Fighting for the River: Women's Resistance against Hydroelectric Power Plants in Turkey

Building on ethnographic work on local community movements against private, small-scale, run-of-the-river hydropower plants in three different regions of Turkey, this paper introduces a body-centered approach to explore the dynamics of women’s committed activism in the context of anti-hydropower movement. The paper shifts the focus to the lived bodies of women and their connection to the living environments, without falling back into essentialist conceptions of gender. In doing so, it employs in-depth ethnographic data to discuss the centrality of corporeal connections with river waters in shaping women’s political agency against hydropower.