New Female Identities Created by the Feminist Alternative Media: Inspecting Turkey and Tunisia

Women’s movement continues the historical development it underwent during the Industrial Revolution, World War II, the Cold War, and the Neoliberal period with reactive changes. It’s also experiencing new developments under the current digital information and globalization era. The rise of digital technologies and the spread of the internet allow social change to occur with the digital environments as its focal points. Accordingly, this digital environment includes the blogs, internet sites, and e-magazines curated by women’s rights activists with propositions of social change. The social movements encountered on the digital environment transform women’s rights advocacy and build upon the historical demands of the women’s movement to bring out new female identities. The Arab Spring can also be considered one of the social movements that the women’s movement tried to influence, and got influenced by, in recent years. Despite, Turkey and Tunisia, the countries that experienced Westernization or secularization before the rest of the Middle East and North Africa, stand out in the self-manifestation women’s right advocacy on alternative media, the attempt at including the new wave of women’s rights to these social movements under the context of neoliberalism and globalization, and successfully allowing the inclusion of traditional feminist demands into the priorities of these social movements. This study explores how these two countries, that highly benefit from the emerging new role of the internet as a public sphere, saw women’s rights advocacy creating new female identities using the feminist alternative media platforms.