Reading the Panoptic Effects of Femicide through Twitter: The Case Turkey ()
1. Introduction
Although there are no legal obstacles to gender equality in Turkey, visible and invisible patriarchal socio-cultural and political mental codes (socio-genetics) create serious gender inequality and injustice in all areas of society. Provided, of course, that we always keep poverty, social-cultural and economic capital, gender inequality, ideology, party, clientalist ties, forms of exploitation and hegemonic processes alive in the back of our minds. After creating a big picture with these big concepts, it is necessary to briefly mention the structural causes and types of fatal violence against women that occur intersectionally between the lines of this picture.
As stated by Aka (2021: pp. 147-148) , the reasons for femicides in Turkey generally include the demand for divorce, psychological crisis, rejection of men, refusal to get back together, honour killing, hatred, unknown reasons, sexual assault, women wanting to take decisions about their own lives and being driven to suicide. Among other reasons, the simultaneous or sequential circulation of different forms of violence (physical, psychological, social, symbolic, political economy, etc.) until the end of the victims’ lives; the blaming of women victims by individual, political economy, legal, social and cultural subjects and the re-victimization of women by these subjects is to be left alone. On the contrary, making the safety of the perpetrators (murderers) a top priority issue, giving them little or no punishment by innocitimizing their actions; offering the reward of masculine positive discrimination to murderers and as a natural consequence of this, they assume the role of “God” and destroy their female victims in the most brutal way and take pleasure in it.
In short, the misogynistic sexist attitudes of the destructive, patriarchal, hegemonic, conservative neoliberal political economy and the forms of power caused by its legal, social and cultural codifications lead to impunity for murderers of women. This culturally constructs resentment, anger, helplessness, hatred and disgust towards criminal injustice. On the other hand, the Panopticon mechanism does not discipline the criminals but the victims, turning them into politically docile bodies.
In other words, Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon project is more than a simple architectural idea; it has a deeper meaning for the state-controlled society. Bentham envisions the Panopticon as “an artificial body with life, where the center is the animating heart of the artificial body” (Kumar, 2015: p. 346) . For example, according to data from the World Health Organization, Turkey ranks fifth on the scale of the rate (per million) of femicides per year in different countries. The countries in the same band with Turkey are Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Spain (Taştan & Yıldız, 2019: p. 1) .
In the light of the above data, it can be said that the Panopticon, a new form of power, is transforming into a tyranny (the simultaneous circulation of freedom/despotic discourses and practices) by reproducing the discontinuous surveillance of patriarchal Panoptic power with its punitive practices over innocent women who lead very ordinary lives (femicide), while fulfilling the function of reformative, moral social reform (surveillance, control and supervision of workers, criminals, the poor).
The inventor of such an intelligent device is the architect Samuel Bentham. The idea of developing this idea and applying it to society belongs to his brother Jeremy Bentham. This project, which Jeremy Bentham designed as a social reform project in the 18th century as a new management plan to be implemented in working life, prison, reformatory, education, constitutional order; it is very important to explain the function of the digital public sphere (overt and covert), which is highly functional for global actors who shape the future of the world, which is very difficult to be accepted in England even during the design process and has been practiced in all social institutions by taking different forms until today.
In this context, what is the meaning of this system of panoptic patriarchal law and politics that judges the victim and her relatives rather than the accused and her relatives?
For some, the Panopticon is the architectural reform design of society; for some, a utopia, a dystopia, a plan-project; for others, a symbolic construction of the prison/disciplinary society in the minds; does it represent a nirvana to be reached or a darkness to be avoided? According to Jeremy Bentham, the discoverer of the Panopticon in modern society, it is “a new method of acquiring multiple power, hitherto without precedent” (Dobson & Fisher, 2007: p. 311) . According to him, the Panopticon is undoubtedly a form of confinement and control of labour, and it is a structure designed precisely for this dual purpose (Kumar, 2015: p. 344) . In other words, it is an architectural fictional design that makes it possible to monitor the activities of prisoners, but also allows them freedom of movement in certain situations. The basic principle of this design, surveillance without being seen, was later “supported by a series of non-architectural arrangements” (Brunon-Ernst, 2012) .
The Panopticon is a diagram of a scheme of power reduced to the ideal form; its operation abstracted from any obstacle, resistance or friction is represented as a pure architectural and optical system: It is, in fact, a figure of political technology that can and must be separated from any private use (Laval, 2012: p. 45) .
Bentham’s theory presents a vision of a government which knows everything about society, and a society which knows everything about its rulers’ activities. This vision initiates a universalisation of the panoptic paradigm on a metaphorical level. However, the similarities between Bentham’s constitutional and penal theories are not limited to the presence of transparent information. His theories assume more tangible aspects, which testify to the transposition of prison systems to the political level. Since the intention is to direct the behavior of a certain number of individuals through a combination of the principles of economy and of security, the panoptic system seems to suggest itself. Bentham is in a position to put forward a functional system which is applicable at the same time to prisons, asylums, hospitals, work houses for the poor and schools which allows for the surveillance of the governing machinery (Bentham 1997: p. 16 cited in Tusseau, 2012: p. 124 ).
The panoptic system minimises the effective exercise of control, while maximising awareness of this control. In penal law as well as in constitutional law, it is a question of watching both recognised and potential offenders. The rulers are in a position to commit public offences, and harm all the members of the State (Bentham, 1991) . Bentham therefore recommends a principle of minimisation of trust and maximisation of distrust (p. 118) in opposition to them. He intends to direct their behaviour towards general utility by both curative and preventive means.
Michel Foucault, on the other hand, thinks of the Panopticon as an abstract paradigm of power relations. In his work “Discipline and Punish”, he does not define the Panopticon only as an abstract apparatus. The status of the Panopticon is twofold. Beyond being a diagram, i.e. a revelation of the power relations underlying power, it is a concrete historical project encompassing the principles laid down by other thinkers.
The Panopticon is an important apparatus because it automatises and individualizes power. This principle of power is an apparatus that includes the individual rather than a person, rather than a calculated distribution of bodies, surfaces, gaze, and produces a relationship (Foucault, 1992: p. 253). According to him, the object and purpose of the Panopticon is the general principle of a new political anatomy whose object and purpose is not the relationship of sovereignty but the relationship of discipline (Foucault, 1992: p. 252) .
In this context, the main claim of the study is to touch upon the problem of how those who deviate from the norm (hegemonic masculinity(s)) are positioned in the minds, hearts and capillaries of the structural architectural project constructed as a means of social control. In other words, the Panoptic effects/emotions of the destructive patriarchal hegemonic ideology, which deconstructs ‘social development’ with heavy individual, socio/cultural, socio/political and legal costs, taking different forms at different times, imprisoning women in a Panoptic real cage (fictional) and punishing women and thus reproducing the culture of masculinity that inflicts violence by creating permanent fear in them, will be analyzed as dependent/independent variables.
In this context, by examining the emotions that were expressed after the fatal violence against women that left traces in the social memory with a sociological perspective, it will be tried to evaluate how each emotion functions as a Panoptic effect as self-discipline/self-control that creates individuals’ own prisons. Spacing, and type styles are built-in; examples of the type styles are provided throughout this document and are identified in italic type, within parentheses, following the example. Some components, such as multi-leveled equations, graphics, and tables are not prescribed, although the various table text styles are provided. The formatter will need to create these components, incorporating the applicable criteria that follow.
2. Panoptic Effects: Sociological Emotion and Major Emotions2
Emotion can be defined as the change that occurs in the body under the influence of a certain situational stimulus (internal-external) in a certain time and spatial context. In other words, emotion is a movement that moves the soul and spreads spontaneously from soul to soul. Denzin defines emotion as ‘feeling the self’. According to him, emotion mobilises the subject and includes desire among emotions. And a motivating situation is needed to understand how emotionality ‘closes people in and projects them out’. Denzin considers emotions in terms of the development of opportunities, choices leading to the overcoming of options or uncertainties, and barriers to action or even conditions (Swanson, 1985: p. 313) . According to Averill, emotions are socially constructed roles. Each emotion is a different combination of a drive, a goal and a purpose (Swanson, 1985: p. 314) . According to Swanson (1985: p. 314) , emotions seem to be bodily sensations that express the value of something (positive and negative) or other level of relationship that the self. According to Barbalet, emotion is the individual experience and the state of being affected by an event. In other words, associating the emotional experience with the event allows us to see that the emotion is always situated and therefore has a context (Barbalet, 2004: p. 79) . Emotions are “socially constructed patterns of sensations, expressive gestures and cultural meaning organized around a relationship with a social object, usually another person or a group such as a family” (Gordon, 1981: pp. 566-567 cited in Thoits, 1989: p. 318 ).
Emotions include emotional states as well as the experience of physical impulse states (hunger, pain, fatigue). Affects refer to positive and negative evaluations (like/dislike) of an object, behavior or idea; affect also has dimensions of intensity and effectiveness. Therefore, emotions can be understood as culturally defined feelings or types of feelings. Compared to emotions, moods are more chronic, usually less intense and less related to the context in which they occur. Emotions function as a kind of capital; the affect does not exist positively in the sign or commodity; instead it is produced as a result of its circulation. Emotion does not reside in an object or signifier, but is the result of circulation between objects and signifiers. As a result of the movement between signs, the effective value of the sign increases. The more signs circulate, the more potent they become (Ahmed, 2004: p. 62) .
Emotions are based on states of feeling the world that enable the maintenance of perceptions associated with socially constructed forms of sensation. In turn, organic and social sensations, like individual sensations, make it possible to convey what appears to be unique and unrepeatable and to elaborate the “unnoticed part” of the inclusion of socially constructed emotion (De Sena & Scribano, 2020: pp. 37-38) .
The common emphasis in the definition of emotion above is a state that is constructed in the social and cultural sphere, experienced subjectively, activates behavior, is permeable, fluid, and can also be bio-physical. However, in this study, since some of the emotions in the tweets that were tweeted during and after violence against women and femicides, whether they were tweeted for intellectual and emotional reasons or not, whether each of these emotions is reflected individually or not, their relationship with each other, whether they occur together or not and their interaction are analyzed, the literature on emotion will be reviewed and the three emotions will be detailed below.
2.1. Pain-Grief-Mourning
Expect hope to be rekindled. Expect your prayers to be answered in wonderful ways. The dry seasons in life do not last long. The spring rains will come again.
Sara Ban Breathna3
In our life line from birth to death, we witness that many subjects and objects are included in our lives on the one hand and disappear from our lives on the other. Sometimes we want to remove them from our lives, sometimes we may have to remove them from our lives due to various structural factors. This is of course also true for other subjects. For example, one day we may lose our money, our friend(s), our job, our position, our identity, our memory and self-esteem, in short, everything. Our lives are full of such momentary losses or more permanent losses. In the face of loss, we express that we feel pain and are deeply hurt. Especially if we have experienced this feeling as a result of a violent behaviour (when we lose a loved one or when we are informed about the barbaric murders of women after sexual assault in various news reports), we may disconnect from life for a while. Then, somehow, we can either enter the process of acceptance or we can choose the state of extinction without ever leaving that process. When we choose the process of acceptance, we try to replace the missing subjects and objects in our lives with others. For example, we earn money again, make friends again, find new jobs and try to regain our prestige, self-esteem and dreams.
Initially, one feels not only the emptiness of loss, but also the lack of reality. Consistent with other life interruptions, the survivor’s world changes irrevocably, but we continue to exist in consciousness and expectancy (Charmaz & Milligan, 2006: p. 520) despite the physical absence of the deceased.
In general, grief is a kind of feeling of loss. It is therefore an emotion triggered by an experience that makes us realise that we have lost something or that we miss a loved one who is very important to us in some way (Petersen & Jacobsen, 2019: p. 191) . However, the concept of ‘grief’ is meaningfully different from loss or other types of ‘absence’. This is because the experience of ‘pain/mourning’ is associated with irreparable experiences of loss/death in human life. When people lose a loved one as a result of lethal violence, not only is it irreparable, but it is also very difficult to describe the pain/grief they will experience from this point onwards. If the grief is intense, as in the case of the death of a valued family member or another person, coping with the loss is also extremely distressing.
Walsh (2012) says that it frightens him that people ignore such pain and continues as follows: “there is loss and pain and it needs to be recognized as a form of grief. Who are we kidding? There is pain and suffering, but it only starts to matter when it spreads to more affluent communities (such as school shootings)”. Pain is usually defined as a sensation or feeling (Cowan, 1968: 15 cited in Ahmed, 2004: pp. 36-37 ). But it is a specific type of sensation. The International Association for the Study of Pain has adopted the following definition: (a) pain is subjective; (b) pain is more complex than a basic sensory event; (c) the experience of pain involves a combination of elements of sensory experience and a repulsive feeling state; d) attributing meaning to unpleasant sensory events is an integral part of the experience of pain (Champman 1986, p. 153 cited in Ahmed, 2004: pp. 36-37 ). Considering the above explanations, it can be said that there are many manifestations of pain. The feeling of pain/grief is ‘a multifaceted, multidimensional and multilayered emotion that can be connected to many different emotional and physical experiences’ (Jackson, 1972; Sprang & McNeil, 1995; as cited in Petersen & Jacobsen, 2019: p. 194 ). Besides the fact that grief is a deep-seated and often invisible emotion within the individual, it has a distinct observable physiognomy (frown, sullen or sad look and especially tears, silence, etc.). To this can be added other bodily sensations felt by the bereaved person: fatigue, forgetfulness, aches and pains, shortness of breath, headaches and loss of appetite, it becomes clear that there is also a physical dimension to grief, sometimes even referred to as ‘broken heart syndrome’ (Petersen & Jacobsen, 2019: p. 195) .
The effect of grief varies from mild to intense. When grief is mild, a person may experience unstable mixed feelings of sadness, regret and anxiety, and possibly sympathise with those who have been more harmed by the loss, if this describes the feeling of grief. Intense grief, however, causes considerable mental and physical distress and can lead to a caustic disruption that not only suppresses the bereaved person’s emotions but also destabilises their life and self (Charmaz, 1997 cited in Charmaz & Milligan, 2006: pp. 518-519 ).
The effect of pain is important in shaping the body both as a material and as a being that has experienced it. Especially the feeling of pain felt after violence marks subjects and carries the traces of trauma on bodies. In other words, violence is also particularly intersubjective (Shepherd 2008; True 2012; Wilcox 2014; cited in Davies & Chisholm, 2018: p. 278 ).
This verbal strategy of picturing the bodily damage which accompanies the pain is what Elaine Scarry calls “the language of agency”, a form of resistance that reappears continually in the words of “those who wish to express their own pain…to express someone else’s pain …or to imagine other people’s pain” (Villar-Argaiz, 2010: p. 145) . Elaine Scarry, in her 1985 study The Bod in Pain, begins with the fact that physical pain resists verbal objectification, because it actively annihilates language by reducing sufferers in the most extreme instances to an inarticulate state of moaning (Villar-Argaiz, 2010: p. 147) .
Life consists of process and change. Suffering changes people. Marris describes suffering as always leaving a mark; even in cases of “recovery”, people are permanently changed. How they change differs according to the person. Some people can look to the past and never get rid of grief and recover. Other people may be forced to move into an unexpected future and rebuild the self for the events they have experienced. Experiencing intense grief causes more than a change of social identity. In other words, it reveals a changed self (Charmaz & Milligan, 2006: p. 534) .
In research on grief, it has been found that survivors assume the roles of those they have lost, behave like them and use their views. This effectively suggests that the grieving subject is internally integrated with the deceased. When and how these aspects of the self change is less clear. The bereaved person may change gradually because new experiences lead them to a different present and expected future than the one they shared with the deceased (Charmaz & Milligan, 2006: p. 534) .
2.2. Anger
It is a form of affect that manifests itself in the form of turning into a tormented situation without any concrete justification, starting from a simple annoyance just because of dislike. In other words, anger is an instinctive reaction to pain (Jones, 2016: p. 49) . Anger is the state of not being able to control an injustice suffered. According to Yeager (1997: p. 170) , anger is “a feeling that tells us that all is not well in our relationship with other people, groups or the world around us”. Anger, just like in the spiral of power relations, is a state of being dependent on others and a way of always being important. Anger is never felt towards something that is not important.
According to Schieman (2006: p. 494) , anger is the feeling that “perhaps more than any other emotion, we know when we feel (or understand) it” (Schieman, 2006: p. 494) . According to Kassino and Sukhodolsky (1995: p. 7 cited in Schieman, 2006: p. 494 ), anger is characterised by certain cognitive and perceptual distortions and deficits (misevaluations, minimisations and blame, attributions of injustice, avoidability and/or intentionality), subjective labelling, physiological changes, action predispositions to participate in socially constructed and reinforced organised behavioural scenarios. Ellsworth and Scherer (2003: p. 575, cited in Schieman, 2006: p. 494 ) argue that “there are many types of anger experiences rather than a single type of anger”. Spielberger et al. (1985: p. 28, cited in Schieman, 2006: p. 494 ) defined anger as “an emotional state consisting of irritation, resentment, or rage and increased activation or arousal of the autonomic nervous system”.
These definitions indicate that anger processes have a number of components. Sociologists are often interested in individuals’ perceptual differences in relation to anger. For example, in recent research anger is operationalised in terms of. It is manifested by emotions ranging from mild to more severe (irritable, angry) and behavioural expressions (shouting at someone) (Mirowsky and Ross 2003a; Schieman 1999, 2005a; cited in Schieman, 2006: pp. 494-495 ).
Emotions can be detected in non-symbolic verbal gestures as well as in words. Labov and Fanshel (1977) and Pittenger et al. (1960) have described extra-linguistic cues (Retzinger, 1991: p. 72) . These gestures are 1) high: the level of the voice increases, 2) heavy stress: increased volume and stress on certain words, 3) staccato: marked breaks between successive tones, 4) singsong: repeated pitch and stress pattern, 5) buzz: nasalised utterance.
Social contexts influence visual and auditory anger states and processes. Disturbing cognitions and affect, physiological reactions or bodily sensations and expressions or gestures are elements of anger processes. Ekman and Friesen and Izard list these visual elements as follows: 1) eyebrows lowered and drawn together, with vertical lines appearing between them, 2) narrowed and tense eyelids with a hard, fixed gaze; eyes may have a bulging appearance, 3) mouth closed, lips pressed together, corners straight or down, or mouth open but tense and square. The closed mouth position may occur to contain shouting or hostility, open-mouthed anger occurs during speech (Ekman & Friesen, 1975, 1978; Izard, 1971) , 4) hard, direct glare, 5) leaning towards the other in a forced posture, 6) clenched fists, fist shaking, pounding movements (Retzinger, 1991: p. 75) .
The target of anger is usually a loved one, friend or acquaintance. The aim of anger is usually to change the circumstances that led to the provocation; anger is therefore constructive rather than malicious (Swanson, 1985: p. 314) . One of the most salient causes of anger is that it involves direct or indirect actions that threaten an individual’s self-concept, identity or public image; insults, belittling and reproach represent these threatening actions (Canary et al., 1998) ; collectively, these sites of anger provocation involve the perception of social conditions or objective circumstances. The basic institutionalized social roles embedded in work and family contexts enable structure and organization for the conditions that expose individuals to sites of anger provocation. And also basic social statuses such as gender, age and social class regulate anger processes (Schieman, 2006: p. 495) .
Characteristically, anger is intersubjective. For example, when a child misbehaves, when a spouse undermines us, when a colleague interferes with what we are doing, it becomes an urgent matter to punish the other in the sense of taking back one’s own right or tying the other to a nail. Oatley and Jenkins call this kind of anger normative anger (Oatley & Jenkins, 2019: pp. 176-177) . At the intersubjective level, emotion is an active negotiation process in which the intersubjective relationship is determined: emotions drive the actual outcomes expected from themselves or others. Anger is a good example of such social emotions, because they are fundamentally communicative and directed towards relationships. Anger aims to do something to change the behavior of others, especially when one feels that one has the means to do so. From a relationship-harmony perspective, anger towards someone indicates that the relationship with that person is still ongoing and that their behavior can change. Therefore, anger tells that the relationship is in danger (Löwe & Parkinson, 2014: pp. 129-130) .
For most people, the overwhelming characteristic of anger is that it is short-lived and usually not very accommodating to those who express it or to those who are targeted. Nevertheless, although very infrequently, even ordinary people can have serious bouts of anger in the form of a provoked affect that can lead to destructive bodily injury and sometimes even murder (Oatley & Jenkins, 2019: p. 177) .
What is the role/effect of anger in human relationships? Anger provides drama; anger magnifies and expands drama. For this reason, many television programmes, cinema and theatre use various forms of anger as script elements. Often, in television programmes, anger is created between “actors”, providing an opportunity for viewers to witness the psycho-social effects of reality. Anger can be personally and socially destructive, but it can also inspire and mobilize individuals to change the undesirable circumstances of their lives (Schieman, 2006: p. 493) .
As social cognitive perspectives of anger, it points to four types of emotions in the form of disappointment (undesirable consequences), resentment (consequences perceived by others), condemnation (blame) and anger (undesirable consequences). There is ongoing debate about whether anger includes or is conceptually different from emotions such as frustration, reproach and resentment (Berkowitz & Harmon-Jones 2004; Smith & Kirby 2004 cited in Schieman, 2006 ).
Socio-cultural-economic-political forms of socialization “teach subjects how to encode flight or fight responses” (Jones, 2016: p. 49) . If a person can feel anger in a healthy way that does not harm others, he/she can release it. However, people who come from cultures where anger/anger is suppressed have generally not learnt how to do this. In field studies, it has been found that anger/resentment is typically aroused when an unjustified mistake is made or personal expectations are violated (Swanson, 1985: p. 314) .
The main opinions pointing to both positive and negative functions of anger are as follows: in James Averill’s (1982) study, two-thirds of the participants perceived this emotion as a negative experience, while 70 per cent evaluated it as a positive experience. At the same time, anger functions positively as a problem solver in discussions between angry people (Oatley & Jenkins, 2019: p. 179) . Kemper (1991: p. 334) claims that anger “helps the organism to take action to resist deprivation of vital resources” (2019: p. 179). Shaver et al. (1987: p. 1078) state that angry people feel themselves “more warrior against the cause of anger or stronger and more energetic to get rid of this emotion”. Also, angry people feel more powerful (Berkowitz and Harmon-Jones 2004 as cited in Schieman, 2006: p. 508 ). Schieman himself says that anger helps people to take action against other people or negative circumstances (Schieman, 2006: p. 508) .
Ben-Ze’ev (2000, cited in TenHouten, 2007: p. 41 ) argues that anger, like other emotions, has a socially constructive function when it is in the right proportion, for example when overstimulated; Kemp and Strongman (1995, cited in TenHouten, 2007: p. 41 ) note that anger “accompanies feelings of unjust victimisation and is directed at those in power (men), and in turn often provokes anger of a more powerful and empowering kind” (TenHouten, 2007: p. 41) .
More recently, in Western societies, work on anger in organisations has emphasised anger as an inappropriate instrument of power. Parents have begun to encourage children to acknowledge and discuss their anger. In addition, the management of anger and other emotions was emphasised. Thus, both men and women were now brought into contact with their own anger. In other words, expression rather than suppression of anger was encouraged and anger was suggested to play a key role in solving problems (TenHouten, 2007: pp. 41-42) . In these studies, the social and cultural structure has a determining position in emphasising the positive or negative functions of anger.
To summarise, socio-demographic characteristics (gender, age, education, economy, having children, marital status, etc.) are determinant among the reasons that mobilise the feeling of anger. In addition to this, forensic medicine and legal institutions are two important independent variables that decrease or increase the degree of anger, which is manifested as an indicator of the feeling of pain experienced. The way anger is presented in daily life is a learnt situation related to class, national, cultural, social, power, status, authority and criminal injustice.
2.3. Despair
It is as if what constitutes us is completely transparent and therefore imperceptible, and as if the only appearances we can recognise are the cracks and fracture planes in that transparent matrix
Bateson, 19794
Although helplessness is sometimes described as an emotion, Lazarus (1991: p. 83) thinks that there is little reason to describe helplessness as an emotion. Helplessness/despair, like frustration, refers to an individual-environment relationship, a specific loss and the generalisation of the effects of that irreversible loss to the whole of life, which makes it existential (1991: p. 248).
Feeling helpless about a particular issue does not mean feeling that way about everything, unless we over-extend the meaning of the word to cover our life in its entirety. In reality, unless we make it clear that we really mean despair about the possibility of living a fulfilling life, we must limit despair to a particular outcome (Lazarus, 1999: p. 660) .
Hopelessness often occurs in moments of blocked paths to goals, which can lead to confusion about goals (Weingarten, 2007: p. 16) . The role of hopelessness is to resist isolation. The task of those who witness a sense of helplessness is linked to this. We must reject indifference in the face of disasters and tragedies that occur again and again in our homes and on our planet. Indifference exerts its own seductive pull and pulls us up by the string, first with our sense of inadequacy, then with our sense of being overwhelmed. Recognising these sticky strands is the first step in rejecting indifference (Weingarten, 2007: p. 15) .
How often is helplessness useful? Just as we can get along with only a small fraction of the pain and anxiety our evolved systems provide us, we can probably do the same or better with a much less low mood. Thus, low mood can be a source of adaptation, but it can also often be unnecessary or harmful.
Despair sometimes provides individual benefits in order to get out of troubled and pessimistic processes. However, it maintains the status quo in the social-cultural order. Nesse says that this is a paradox, because at the individual level hope is fundamentally conservative, while at the social level it deeply threatens those above (Nesse, 1999: p. 463 ).
Some studies on hope/despair; William Snyder (1996, cited in Lazarus, 1999: p. 674 ) investigated the tendency or characteristic aspects of hope. Snyder et al. (1991: p. 570, cited in Lazarus, 1999: p. 674 ) developed scales to measure hope in adults and children and expressed their approach to hope as follows (cited in Lazarus, 1999: p. 674 ):
We propose that hope has two main interrelated elements. First, we hypothesise that hope is fuelled by a perception of successful goal-related agency. The agency component refers to a sense of successful determination to achieve past, present and future goals. Second, we hypothesise that hope is influenced by the perceived utility of successful goal-related paths. The path component refers to the sense of being able to generate successful plans to achieve goals.
Stephanie Paterson (2010) using the lens of women’s resistance, it provided a theoretical framework for analyzing both the links between social position and vulnerability to abuse and the impact of anti-violence policy at the household level. It also explained the ways in which policies intersect with existing social relations and their effects.
Warren C. Lyons (2006) , on the other hand, draws attention to the reciprocity of violence (whether directed against the other or against oneself) in order to reveal a reality that cannot be contemplated, although it surrounds each of us like water surrounds the sea. Angus Fletcher (1999) , by explaining helplessness with historical, religious (Christianity and Judaism) and literary works, emphasized the historical origin of these two feelings and emphasized the importance of these two feelings as a form of belief in the future. He also pointed out that despair started with secularization.
3. Methods and Techniques
The ontological and epistemological positioning of this study has clear implications for methodology. Such a study sought to answer the question of how such a study could “generate insights specific to individuals” (Deuze, 2012 cited in Yardley, 2017 ), while taking into account the broader social and cultural context of lives in the digital public sphere (Twitter). For this reason, qualitative (observation, content analysis) and quantitative (semi-structured questionnaire and tweet counts) research techniques were used together in the study, as they complement each other. Thus, on the one hand, the content analysis of the data and questionnaires embodied in the scientific literature was carried out; on the other hand, the content analysis of the tweets and photographs was carried out. Under the main code of Panopticon scheme; Panoptic action (sexual violence against women and femicides), digital public space (Twitter), Panoptic effects (negative emotions/trauma and causes and solutions of sexual violence against women and femicides) were coded as sub-codes.
3.1. Data Collection Techniques
In the study, 79491 tweets and semi-structured questionnaire were used for quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis was conducted on 14214 individual tweets sorted in terms of impact. While collecting the data, the number of tweets with the hastags #şuleçetiçinadalet, #ŞuleÇetiçinAdaletistiyoruz, #neclasaglam (Dokuzhaber, Location 6), #şiddetehayır, #kadıncinayetlerinidurduracağız, #kadıncinayetleri, #feministbirisi, #feminism, #equality, #cerenozdemir, and #cerenözdemiriçinadalet, which are dependent variables, were taken into consideration. The original tweets were extracted from the tweets marked with these tags and the texts of the tweets in the sample group were first identified in the MAXQDA computer software programme. In addition, considering the fact that Twitter provides incomplete information and has a short-term effect, a semi-structured questionnaire with eleven questions was applied (in order to increase the objectivity of the research). Using the snowball method, some interviewees were interviewed via google questionnaire and some interviewees were interviewed face-to-face. In this way, it was tried to determine the permanent emotional and behavioural effects/damages of violence.
3.2. Data Analysing Techniques
In the evaluation of the obtained data, mixed techniques were used together. Firstly, the frequency analysis of the words in the tweets in the sample group was performed and as a result of this analysis, the tweets with the highest frequency were coded by content analysis method. This coding was done by utilising both coding with prede termined concepts and coding with concepts extracted from the data. First, concepts were identified based on the data, and then content analysis of these concepts was conducted. The visuals (tweet map and photographs) pointed out by the concepts were analysed by making use of narrative methods used in visual sociology.
3.3. Research Questions
1) To determine what kinds of trace are left in the social memory by the emotions of pain, anger and helplessness left in the social memory by the tweets posted on Twitter?
2) How does the discussion of these emotions on Twitter reconstruct people’s worlds of meaning (control of emotions) about violence against women and femicides?
3.4. Finding
According to Figure 1, the Panoptic effect/emotion of pain/grief (189 tweets) code expresses the banality of evil and anger at the role of the perpetrator trying to justify himself in order to avoid punishment, that pain can be relieved by sharing, that there is no end to the act of killing; that most of this emotion remains hidden, that there are heavier pains and cannot be spoken; on the other hand, it is a very painful thing that such a violent issue is discussed on social media. In fact, it is also reflected in the picture that Bentham’s political discourse of “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” is not realised through the widespread use of repressive methods. The main reason for this is that the pain that everyone tries to avoid is psychological insofar as it requires restraint. Therefore, it is not possible for people to be happy in a society where coercion threatens everyone and can occur at any time (Leroy, 2012: pp. 143-144) .
According to Table 1, the religious curse felt by a father who lost his daughter in the aftermath of speeches that trivialise the sense of suffering; the helplessness felt after the loss and the anger and sadness felt at the lack of criminal sanctions; reminding those who operate the legal mechanism to fulfil their legal citizenship responsibility and both anger and resentment towards the legal actors; the feeling of sadness and pain that the sense of pain felt after the loss cannot be compensated and that this pain will never be alleviated unless criminal justice is achieved, are manifested in severe forms. Here, it can be said that emotions are related to each other and one emotion is both the cause and the consequence of the other (permeability of emotions).
In the photo visuals in Figure 2, it is seen that a father who lost his daughter,
![]()
Figure 1. The model describing the panoptic effect of femicide on the social pain/mourning.
![]()
Table 1. Tweets related to the pain/mourning effect.
![]()
Figure 2. Image describing pain/mourning.
the perpetrator and his relatives legitimised the act of killing for which they were responsible and blamed the father as the perpetrator of this crime (attribution of the responsibility of protection to the father). It is expected that being subjected to this kind of accusation will deepen the wound of a father who is in pain/grieving. In other words, the father is pushed into the process of pain and mourning for the second time. In the other two images, the mothers who lost their daughters are reflected with their painful tears, asking for the perpetrators to be hanged (fulfilment of criminal justice). It can be said that instead of the silence of the male gender (fatherhood role) experiencing the feeling of losing their daughter, women experience these feelings in a more expressive way (the feeling of pain/mourning has different representations according to gender). At the same time, there is an emphasis on the ‘protective fatherhood role’ even in the case of the murder of a daughter who was not guilty of any crime. It can be said that the grieving mothers, on the other hand, expect the perpetrators of their daughters who were brutally murdered to be punished in the same way (a lethal form of punishment—hanging) from the official judicial system and thus, they think that their pain can be alleviated somehow. Mothers and fathers want a solution in the form of punishing the perpetrator with the death penalty (substitution) as a way of coping with the feeling of pain as a result of a very important loss in their lives (filial grief) and moving on with their lives.
In Table 2, there are expressions about the causes of fatal violence and solution suggestions. When the tweets are analysed in order, the following can be said. As the legal patriarchal structural cause, the blaming of the victim by the law; anger at the injustice in the legal mechanism; anger at the helplessness of patriarchal legal subjects judging women (punishment of the victim subject) are reflected. As a legal solution, it is thought that the perpetrators (murderers) should be executed and that it would be appropriate to dismiss the forensic medicine and the defence lawyer. In this context, the problematic of femicide, which is a “social problem”, points to “three types of failures specific to the capitalist system”: the failures of the neoliberal market, the patriarchal neoliberal state and the conservative neoliberal civil society. The killings of young girls give rise to processes of gender inequality that emerge in a social configuration based on the commodification of their lives and conflictual problems that need to be systematically corrected. This points to the sharp interrelatedness between the reasons why young girls are killed and the failures of the neoliberal market, the patriarchal neoliberal state and conservative neoliberal civil society.
The photographs in Figure 3 show young girls who were torn from their lives at a very young age by hegemonic masculinity(s). In the 21st century, even the inclusion of a sentence that the struggle for a world in which no one is killed by barbaric male violence without any right, deliberately and intentionally, is very important as it is a concrete indicator of how serious the dimension of violence against women has become and that it is moving backwards.
In Figure 4, it is seen that there are situation determinations and solution suggestions regarding the current political and social structure. As the current real situation determinations; the real definition of the human being is made and it is seen that the human species should be avoided as a warning and the expressions of astonishment and contempt for this species are included. In addition, the reality of the killing of innocent women is pointed out and the expression of
![]()
Table 2. Tweets related to the anger effect.
![]()
Figure 3. Image describing anger emotion.
![]()
Figure 4. Code co-occurrence model of the panoptic effect of despair (conflicting codes).
drawing attention to the fears of women is included. As legal and political solution suggestions, there are statements that women do not want to die in cities and streets and that women should be protected.
In the tweets in Table 3, there are various realised feelings of determination of the social patriarchy. Emotions of sadness and shame in the face of helplessness as a sense of situational determination about time and human beings; feelings of helplessness with anger about the frequency of femicide and the brutal structural situation; feelings of helplessness with anger about hegemonic male violence to which women are exposed in every situation; feelings of helplessness and sadness about the fact that the women who tweeted had tweeted for the woman who was killed by the same perpetrator of violence before she died. Emotions of helplessness combined with anger regarding the gendered accusations of the murdered girls and finally, the emergence of a sense of hope from the impasse of helplessness despite the dangerous world and human beings. In this context, helplessness is not a negative emotion, contrary to the general acceptance, but a positive
![]()
Table 3. Tweets related to the anger effect.
emotion that moves women towards new solutions. As a characteristic of emotions, it can also be said that one emotion can be the cause and consequence of another and that various emotions occur simultaneously.
The photographs in Figure 5 show the heartbreaking drama of the murdered girls with smiling faces and the suffering mothers. Unfortunately, words cannot convey the feelings of helplessness and sadness of not being able to do anything with this pain. Social sensitivities describe emotional patterns arising from accepted and acceptable forms of feeling. Sensitivities are produced and reproduced by the contingent and structural effects of various social structures. In other words, the emotions of young girls who are murdered before they can fulfil their dreams and the emotions of desperate mothers hugging the graves of their lost daughters intersect. The neoliberal subject invests in “human capital” (Becker, 1993) in order to adapt to the changes brought about by competition. Neoliberalism is particular, it means different things to different people depending on one’s point of view (Davies & Chisholm, 2018) . For neoliberalism, the subject is only autonomous, its goals are only self-determined in the most general sense, especially because the subject must adapt to the changing demands of competitive markets—in fact, this is what neoliberal market logic demands of the subject. Competition produces winners and losers, so the concrete qualities of the subject must be flexible and changeable. For neoliberalism, vulnerability is important in terms of risk. It is something that needs to be defined and controlled. Winners and losers are subjected to a “brutal culling” (Sassen, 2010) . Losers, who have likely assumed the risk of entering the social space mediated by competition, are responsible for their own outcomes and may be ignored or discarded (Davies & Chisholm, 2018) . The murdered girls are also likely to be on the losers’ side and are seen as responsible for the acts of “killing” by the defense lawyer and relatives who blame them.
Figure 6 shows the relationality in which anger (1730), pain (189) and helplessness (208) codes are formed together. These tweets are followed by anger towards social and legal sexist discrimination (legitimization of rape and protection of the rapist, 118 tweets; opposition to the concern of covering up the murder, 107 tweets; subject or perpetrator on trial, 107 tweets; injustice, 107 tweets;
![]()
Figure 5. Image describing the emotion of despair.
![]()
Figure 6. Code co-occurrence model of pain, anger and despair according to twitter us.
blaming the victim, 8 tweets); social collapse (destruction of morality and conscience, 5 tweets); patriarchal social structure just being a woman, 9 tweets; patriarchal mentality, 292 tweets, traditional and new media (16 tweets), tweets posted as a warning to create awareness of social sensitivity (general awareness raising, 678 tweets; silence/staying silent, 91 tweets; reminding/reminding/keeping the collective memory alive, 118 tweets); ensuring injustice that exists outside the legal framework and using the murderer for the common good on behalf of humanity (ensuring individual justice, 253 tweets; applying the same violence to defence lawyers, 22 tweets; silencing criminals, 247 tweets; execution, 424 tweets; castration, 175 tweets; using them as guinea pigs, 3 tweets); ensuring punishment within the framework of law, 67 tweets; women’s political demand as a citizenship right (women’s demand for freedom, 75 tweets). In addition, based on these 8 categorical distinctions; tweets about the structural causes of gendered social, political and legal discrimination; tweets about demanding a change in the form of punishment (as a requirement of the right to citizenship and specific solutions to end violence against women and femicide). In other words, Figure 6 reflects tweets about individual and structural causes of femicide and suggested solutions. Reading the data in Figure 6, it can be said that the perpetrator’s (murderer’s) crime of violence against women, knowing that the victim will be blamed and can benefit from a good behaviour discount in the patriarchal legal and social structure, sets a precedent for other perpetrators and encourages them to rape and kill (the continuous increase in fatal violence against women and the emphasis on the injustice of punishment commensurate with the crime are also reflected in the tweets).
4. Conclusion and Assessment
The main conclusions (based on the data obtained) of this study, which deals with the problematic of how three types of emotional expressions, which include what women, as the subjects of political and legal citizenship, want for their desire not for freedom but only for their desire to survive as alive and their expectations for urgent solutions, are reflected in the digital public sphere and how these emotional expressions find a response in society, can be summarised as follows:
The three emotions reflected on Twitter (pain, anger and helplessness) are closely related to each other and to other emotions and make the reality of lethal violence against women visible in all its clarity. At the same time, they provide lawmakers and practitioners with concrete rather than abstract categories for the social policies they urgently need to develop (answer to the first question of the research).
Regarding the second question, which is how the discussion of these emotions on Twitter constructs people’s worlds of meaning (control of emotions) about violence against women and femicides, the following can be said:
It can be said that the discussions in the digital public sphere (Twitter) sometimes have a dual and sometimes a triple view.
While a part of the society intensely criticises the fact that these discussions are held in the digital environment, another part of the society agrees that they are informed about the deadly violence against women; that the real situation is very painful and urgent measures should be taken with concrete examples instead of believing in abstract categories. A third group expressed their general criticism by emphasizing the horror of savagery, humanity, time and space. In that case, what needs to be done to end this deadly violence? The legal, political and social spheres need to prevent the socio-genetic transmission of such negative emotions (pain, anger and helplessness) through cultural codes, to ensure criminal justice and to ease the social conscience by punishing the perpetrator rather than the victim (temporary but primary solution). Because through public security, it is imperative to re-establish the damaged public security.
It is necessary to socialise women as subjects through a new socialisation process that will change their socio-cultural coding and living habits that warn them against the occurrence and possibility of violence. In other words, they should be socialised into neoliberal subjects in accordance with the neoliberal management strategy (in order not to be in the losers’ club as fragile subjects and also not to be barbarically deprived of their lives). At the same time, they must be reminded that the social is itself a field of competition.
Finally, emotional tweets about femicides should be prevented from presenting women as vulnerable subjects as a “pity and emotional exploitation”. In addition, it is necessary to emphasise that it is imperative to implement proposals and social policies that will urgently produce solutions rather than the structural causes and effects of deadly violence against women.
NOTES
1Reading the Panoptic Effects of Femicide on Twitter: The Case of Turkey" was supported by Canakkale Onsekiz Mart University Scientific Research Projects Coordination Unit. Project Number: 3186.
2The Panoptic can be interpreted in relation to the root idea of the Panopticon, referring to the more concrete, specific and fundamental characteristics of the project, whereas the Panoptical operates at an abstract and higher level. The Panoptic can therefore be interpreted as a description of the qualities attributed to the Panopticon, mediated through Foucault (Brunon-Ernst & Tusseau, 2012: p. 186) .
3 Walsh, 2012: p. 77 .
4 Shuda and Just, 2007 .