Listening to possible worlds :|the 2019 Istanbul feminist night March and its acoustic conflicts

Abstract

This thesis is about the relationship between sound and power. It takes the 2019 Istanbul Feminist Night March as a case study where women participants were accused of protesting the sound of the call to prayer that was broadcast during their annual Women’s Day demonstration. This allegation was later propagated and substantiated by the President via an audiovisual video collage that he displayed during his rally. Defining this series of events as acoustic conflicts, the thesis contributes to the argument that the soundscape of a nation is a gendered site of power on three main axes. First, it exhibits the political power of the silenced voices and sounds of women through examining the acoustic atmosphere of feminist night marches and other feminine-soundscapes; second, it reveals how the current gendered power regime of the government operates over the soundscape of the nation by untangling the President’s allegation towards women protestors; and third, it offers an analysis about how the contemporary conditions of the production and circulation of audiovisual representations affect social and political day-to-day listening practices via a discursive and audiovisual analysis of the video collage displayed by the President. Based on theories of feminism, aesthetics, affect, and sound studies, and through ethnographic fieldwork and media analysis, the thesis brings these three axes together around the question: how the relationship between sound and power contributes to and challenges the hierarchical sensory configuration of the patriarchal social system.