The Activist Chroniclers of Occupy Gezi : Counterposing Visibility to Injustice

Abstract

With the benefit of hindsight, this chapter casts another glance at Occupy Gezi, a landmark protest in contemporary Turkey. We reflect on the pursuit of visibility by activists on Twitter as a means to garner the attention of the Turkish and the global public to the heavy-handed police crackdown of the popular mobilization. We interpret their quest for visibility as a ‘subaltern tactic’ employed to reverse an asymmetry of power through an aesthetics of indignation at the injustice perpetrated against peaceful demonstrators. In the longer run, however, such visibility poses an important dilemma when, as in the case of Turkey, it becomes the basis for reflexive state surveillance.