Girls' education and women’s public spheres
ELİF EKİN AKŞİT
This paper aims to evaluate present girls’ education campaigns from a historical point of view. Many different forms of household education of girls by women is rarely a part of histories of public education. By taking this unacknowledged form of history into consideration, girls education can be imagined in wider spheres than pre-determined national education patterns that reproduce the existing gender regime while promising to transform it. Thinking of girls’ education in a context where women’s knowledge is acknowledged and women’s public spheres are affirmed, will also require rething patriarchy in its old and new forms.
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Kemalism, professionalism and patriarchal manifestations
GÖKÇE BAYRAKÇEKEN TÜZEL
This article aims to scrutinize how patriarchy has come to surface in the occupational and personal experiences of the first generation of professional women in Turkey. The clues that I have found to map these appearances contribute to definitions of partiarchy by means of life-narratives. Notions such as “the spirit of the Republic,” and Kemalism can be understood in the context of how professional women that have started their careers in the 1930s and 1940s strongly believe in and shape their lives upon. The strong relation between professionalism and Kemalism in Turkey and the way that this reflects onto professional women have induced me to rethink what defines patriarchy, as we all should think of contextual frameworks with a variety of experiences in mind.
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Gender in relation to power and resistance: A school ethnography
FEVZİYE SAYILAN - ALEV ÖZKAZANÇ
This article aims to understand the relations of power, resistance and gender in a public high school in Turkey by means of a critical ethnographic research conducted in 2005. It suggests that the neo-liberal transformation of Turkey within last twenty years resulted in a structural crisis of education whereby public schools have been reduced to function like a ‘correction house’ taming the ‘unruly’ young people. This constitutes the root cause of the acute crisis of authority and resistance in high schools. As we concluded from our research, this resistance culture is mainly of masculine character. Consequently, the role of the school in the reproduction of gender identities is principally realised through provoking a masculine resistance culture, the ‘emancipatory’ dimension of which is overwhelmed by its oppressive character.
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Male dominance, cultural violence and law
AYÇA KURTOĞLU
While the link between male dominance and law seems obvious given the efforts to transform laws in order to achieve gender equality, the link between law and violence as a justification of gender-based inequalities is often much less clear. This paper argues that law itself can construct gender inequalities as well as justify and normalize male dominance even when its primary objective is the achievement of equality. With a focus on the issue of rape, the paper examines the Penal Code(s) of Turkey in order to elucidate some of the ways in which law can be seen to legitimize male dominance. More specifically, the relevant articles of the Penal Code(s) are treated as texts in which an androcentric understanding of sexuality prevails. To shed additional light on the link between law and male dominance, the paper employs Johan Galtung’s concepts of “direct”, “structural” and “cultural” violence. With the help of this violence typology, it is shown how the law makers’ objective of creating more freedom and equality through the regulation of direct violence (rape) can maintain inequality unless the corresponding structural violence (male dominance) and cultural violence (legal legitimization) are also attended to. Drawing on Galtung’s idea of “peace by peaceful means”, the article concludes that all forms of violent sexuality can be eliminated only through the use of nonviolent methods on the one hand, and a transformation in understandings of sexuality towards greater plurality and equality on the other.
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Police sub-culture as the manifestation of state strategies: An evaluation of the hegemonic discourses prevalent within the police organization in post-1960 Turkey
BİRİZ BERKSOY
This paper aims to scrutinize the sub-culture of the police organization in post- 1960 Turkey. It is an accepted fact that the police officers experience a socialization phase after they join the police cadres and consequently internalize the dominant norms, values and social codes which constitute the sub-culture of the organization. These norms and codes crystallize in the everyday practices of these officers. Examination of the journals published by the police organization in Turkey as well as the interviews conducted by the author in 2005 reveal that the subculture of the police is marked by nationalist-conservatism which incorporates mainly the fervent endorsement of Turkish identity and the Sunni sect of Islam, a recurring emphasis placed on the “perpetuity of the state” as well as the “homogeneity of the social body”, a self-representation as an altruistic “public order army” and an increasing division between “citizens” and those called “terrorists/ criminals”. This orientation is combined with the “enemization” of certain groups. In the 1960-80 period while the groups labeled as “anarchists/communists” were subjected to this “enemization” process, in the post-1980 period it was expanded to include ethnic/religious groups which pose a challenge to the political power in addition to the leftist groups and certain trade unions as well as the poverty ridden neighborhoods of the big cities which are criminalized because of the relative increases in the crime rates. These neighborhoods are mostly constituted by Gypsies and Kurds the latter of whose ranks were swelled because of the forced internal migration waves caused by the war waged, from 1984 onwards, in the Southeastern provinces against the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party). In the 1990s, certain discursive elements based on human rights and public relations were added to this legacy. This sub-culture of the police in Turkey is examined in the paper by theorizing the police as the visualized state power on the street having wide discretionary powers and a social role of “conducting the conduct” of individuals in accordance with the “subject positions” endorsed by the state. It is argued in the paper that the police sub-culture –rather than being formed solely by the inner dynamics of police practices or flawed policies– takes shape under the impact of deliberately devised power strategies of the state. Therefore, the sub-culture of the police in Turkey is constituted under the impact of the hegemonic discursive formations in the country fashioned by the state which has built a hegemonic authoritarian, militarist, nationalist-conservative rationality until the 1980s supplemented by an “exclusionist” neo-liberal one in the post-1980 period. This argument is supported by underlining the similarities between the recurring discursive practices of the police officers and the elements of this hegemonic rationality in the country shaped by the state and based on an extensive examination of the primary resources published by the police organization, in-depth interviews conducted with police officers and secondary resources on Turkey.
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Ethnic kinship in vain: Turkish migrants from Iraq and Bulgaria, migrant associations, and the state
DİDEM DANIŞ - AYŞE PARLA
This article examines the changing meanings of what it means to be “of Turkish origin” (Türk soylu) through a historical and comparative analysis of Turkish migrants from Iraq and Bulgaria. In problematizing the deployment of the term “of Turkish origin” as if it were a self-evident category, we make three interrelated arguments: 1) The state treats migrants according to what we call a “hierarchy of desirability” which is shaped by the geographies the migrants come from; 2) Rather than being static or fixed, this hierarchy has constantly been reconfigured and instrumentalized in accordance with the national and transnational political priorities of the state; and 3) the relatively privileged status of those immigrants designated as “racial kin” (soydaş) has gradually weakened since the nineties. During the Cold War, the “ethnic kin” abroad were used to reinforce anti-communist state ideology through the discourse of “Turks in captivity,” while since the nineties, they are being instrumentalized to further the transnational political agendas of the state. The instrumentalization of “ethnic kin” status has been significant in terms of the relationship between the Turkish state and the migrant associations in Turkey. The hierarchy of desirability established among migrants of Turkish origin manifests itself in terms of differences in the discursive practices of the two migrant associations we examine: the Iraqi Turks Brotherhood and Solidarity Association (ITKYD) and the Balkan Turks Solidarity and Cultural Association (BTDKD). While the former prefers a more informal approach through mobilizing personal networks, the latter forces official and legal channels in the pursuit of citizenship status on behalf of the migrants. Whether they seek formal or informal means, however, both migrant associations attempt to further establish themselves through reaccentuating Turkishness and thereby reassert the discursive weapon that is being wrested away from them. By repeatedly referring to the “debt” the state historically owes to the Balkan migrants, BTDKD reappropriates the discourse utilized by the Republic in its founding years and redirects it towards the current government. Similarly, by underscoring the “national cause,” ITKYD prioritizes the struggle of the Iraqi Turkish population against the Kurdish formation in Iraq. Finally, while previously received favorably and granted citizenship, immigrants of “Turkish origin” have failed to obtain residence permits, let alone citizenship since the nineties. Their lapse into irregular/illegal status has exacerbated the precariousness of their lives which increasingly resemble the experiences of all other migrant groups in Turkey.
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Gypsyness and gypsy music performance in world music discourses:
The case of Selim Sesler and Hüsnü Şenlendirici
KORAY DEĞİRMENCİ
This article examines two of the most popular ‘Roman’ (gypsy) musicians in the Turkish world music market, Selim Sesler and Hüsnü Şenlendirici. The article discusses how the notions of gypsyness (Romanness) and the gypsy community and locality are discursively articulated and reconstructed so as to constitute particular elements of ‘world music’ discourses in Turkey. Romanness and its associated elements wear many masks in this discursive process. On the one hand, Romanness symbolizes popular Roman images and their associated notions (such as Roman community or locality, performance styles associated with gypsies, ethnicity, life styles, etc.); but on the other hand, Romanness is used to constitute various marketing discourses of world music (such as the senses of sincerity, locality, exoticity, genuineness, pristineness, authenticity, etc). Despite their seeming disparity, these discourses of Romanness are oftentimes overlapped and redefined; or they replace each other when they are used in the formation of the marketing strategies and musical subjectivities of the actors. The discussion unbundles these various elements of Romanness and traces their articulation into world music discourses.
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Modernization, health politics and physicians of the Republican period in Turkey, 1920-1946
SEVİM ODABAŞ
For the social scientists, medical territory in Turkey is a field replete with diverse materials where one can discover, analyse and trace continuities and changes in Turkish biopolitical order. This article focuses on the period between 1920-1946, and it investigates the position of bodies, health politics and phsysicians in Turkish modernization experience as well as the fuctional, symbolic meanings and duties ascribed to them. According to dominant motifs of the time the Repuçlican regime sees the body as a functional and symbolic source of a new biopolitical order, therefore, it ascribes a vital importance to the characteristics of bodily capital and to the health of its citizens and nation body. The essential charecterictics of health politics of the time are treatment, prevention, populism, peasantism and statism. The main duty of physicians of Republic was inscribing the principles of new biopolitical order on the bodies of the citizens and mentoring the people. The medical gaze and health politics of the period construct the family, the school and the army as fields where biopolitical order is produced, national and civil values are inscribed in the citizens. Moreover, they try to knot the bodies with the umbilical cord of new biopolitical order. They also classify bodies and keep their medical record in relation to principles of the new order. They position the bodies according to this medical record which means the legitimization and support of bodies having the attributes of “sturdy”, “fertile”, “hygienic”, “hard working”, “productive” and “military” etc. Finally, they exclude the bodies which do not conform to the characteristics mentioned above, and see them as threats to the new biopolitical order.
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Subcontracting in the context of exchange relations across firms:
The case of Denizli and Gaziantep textile sector
DÜRDANE ŞİRİN SARAÇOĞLU - ZEYNEP BAŞAK
Based on a field survey, this study aims to reveal the characteristics of subcontracting relations across firms in textile industry in provinces of Denizli and Gaziantep. Denizli and Gaziantep were selected for the field study primarily because of the fact that they have undergone substantial transformation and growth following the export-led growth strategies after the 1980s in Turkey. Secondly, even though they have gone through significant transformation, there is evidence that production has been conducted under low productivity and low pay, particularly in the textile industry. Last, but not least, these provinces were chosen for the field study as they have both experienced a considerable yet divergent progression of subcontracting relations in the last few decades. Through the study, we seek to uncover the means by which these relations are sustained, and by communicating with both sides of the relationship, discover clues to the degree of dependency across firms. Taking the factors such as the number of firms engaged in the subcontracting relationship, the inadequacy or even the lack of technological transfer across these firms, attempts to cut down labor costs, and most importantly the scale and the capital stock of these firms into account, findings from our study point to a hierarchical subcontracting relationship structure embodying high dependency across firms, particularly from the point of view of the smaller scale firms. Our results are in stark contrast with the literature that affirms subcontracting relations by the employment creation, capital accumulation, and growth potential of small and medium sized firms; we find no clear evidence of growth of scale and capital expansion by the firms involved in subcontracting relations. Furthermore we argue that employment creation potential, or capacity must be judged not only from a quantitative standpoint, but also a qualitative one.
