THIRD SPACE “An Article That I Am Not in the Mood to Write Anymore” Motivations to Research about Popular Feminism DEMET GÜLÇIÇEK M y friends have grown bored of me talking about conceptualizing some form of popular feminism that I have been noticing “in the air” in Turkey. For many feminist activists and scholars based in or engaged with Turkey, it seems confusing to talk about “popular feminism” at a time of such active antigender and antifeminist mainstream discourse. Thus each time I have shared this conceptualizing idea with someone, I have had to explain my usage of the term. Despite growing antigender mobilization, feminist ideas have become increasingly popular in some spaces in Turkey, but we have not been able to analyze this beyond a discussion of whether that popularity is good or bad. Once I explained this in detail, I was encouraged to “write something” about it because the contradictions I problematized seemed intriguing to many. Here I reflect on my failure to write about popular feminism, situating that failure in relation to the political atmosphere in Turkey after the 2023 elections. I do not aim to complain about contemporary political conditions (well, maybe just a bit!) but rather to discuss how our relations with the world around us are linked to our readiness to build research in a specific way. I suggest that sometimes a researcher’s reluctance can produce new ways to ask questions. I am inspired by feminist work encouraging us to unpack how we produce knowledge (Davis and Evans 2011), and I turn to mood as a tool for it. In my earlier work I analyzed political commitments as an affective lens that sticks, proposing the concept of “mood of commitment” (Gülçiçek 2022). I now want to reflect on a mood change from the uprising excitement to reluctance toward my research focus on popular feminism in Turkey. “Mood” is often conceptualized as JMEWS • Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies • 20:2 • July 2024 DOI 10.1215/15525864-11176482 • © 2024 by the Association for Middle East Women’s Studies 261 ADVANCE PUBLICATION Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/jmews/article-pdf/doi/10.1215/15525864-11176482/2085743/11176482.pdf?guestAccessKey=2ef4c002-a6e2-4b8c-9244-744a1dd60991 by guest on 19 April 2024