A Generational and Gender Perspective on the Tent Protest

The 2011 protest is analyzed in generational and gender terms. The common assertion that it was a middle-class protest is rejected in favor of the argument, which draws on Karl Mannheim, that the phenomenon is based on the experience of diverse generational units. This experience, which transcends defined categories, is shared by all members of the generation that grew up in an environment that encourages trends to depoliticization, individualism, privatization, and the neoliberal discourse. Many of them were swept up by these trends, by choice or otherwise, and incorporated them into their daily lives. The protest is a product of these formative processes and an expression of the disappointment with them and their latent promises. The protest should be seen as a new clear-headedness on the part of apolitical generational units that are looking for a way to interpret their life experiences and to propose a new language to give meaning to this experience. In the process, the dispositions that led to the protest encountered the feminist discourse and feminist activism that have developed since the 1990s, which enabled them to create a language and tools for a different type of thinking. A multidimensional and process-oriented analysis is offered, one that is sensitive to the purging processes—that is, an analysis that defines the protest as a new phenomenon while at the same time pointing to the fusion of the diverse and sometimes contradictory components that exist within it.