Feride Baycan

Feride Baycan was in born in Turkey and came to London in 1989. She talks about publishing a women’s magazine, dir-dir, and about a women’s discussion group.

Listen to Feride (in Turkish, mp3, 692kb)

Transcript

Read transcript in Turkish (pdf, 12kb)

'"Dir dir" ("Nag nag") was published for two years, three years, sorry - by forcing it we managed the 3rd year. It came out from 1995 until 1998. I don’t know how many issues there were in total, the journal was published according to its own cycle and therefore they were coming out every two or three months - I think it was published either four or five issues each year…

'We did not want to be the spokesperson of the feminist movement. We wanted to be women who were living their own experiences. This is because all of us have different kinds of feminism. Most of us did not have feminism anyway. We wanted to live our own experiences. I mean we did not have anything to prove to people and we were not trying to convert people. We just wanted to write. Just wanted to write our experience, so be it.  We wanted to publish a journal for that reason…

'We thought if we were under a certain title of feminism then we would not be able to live our own natural experiences. We said no, we should be a small group that was going to work in our small box. Therefore ours was not a mass movement. We were printing the journal. We were printing like 400 copies. We were actually selling 300, 350 copies out of 400…

'In every edition, there was a subject. Let’s say, censorship and pornography was for one of the editions. Different feminist approaches, women and ‘isms’ was another one. There was an edition about women and art. Well, everybody used to be able to write on any subject, no matter what point of view or beliefs they had to make their point. Or we would have further discussion on a particular subject, then they could all write about it, either as a discussion paper or a research report in the journal.'

Copyright Evelyn Oldfield Unit