Feminist Grammars and (Lost) Hopes

This chapter explores the limits of language when one needs to translate ‘hope’ between the local and the transnational as well as legal/institutional and affective/political language after a woman’s death. It reflects upon ethnographic material from a silent feminist protest that took place in memory of an Italian artist who was raped and killed in Turkey while on a march for peace. Despite the plea by the artist’s family for feminist activists not to politicise her death either by attributing a local connotation to it, which would be turned against the Turkish people, or by translating it through a feminist vocabulary that would be used against the state, a few feminist women held a protest, a silent protest. By highlighting the performative components of political language in its tight relation to affective dispositions, it is argued that this silence was not speechless, but instead echoed the long history of the feminist movement in fighting against male violence and sexual harassment, as well as with the feminists’ (lost) hopes for changes and social transformation.