Books
Books
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Fighting for the River: Gender, Body and Agency in Environmental Struggles (University of California Press, 2023)
Fighting for the River: Gender, Body and Agency in Environmental Struggles (University of California Press, 2023)
Fighting for the River portrays women's intimate, embodied relationships with river waters and explores how those relationships embolden local communities' resistance to private run-of-the-river hydroelectric power plants in Turkey. Building on extensive ethnographic research, Özge Yaka develops a body-centered, phenomenological approach to women's environmental activism and combines it with a relational ontological perspective. Fighting for the River takes the human body as a starting point to explore the connection between lived experience and nonhuman environments, treating bodily senses and affects as the media of more-than-human connectivity and political agency.
Reviews
Reviews
"Özge Yaka has written a beautiful book: ethnographically rich, theoretically innovative, emotionally profound. Fighting for the River is a must-read for feminists, environmentalists, students of Turkey and of neoliberalism–for all who seek to integrate history and body, activism and affect, critique and empathetic understanding." Nancy Fraser, New School for Social Research
"A compelling and important account of environmental struggle. In Fighting for the River, Yaka develops an original approach to thinking lifeworlds as embodied, emergent, relational, and political."
James Ash, Professor of Technology and Society, Newcastle University
"Yaka interweaves high-powered academic research, embodied knowledge, and firsthand narratives to reveal the real story behind the search for socio-ecological justice in energy production. This book is a must-read for both academics and anyone interested in our common future."
Ingrid Leman Stefanovic, editor of The Wonder of Water and Ethical Water Stewardship.
"It is a profound, moving meditation on how we might better coexist with others in times of ecological crisis and struggle. In its passionate care for how worlds are built with others, the book demonstrates how relational thinking might help us to rethink today's pressing ecological problems."
Ben Anderson, Professor of Geography, Durham University
"The book offers a nuanced theoretical elaboration of contemporary research on environmental justice, presenting a relational ontological approach that emphasizes the social, corporeal, and existential embeddedness of humans and nonhumans, thus going beyond frameworks of economic and cultural valuations and dichotomies of ecology versus environment. Overall, this monograph should be required reading for scholars of environmental governance and politics in Turkey and the Middle East and, beyond the region, environmental anthropologists, environmental sociologists, political ecologies, and scholars in the wider environmental humanities and social sciences."
— H-Net
Annelik Kitabı: Deneyim, Sadakat, Dönüşüm (The Book of Motherhood: Experience, Fidelity, Transformation, published in Turkish by İletişim Yayınları, 2026)
Annelik Kitabı: Deneyim, Sadakat, Dönüşüm (The Book of Motherhood: Experience, Fidelity, Transformation, published in Turkish by İletişim Yayınları, 2026)
Motherhood is not a program, an instinct, or a sacred duty ‘installed’ on a woman at the moment of birth (or adoption); rather, it is a transformative process, an experience, and a state of constant becoming that unfolds within the unique relationship formed with the baby or child. It is precisely the situation where an ‘other’, who is not quite an other, draws out another self, a ‘mother-self’, from within you. This state of becoming is, of course, a conflicted, colliding state. It is a state burdened by the strain of encountering an ‘other’ who is in a constant state of need, who constantly interrupts, dissolves, and fragments the old existence, the old self, and of being responsible for that other. (...) So, what happens if we take this destabilization—or this state of becoming—seriously instead of waiting for it to pass; what if we allow this experience to seep in through our skin, into our very being, to transform us at our core? In other words, what happens if we cultivate a fidelity to motherhood, if we see it as a call, an invitation to a new subjectivity?
Reviews and Endorsements
This work not only fully grasps feminism’s troubled relationship with motherhood, but also shows how we can rethink it and repoliticize it in today’s world. Drawing on feminist thought and psychoanalysis, it both narrates a singular experience and makes it possible for other women, as both mothers and daughters, to understand their own lives and transform them into experience...To allow the experience of motherhood to “seep into our skin,” to transform it by passing all that milk, blood, tears, memories, and traces through one’s body. Özge does not pass through motherhood; rather, she passes motherhood through herself.
Aksu Bora, Foreword for Annelik Kitabı
I’ve read many things about motherhood. Yet none of the texts I’ve read have struck me and held me as powerfully as Özge Yaka’s The Book of Motherhood—Experience, Fidelity, Transformation.One of the most striking aspects of The Book of Motherhood, in my view, is Özge Yaka’s self-reflexivity and the way she brings together what she draws from her own experience of motherhood—through autobiographical threads—with theories and examples from different fields such as feminism, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literature in a highly compelling dialogue. It is a comprehensive feminist text that brings theory and experience vividly to life.
The Book of Motherhood gave names to certain feelings I had been scattering around for a long time, but had never had the courage to look back at and gather. It is not a “how-to” book. It is a companion for those who wish to turn back to their motherhood and themselves—with all their ambivalence, their “conflicted and colliding states”—to examine motherhood in all its dimensions, to discuss its possibilities, and to consider the transformative potential it points to.
Burcu Şenel Alpuğan, K24 – Book, Culture, Critique web portal
Özge Yaka sets out to challenge received ideas about motherhood in The Book of Motherhood: Experience, Fidelity, and Transformation, by openly sharing her own experiences and exposing the myth of motherhood.
Seda Yılmaz, Aposto Digital Media Platform
How is it possible for motherhood to become a lived experience rather than something that simply “passes by”? How can a woman continue to live her sense of self and her womanhood without submitting to an ascetic moral code, yet also without abandoning motherhood? How can she develop a form of “relational motherhood” together with her child and other close relationships? What do feminist theory, psychoanalysis, and literature have to say here, and how can they be of help? In the historically tense relationship between femininity and motherhood, this book explores the possibilities of “feminist motherhood,” and its importance is great not only for mothers and women, but also for fathers, partners, and all caregivers.
Onur Eylül Kara, Artıalan Digital Learning Platform
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