Özge Yaka
Freie Universität
Water, Body and Agency: Women’s Bodily Experiences of River Waters and Emergent Political Agency in Anti-HEPP Struggles
Building on extensive ethnographic work on local community movements against small-scale run-of-river hydropower plants (HEPPs) in Turkey’s East Black Sea region, this lecture introduces a phenomenological, body-centered approach to explore the relationship between gender, water, and political activism. Focusing on the dynamics of women’s committed activism to protect rivers without falling back into essentialist conceptions of gender and nature, the talk will demonstrate how the relationship between women’s bodies and river waters is conditioned by the gendered division of labor but not confined to the realm of necessity. In the East Black Sea region, it is not the use of river waters as a “natural resource” that drives women’s anti-HEPP resistance; it is their embodied, sensory, and affective connections with river waters. By attending to women’s embodied, sensory, and affective connections with river waters, the talk will demonstrate how bodily memory and emotions mediate the relations between gender, water, and political activism in the more-than-human lifeworld of East Black Sea women. Rather than attributing human-non-human connectivity to specific cosmologies and beliefs, the talk introduces a phenomenological perspective that maintains non-human life and entities as integral to our lifeworld.