying “my commander” in daily roll calls, symbolizing they were not soldiers but women, and vying to be the last one in the roll call who would receive baton beats because of the protest (Kaktüsler 2011, 169, 243, 302). Another notable act of defiance was the forty-day hunger strike against wearing demeaning prisoner uniforms. While men ceased their resistance, women persisted since resistance was fueling their solidarity (Çeşmecioğlu Reference Çeşmecioğlu2015, 174–175, 259). They threatened to confront the prison administration in court by wearing only underwear, a tactic narrated as a triumph of women’s cunning in exploiting the administration’s fears rooted in traditional gender norms (Erdoğdu Çelik Reference Erdoğdu Çelik2005, 259).
Furthermore, many emphasize the importance of solidarity for women’s endurance. Günseli Kaya recounts that “despite the enemy [the prison administration], we did not turn on each other, we did not break apart, and we won” (Kaktüsler 2011, 312). Ümit Efe notes the formation of “an incredible emotional bond” and “a collective spirit” within the women’s ward (Erdoğdu Çelik Reference Erdoğdu Çelik2005, 165). A key aspect of solidarity among women was the care and compassion that helped them overcome isolation, segregation, and past divisions (Unutamamak 2017, 81, 88, 155, 249, 255, 260). Meral Bekar recounts how women demonstrated care and compassion for those returning from interrogation or newcomers who had been tortured, by bathing them and dressing them in clothes belonging to the commune (Kaktüsler 2011, 68). Visits from the children or babies of imprisoned mothers were described as greatly lightening the mood of the ward (Çeşmecioğlu Reference Çeşmecioğlu2015, 33; Erdoğdu Çelik Reference Erdoğdu Çelik2005, 232; Unutamamak 2017, 158). This shared joy stemmed from strong communal bonds and shared feelings within their new home. Kumru Başer challenges the claims of surrender and division, emphasizing that over time in prison, women came to recognize each other as resilient and strong, forming deep bonds of mutual attachment (Çeşmecioğlu Reference Çeşmecioğlu2015, 420). That is why these women narrate their experiences collectively as well, as an attempt to be acknowledged and empowered through seeking recognition (Unutamamak 2017, 10).
Women’s communal bonds extend through joy and laughter, a significant element that breaks individual isolation and empowers them against segregation and domination. Their recounting of torture and humiliation consistently features a collective response of moral fortitude fueled by positive emotions. They narrate strategies for countering prison life’s harshness, including mocking their torturers, organizing humorous activities, and offering courses to each other for personal development.
Laughter emerges as a recurring theme, instrumentalized to undermine an authority resting on physical violence. Women humorously narrate nicknaming military officers like razor and mother-in-law, outsmarting and harassing them with various strategies. Women were making fun of their own state during torture sessions. For instance, they remember calling their attempts to dodge baton swings “the baton dance” or “the Mamak [prison] dance” as if it were an entertaining experience (Unutamamak 2017, 116, 295). Numerous accounts recall “funny moments from the beatings” (Erdoğdu Çelik Reference Erdoğdu Çelik2005, 172) and turning things into fun by caricaturizing (Unutamamak 2017, 75, 89, 307). Women describe laughter as a crucial strategy for collective survival and bonding amidst adversity. Latife Türkyılmaz recounts:
What keeps a person alive the most is laughter. You must laugh. Once we started laughing, our energy was increasing, and color was returning to our faces. We would also tell each other how we were beaten, and we would laugh again (Çeşmecioğlu Reference Çeşmecioğlu2015, 69).
Women’s empowerment in prison was also narrated through their engagement in collective activities such as theater plays and folk-dance groups, bringing fun and entertainment (Kaktüsler 2011, 91). In prison, they began studying English, German, and French, learning chess and knitting, and doing physical exercises (Kaktüsler 2011, 40, 135, 176, 209, 305). That is why Rezzan Koca likens prison to a university (Kaktüsler 2011, 148). These activities turned segregation and isolation into opportunities for expanding their physical and intellectual capabilities as well as producing handicrafts. Laughter, chanting, singing, and playing games served not just for having a lively life but as a form of resistance against authority, embodying “a refusal to bow” and “an act against breaking their spirit.”
The counternarrative of women notices sympathetic actions from male soldiers, differentiating between those who offered assistance and the prison administration seen as the enemy. Many stories recount soldiers referring to them as “sister,” secretly providing food (Kaktüsler 2011, 317; Unutamamak 2017, 44, 65, 220), offering cigarettes (Erdoğdu Çelik Reference Erdoğdu Çelik2005, 150), assisting them after torture (Çeşmecioğlu Reference Çeşmecioğlu2015, 171), and refusing to beat them, or apologizing for beating them, or begging them to go along with orders to avoid being beaten (Kaktüsler 2011, 160, 183, 271; Unutamamak 2017, 88, 114, 233). Selmane Ertekin recounts these compassionate soldiers with “love and respect” (Kaktüsler 2011, 162), viewing their support as strengthening the women’s collective strength rather than exacerbating isolation and humiliation. Women also distinguish between women police officers and guards, noting those who showed sympathy and those who acted in very “degrading” ways for “any women hard to bear” (Kaktüsler 2011, 190). Instances are shared of women officers who refused demeaning actions such as bra checks and contrasted them with those who escalated searches to harassment (Erdoğdu Çelik Reference Erdoğdu Çelik2005, 269), reflecting an expectation of solidarity from women officers and guards based on shared gender identity.
As women prisoners reflect on their time in prison, they express nostalgia for those days. Melis Düvenci recalls, “I do not have any bad memories of prison in my mind” (Erdoğdu Çelik Reference Erdoğdu Çelik2005, 172), while Ayla Kürkçü shares, “I began to miss my days in prison. The friendship, sharing, solidarity, turning pain into honey …” (Kaktüsler 2011, 375). This sentiment carries into the present as they contribute their stories in collective volumes. Zehra Kürkçü, in narrating their prison experiences, emphasizes the collective memory of surviving military prison altogether and insists that history should recognize women’s struggles for honor (Kaktüsler 2011, 321). Through shared experiences and emotions, women forged a collective gender identity that transcends individual differences by affirming continuity with their prison experiences and in their current recollections.
It is important to reiterate here the selective nature of memory in serving present interests. Through colorful retrospections, women challenge dominant black-and-white portrayals – even depicting the military not solely as an embodiment of evil but also acknowledging moments of sympathy or assistance from individual soldiers. Their narratives juxtapose experiences of torture with moments of dancing and laughter, and forced enclosure with acts of teaching and learning. These memories of survival – subverting the administration’s control, fostering solidarity and care, and even evoking nostalgia – are woven into strategic narratives that emphasize the distinct, rebellious, yet joyful essence at the core of revolutionary women’s identity.
Persistence: “We are revolutionary women”
Triumphant women narrate prison not as a site of defeat for the leftist movement, but as the birthplace of revolutionary women. This gendered identity, crafted from past experiences and reasserted in present narration, carries a forward-looking claim of persistence. Women frame their transformation through solidarity and resistance as neither temporary nor incidental, but as a deliberate and enduring process. Süheyla Kaya states, becoming a revolutionary was especially challenging for women, who had to confront deeply ingrained traditions within their families and social circles. Yet overcoming these obstacles, she argues, forged women into steadfast revolutionaries, unwavering in their convictions and less prone to compromise (Erdoğdu Çelik Reference Erdoğdu Çelik2005, 292). To emphasize the persistence of this novel identity, women recount their journey as a blend of setbacks and victories, sacrifices and achievements.
Years of torture and oppression in prison left enduring impacts on prisoners’ health, both physically and mentally. Yet, negative effects were narrated as remnants of prison experience. What was lost health-wise was compensated for through forging a collective bond. Latife Metli Türkyılmaz reflects:
Perhaps we’ll never truly comprehend the toll those experiences took on our health, but what persisted from those times was our unyielding freedom and our faith in a world more befitting of humanity, which they can never strip from us. Whenever we witnessed injustice or unfairness, we couldn’t stand idly by; our hearts would bring us together. The more we endured oppression, the more we gained and strengthened these values (Unutamamak 2017, 166).
This sentiment reveals the transformative nature of prison experiences and how enduring hardships strengthened women’s commitment to human rights and justice. Fecire Kocaman echoes this sentiment while accentuating the persistence of both sacrifices and achievements:
Those days [in prison] weren’t merely a passing period of time; they left deep marks in our memories and souls, transforming and maturing us. Each experience from that time was a life lesson. I’m sure what we went through added so much to everyone’s life. Yet, it also took a significant toll on our health. Even though we paid with our health, when we think about what we endured afterwards, the values that define us come to the forefront in life, and our hearts lead us back there (Unutamamak 2017, 87).
The marks of carceral torment became palpable reminders of the solidarity and resistance that shaped revolutionary women. Aygün Zerger links the resilience of women completing the hunger strike in Mamak Military Prison to the enduring spirit of women’s resistance: “it was this spirit of being a ‘Woman of Mamak’ that carried us forward to today, 30 years later” (Kaktüsler 2011, 189). Zerger teleologically frames the hunger strike as emblematic of women’s indomitable will. The revolutionary women boldly asserted: while others gave up, they persevered; while others failed, they triumphed in prison. This defiance subverts the master narrative of defeat with one of triumph and persistence. These narratives not only recount torture and deprivation but also transform them into celebratory accounts of victory. In doing so, they establish a resilient identity, forged in adversity and persisted beyond prison walls, marked by defiant optimism. Hilal Ünlü’s account summarizes how revolutionary women persist despite tormenting conditions in prison:
We faced challenging trials. Some of us bore larger scars, others smaller; but we all were wounded; that’s undeniable … Yet, on the whole, we weren’t defeated. In the end, we wore a smile. That’s an absolute fact … (Kaktüsler 2011, 282).
Imprisonment marked a pivotal moment in women’s lives. Despite recounting memories of torturous control tactics, women highlight their enduring free-spirited resilience. Günseli Kaya describes her fellow inmates as “the incorrigible women” (Kaktüsler 2011, 298), signifying a defiant essence against the regimented life of a military prison. Additionally, Meral Bekar speaks of “being” rather than “becoming” revolutionary women:
While in prison, we got hurt more, and we deteriorated further. Yet, within this fight, we equally rejuvenated, inspired, and enhanced both ourselves and one another … Like siblings … Together, we were reshaping our lives with determination, and we were also transforming, with a sense of revolutionary duty … I guess there was a benefit here to the revolutionary nature of women, particularly in being women revolutionaries (Kaktüsler 2011, 79).
For Bekar, “the revolutionary nature” was not emplaced in women in the prison. It was unrestrained and amplified, but it was always already there. This nature both supported and compelled them to persevere. The persistence of revolutionary women’s identity is sustained by the intrinsic alignment between the attributes of being a revolutionary and being a woman.
Those lacking this harmonious recalcitrance lost their way as conditions changed. The revolutionary women’s counternarrative draws a gendered line between resistance and defeat, rationalizing men’s submissiveness yet struggling to account for women who abandoned resistance. Prisons, while serving as arenas of triumph for women, were also sites of dispersion and, at times, betrayal. Ayhan Sağcan reflects on this complexity by describing post-coup prisons as junctions of deviation where revolutionary principles gradually eroded (Erdoğdu Çelik Reference Erdoğdu Çelik2005, 293). Gülbeyaz Hamurcu reflects on women’s divergent responses to prison administration pressures: “That place was like a school. Those who succeeded … Those who didn’t …” (Kaktüsler 2011, 89), voicing concern over the number of women conforming to the administration’s demands. This led to the creation of a new ward for cici kızlar (well-behaved girls). Eylem Uzun laments women transferring to this ward with better conditions, framing it as a frustrating experience that they need to make their peace with (Kaktüsler 2011, 109). Such reflections reveal the fractures within women’s carceral solidarity, yet many narrators transform these failures into evidence of their persistence. As Zeliha Şalcı observes: “In truth, Mamak shattered, damaged, and in some cases obliterated some of us, yet it also remolded and strengthened a remarkable portion of us” (Kaktüsler 2011, 318). These accounts underscore that sustaining the revolutionary dimension of women’s identity was vital for re-engaging in activism beyond prison walls.
The struggle in prison was central to women’s identity, extending beyond release. Mukaddes Erdoğdu Çelik (Reference Erdoğdu Çelik2005) notes the prison regime aimed to sever prisoners’ ideological commitments, turning them into ordinary citizens without a backward glance. Yet, few survived this struggle (Erdoğdu Çelik Reference Erdoğdu Çelik2005, 261). The persistence of these survivors became a defining mark of revolutionary women’s identity, setting them apart from those who failed to resist and persist. Similarly, Kıymet Yıldırım writes:
Before September 12 [1980 military coup], being revolutionary was actually a trend … We got swept up in this wind and came along, but later on, we embraced this wind. Even when the wind didn’t blow, we managed to stay the same, and we strived for it to blow again (Erdoğdu Çelik Reference Erdoğdu Çelik2005, 228).
Yıldırım’s reference to the widespread adoption of leftist ideology in the 1970s highlights that many supported the revolutionary cause, but it was the revolutionary women who persisted through the 1980 coup and its aftermath. Yıldırım’s wind metaphor extends beyond merely distinguishing between those who thrived or faltered with the ideological momentum and includes efforts to rally others. This final component underscores the enduring substance of revolutionary women’s identity, projecting it into the future with persistence.
Conclusion
In this article, we examined autobiographical prison narratives of leftist women in Turkey to explore the overlooked role of temporality in gendered identity formation and their neglected experiences in the post-1980 coup era in Turkey. Our study yields several theoretical and empirical contributions.
First, we show that collective identity is not fixed in either past experience or present narration but emerges through a dynamic negotiation between memory of past struggles and present concerns. This negotiation links what is remembered with how it is remembered, producing a collective sense of empowerment and shifting subject positions across time. By recalling, reframing, and sharing their experiences collectively, women engage in memory-work that reconfigures them as political agents beyond victimhood and in response to a dual exclusion in the past experience and in the present narration. Our three-stage model – distance, substance, and persistence – conceptualizes this temporal dynamic and contributes to feminist memory studies on gender identity.
Second, situating Turkish women’s prison narratives within feminist memory literature exhibits both parallels with and divergencies from global patterns. Like other carceral counternarratives, they transform experiences of repression into narratives of resilience, solidarity, and agency. But they also highlight the challenges of leftist factionalism and the tension between class-based solidarity and gendered autonomy. Identity and memory interact here in ways that both conserve elements of the past and strategically rework them for the present. As the analysis shows, the formation of this new gender identity did not begin with an outright rejection of the old. Women remained committed to leftism even as they carved out an autonomous gendered identity, a persistence that was both enabling and constraining. Further research may clarify how this dual allegiance may expose women to marginalization on both ideological and gender fronts.
Third, the neglect of women’s prison narratives within Turkish feminist historiography reveals how master narratives shape academic paradigms. Our study fills this gap by amplifying women’s demands for recognition of their struggles, long obscured by both physical confinement and discursive marginalization. By re-centering these silenced voices, our study shows how revolutionary women resist the masculinized memory of the left and politicize their experiences to assert autonomous subject positions and collective identities. The celebration of resilience – strategically interweaving memories of torture and repression with solidarity, humor, and companionship – demonstrates how feminist memory-work transforms suffering into agency. At the same time, this narrative strategy risks downplaying the hardships of prison life, internal divisions, and the voices of those less invested in proud remembrance, an epistemological limitation since such experiences seldom surface in written or oral format.
Finally, the identity constructed in these narratives relies on a strict gender binary, distinguishing women’s accounts from men’s and prioritizing collectivity over more fluid or intersectional expressions of identity. While reflecting the political claims at the time of writing rather than antagonism toward non-binary and non-essentialist approaches, this limits their resonance with contemporary feminist and queer debates. Future research may explore how revolutionary women’s narratives intersect or conflict with evolving understandings of gender and political agency.
Acknowledgments
We are grateful for the insightful comments of the anonymous reviewers and the editor on the previous drafts of this article.
Competing interests
None.
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