Screens of Satire and Commons of Resistance: The Place and Role of Humor in the Gezi Park Protests of Turkey

This article analyzes protesters’ satire during the Gezi Park uprising that ignited in Turkey during the summer of 2013. We examine the physical and virtual spaces of satire and their interaction through an intervention that draws on DeLuca and Peeples’ (2002) notion of the “public screen” as an adaptation to Habermas’ public sphere. Both the notion of the public screen and its model of dissemination merit further consideration in the era of social media, and this is illustrated nowhere more clearly than in the crucible of the Gezi Park protests, where street-level satire attained much of its currency through the recirculation of social media. Though the results of this synergy were various, we focus here on the satirical humor generated as part of what we call a creative commons of resistance—a corpus of shared images and phrases that evolved over the course of the protests, contributing to the flavor and the fervor of the movement, and that continue to manifest in resistance to Turkey’s authoritarian regime to this day.