The mourning mother: rhetorical figure or a political actor?

Abstract

The phrase “mothers shall not cry anymore” has by now become a cliché discursive element of the Justice and Development Party (JDP) government’s speeches on the democratic initiative for the resolution of the so-called Kurdish problem in Turkey. Since 2009, JDP parliament members have either directly addressed mothers or utilized the crying mother rhetoric in their speeches on the democratic initiative. In this chapter, I argue that the JDP government’s rhetorical, emotionally evocative appeal to motherhood operates, in Michel Foucault’s terms, as a governmental technique, which assigns women an active role and takes it away simultaneously, while also denying similar emotions to fathers. Instead of “mothers shall not cry,” the resolution process could have been supported with arguments such as, “men shall no longer kill each other and die” or “fathers shall no longer cry.” I argue that the emotional appeal of the mother figure is not the sole reason behind its discursive emphasis. Implicit in the idea of mothers not crying is the fact that men kill each other and women can only passively respond to that. The rhetorical appeal to the mother is employed as a governmental technique because of the acknowledgment that women are crucial for nationalist, militarist discourses and for demographics. Furthermore, the emphasis on the mother prevents any substantial challenge that could be raised against militarism and traditional gender roles.