In Umut Özkırımlı (ed), The Making of a Protest Movement in Turkey: #Occupygezi, Palgrave- Pivot, 2014, pp. 89-102. OCCUPY GEZI AS POLITICS OF THE BODY Zeynep Gambetti When the Gezi resistance started with police violence on 31 May 2013, it had an “anti-depressant” effect, as much as it was nerve-racking. During this period where each day was prone to new crises, and normalcy was completely disrupted, those who poured into the streets or took up residence at Gezi Park simultaneously experienced the peaks of ecstasy and the depths of sorrow. If on any given day the protestors succeeded in preventing the police from taking over an occupied zone, for instance, this achievement would be weighed down by the news of someone loosing an eye or going into coma from wounds in the head. Analyzing such an intense event naturally requires taking some distance. Nevertheless, the vivid memory of days spent in action constitutes the starting point of the present narrative, since the acute intuition that history was being rewritten in Turkey throughout June was accompanied by the equally strong awareness as to its subject: the body. Shattering the modernist construal of the subject as an abstract person possessing will and reason, the unforeseen course that the protests took was more the product of the kinesis of thousands of bodies than the consequence of strategy and deliberation. Each morning, many bodies with sleep-deprived eyes woke up in Istanbul, Ankara, Antakya, Izmir, and elsewhere to take to the streets once again, after having quickly checked the latest news in the social media. Many were astonished and impressed that they could still walk, run, stand up, and carry provisions for those in the parks. Exhausted bodies were rejuvenated with every new threat that the government uttered, and with tens of thousands of others they flowed daily to Taksim, Kızılay, Kuğulu Park, Gündoğdu, Abbasoğlu, and several other parks and squares, equipped with home-made gas masks, swimmer goggles, anti-acid solutions, and whistles. 1 Another corps of bodies – the police – intercepted them with tear gas, pressurized water, plastic bullets, bulletproof outfits, armored vehicles, helicopters and jammer devices. The synchronous or nonsynchronous movement of these bodies in busy metropolises where commuters, vendors and tourists were also circulating produced effects that no single subject could master or predict. But what does it mean to conceptualize the Occupy Gezi movement as a politics of the body? And why choose to do so? After all, the more conventional categories of “the people” or “social and political groups” can also do much work in this context. It would certainly not be wrong to describe the resistance by virtue of its demands (the protection of green urban space, opposition to rampant neoliberalism, or to the growing authoritarianism of a conservative government). Seen in this light, the struggles in and around Gezi would take on the allure of a clash of political visions, ideologies, and objectives. It is true that the composition of the resistance lends itself to such an analysis. The organized groups occupying Gezi Park were easily 1 Tear gas was the most threatening means of crowd dispersal used by the police. Gas masks and swimmer goggles were used to protect the face, while anti-acid solutions were mainly sprayed on skin that came into contact with the gas to deal with burns.