Women and environmental protests :|The Cerattepe incident and the role of women in protests

Abstract

This thesis examines the experiences of local women of Cerattepe, a district of Artvin, who participate in antimining resistance in the region. As a means of exploring the relationship between women and nature, this thesis intervenes in the debates about women’s closeness to nature, and the explanations that the controversial theory of ecofeminism brings to this relation are discussed. The research explains how women’s roles within society were affected by the environmental protests in Cerattepe and whether agency issues within this group were influenced by their active participation in the protests. I demonstrate that environmental activism plays a central role in the development of female protestors’ self-efficacy as agents in the movement. e antimining resistance in Cerattepe and women’s roles in the incident is analyzed based on field research, consisting of thirteen semi-structured interviews and participant observation. Although the thesis finds little evidence that women’s participation in the resistance totally transformed patriarchal relations in their respective communities, their increasing self-confidence and self-efficacy turned them into agents or subjects of the incident as well as into executors of decisions within the movement. This level of agency - or “partial agency” of local women from Cerattepe contributes to theorization of them as the “actresses” of the movement. In this regard, the contribution of this thesis is its use of the Cerattepe movement as a case to analyze the influence of environmental activism on women’s agency.