Iran and Turkey through ‘The Golden Cage’ and ‘Contextual Gendered Racialization’ Lens: Populism, Law, Gender and Freedom

Turkish women took action on May 8, 2020 in Istanbul not to repeal the Istanbul Convention, which provides protection against domestic and male violence. Photo: Emre Orman.

In this commentary, Dr. Hafza Girdap offers a compelling comparative analysis of populism, law, gender, and freedom across two authoritarian contexts. Bringing Shirin Ebadi’s “The Golden Cage” into dialogue with transnational feminist theory, Dr. Girdap examines how populist regimes in Iran and Turkey moralize “the people,” narrow citizenship, and weaponize law to discipline dissent—particularly women’s dissent. Drawing on her original framework of contextual gendered racialization, she shows how gender governance operates through both patriarchy and racialized belonging. The article foregrounds women’s resistance as a form of epistemic, legal, and care-centered praxis, redefining freedom not as order or security, but as memory, accountability, and collective struggle beyond the confines of the “golden cage.”

By Hafza Girdap

This piece offers a condensed commentary drawn from a broader, ongoing project of mine that seeks to trace a coherent trajectory bridging sociology, feminist theory, and human rights practice. Centering the experiences of racialized and marginalized women, my project examines how women actively reclaim voice, produce knowledge, and build solidarities across borders. By integrating scholarship with activism, it aims not only to interpret structures of oppression but also to intervene in them—amplifying marginalized women’s voices, reshaping public discourse, and contributing to justice-oriented social change at both local and global levels.

Within this framework, the article examines populism, gendered repression, and resistance in Iran and Turkey by bringing Shirin Ebadi’s The Golden Cage into dialogue with transnational feminist theory and my conceptual framework of contextual gendered racialization.

Across both cases, populism constructs a moralized vision of “the people,” narrows plural citizenship, and weaponizes law to discipline dissent, particularly women’s dissent. Read together, Iran and Turkey reveal a shared trajectory from revolutionary or reformist promise to authoritarian consolidation, where legality becomes an instrument of domination, intimacy is reorganized by fear, and women’s resistance redefines freedom not as comfort or order, but as accountability, memory, and collective care (Shabnam, 2016).

Populism and the Moral Community

In post-1979 Iran, Islamist populism intertwined anti-imperialism with religious moralism, deifying state power as the authentic voice of the ummah and framing dissent as moral deviance or foreign betrayal. Hardship, repression, and top-down governance are justified as ethical sacrifice, while sovereignty is equated with the regime itself (Qaderi et al., 2023; V for Human, 2025; Bottura, 2024).  

In Turkey, the populism of ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan evolved from counter-Kemalist majoritarianism into a religio-nationalist project that performs unity through slogans such as “one nation, one flag, one religion,” increasingly centralizing authority in the figure of the leader. While initially framed as democratizing, this project narrowed citizenship through moral conformity, loyalty, and cultural homogeneity (Yalvaç & Joseph, 2019; Yabancı, 2022). 

Ebadi’s metaphor of the golden cage” captures the populist bargain in both contexts: material security, national pride, and moral certainty are offered in exchange for silence. Belonging becomes conditional, and pluralism is redefined as threat. Populism thus does not merely mobilize “the people”; it redraws their boundaries.

From Rule of Law to Rule-by-Law

Ebadi’s central assertion, law without justice is violence,” resonates powerfully across both cases. In Iran, juridical language legitimates repression through moralized penalties, surveillance, and gender policing. Courts, decrees, and security forces recode dissent, especially women’s défiance, as disorder, immorality, or national betrayal. Following the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising, intensified surveillance technologies and punitive legislation targeted women’s everyday presence in public space (V for Human, 2025, Makooi, 2025).

In Turkey, a shift from institutional reform to rule-by-law recalibrated the judiciary, media, and religious institutions to executive power. Gender governance became a central showcase of this transformation. The withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention via presidential decree exemplified how formal legality can be used to hollow out rights while projecting a moralized policy turn. In both contexts, legality masks authoritarian consolidation, transforming law into a technology of control rather than protection (Girdap, 2021; Sarac et al., 2023).

Family, Fear, and Everyday Life

The Golden Cage demonstrates how authoritarianism penetrates the most intimate spaces of life. Ebadi’s family narrative traces siblings forced into divergent ethical trajectories; revolutionary idealism punished by imprisonment or execution, loyalist complicity pursued for survival, exile chosen at the cost of belonging. Love and loyalty become calculations of risk under surveillance.

Ebadi’s family members function as ethical projections under coercion: the revolutionary idealist destroyed by the system, the loyalist navigating compromise at psychological cost, and the exile living with safety and loss. Ebadi herself stands as the ethical center, a jurist-witness insisting that memory is a civic duty and that law must be reclaimed for justice. Her feminism is not abstract; it is anchored in accountability, testimony, and refusal to forget.

Contemporary Turkey echoes this intimate violence. Employment bans, travel restrictions, stigmatization of dissidents, and criminalization of speech ripple through households. Families become sites of risk management; ordinary communication is shaped by caution. The political becomes domestic, and repression is lived not only through spectacular events but through everyday self-censorship and fractured trust.

Gender as the Authoritarian and Democratic Measure

Gender emerges as both the primary target of authoritarian control and the most sensitive measure of democratic erosion. In Iran, women led the Woman, Life, Freedom movement following the death of Mahsa (Jina) Amini. Despite lethal repression, mass arrests, and intensified surveillance, women’s everyday practices, particularly in urban spaces, signal irreversible shifts in presence, visibility, and refusal (European Parliament, 2022; Blout, 2025).

In Turkey, women’s citizenship is increasingly restricted into motherhood, family duty, and moral loyalty. Feminism and LGBTQI+ activism are framed as moral and foreign threats, while patriarchal governance is legitimated through religious and nationalist discourse. The Istanbul Convention withdrawal galvanized resistance, making gender a central site through which democratic backsliding and civic resilience are simultaneously revealed.

My framework of contextual gendered racialization sharpens this analysis by showing how Sunni Turkishness is privileged through an ethno-religious “Turkishness Contract,” producing double marginalization for Kurdish, Alevi, Armenian, and dissenting women. Gendered governance thus operates through both patriarchy and racialized belonging (Unlu, 2023).

Transnational Racialization and Migration

Racialization travels across borders. In Turkey, difference is marked through proximity to dominant Sunni Turkish identity rather than skin color; minority women are symbolically racialized as deviant or suspect. In the United States, Muslim women become hyper-visible within Islamophobic regimes of surveillance, legally white, socially brown (Aziz, 2020). Hijab, accent, and names trigger institutional scrutiny across immigration, healthcare, education, and labor.

Women respond through strategic identity management: negotiating visibility, silence, and speech; altering dress or disclosure; cultivating selective belonging. These practices constitute feminist praxis rather than mere adaptation, resisting both authoritarian repression and reductive Western feminist frames. Situated feminisms emerge from lived negotiation rather than abstraction (Girdap, 2025).

Law, Memory, and Care as Resistance

Across Iran and Turkey, women deploy diverse resistance strategies that transform opposition from episodic protest into durable institution-building. Ebadi’s ethic of defending rights even within captured institutions finds parallels in feminist lawfare and documentation practices in Turkey. Litigation, femicide databases, survivor testimonies, and non-enforcement audits preserve public memory and sustain accountability even when legal victories are limited. As national protections erode, opposition-led municipalities expand shelters, hotlines, training, and care infrastructures, producing constituent feminism beyond electoral cycles. Campaigns such as #İstanbulSözleşmesiYaşatır (#IstanbulConventionSavesLives) and recurring protests after femicides sustain public scrutiny and agenda pressure. Groups like Mor Dayanışma link gender violence to labor precarity, militarism, ethnic repression, and anti-LGBTQI+ moral panics, expanding coalitions and articulating care-centered, class-conscious feminist praxis (Mor Dayanışma, 2025; Najdi, 2025; Şeker & Sönmezocak, 2021).

Conclusion: Freedom Beyond the Golden Cage

Bringing Ebadi’s ethic of law, memory, and freedom together with a transnational feminist analysis clarifies the stakes of the Iran–Turkey comparison. In both contexts, populism narrows [established] citizenship into a moral community, and gender becomes the key nexus of belonging. Yet women’s epistemic and practical resistance, through legal advocacy, documentation, care spaces, migration, and transnational solidarity, takes a huge step to widen citizenship back into rights, pluralism, and accountability.

Freedom, in this sense, is not comfort or order. It is collective remembering, feminist institution-building, and sustained struggle against normalization. The golden cage is broken not by silence, but by women who insist on memory, justice, and shared political futures across borders.


 

References

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