Women’s National Volleyball Team and Deep Play: Dramatization of Turkish Politics and National Identity

Sena Sahin, Yale University

On September 3, 2023, Turkey women’s national volleyball team, known as Sultans of the Net, defeated Serbia and won the CEV European Championship. The match captivated the society-wide attention because not only the team was about to be the first national team to be European champion but also it initiated debate over what is sacred to the nation. The dispute extended to the historical figures such as the founding father of the Republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and the Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II and the symbols such as the emancipated woman and fez. As one columnist noted for the first time, a sports event gave rise to an issue involving almost all political circles in Turkey. This paper examines how an international volleyball match was experienced in several levels through the dramatization of political and cultural cleavages in Turkey. By drawing on cultural pragmatics theory, I will analyze how the confluence of immediate, historical, and political layers turned the final match into a ‘deep play’ in what I call ‘the volleyball team drama’. First, I will show how the volleyball team drama started to take shape from 2020 onwards through the issue of the players’ uniforms and the team player Ebrar Karakurt’s sexual identity. I will then examine how the team was placed at the center of the political struggles between the seculars and Islamists over the imagining of Turkey in the politically and symbolically charged year of 2023, which was the year of the centennial of the Turkish Republic and the national election. Lastly, I will analyze how the social media interaction between Ebrar, and an X user became the tipping point of the drama and turned the final match into a deep play through which Turkey’s past, present and future were symbolically put on the line.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 51. History, Politics, and Memory I