The use of ‘feminism’ in the Turkish National Corpus and its social reflections

Abstract

This study emphasizes the word feminizm (En. feminism) within the Turkish National Corpus (TNC), exploring the subject from a multilayered perspective. Its significance lies in being the first corpus-based examination of the usage of the term in the context of the TNC. Given that prior research has not addressed the utilization of the term “feminism” in Turkish through a corpus-based analysis, this work contributes to the existing literature on the topic. To uncover how the expression is represented in the TNC, we first focused on the frequency and collocations of the word. Later, by examining the collocations of “feminism,” we conducted a thematic analysis to outline the contexts in which the expression appears in the corpus. In the frequency and collocation analyses, we found that the expression was primarily used in non-scientific social texts, news articles, and artistic and religious texts, primarily associated with women and women's rights and emphasizing gender, sexuality-related, philosophical, and ideological dimensions. Moreover, the study shows that the expression is often paired with negative words (e.g., dangerous, threatening), which reflects the negative and marginalized perception of feminism in society. The study also offers insights into the use of “feminism” in Turkish texts and reveals that the word is relatively rare in frequency. The Turkish women's movement faced nearly 40 years of hiatus after 1935, followed by a resurgence in the 1980s. However, it faced significant setbacks after 2010. The study suggests that this historical context helps explain why feminism continues to be a marginalized and underrepresented concept in Turkish discourse. Considering that language develops through social, political, and cultural influences, the expression “feminism” in the TNC results from sociopolitical and cultural developments in Turkey. Thus, the TNC serves as an important resource for understanding how societal attitudes and historical developments are reflected in language use.