Sexuality and Gender in Turkey Mert Koçak

In this episode, I am hosting Zeynep Serinkaya Winter. We will discuss the gendered representations of disability in the Turkish cinema, focusing on melodramas produced between 1960 and 1980. Zeynep reveals how disability and gender intersect to signify bodies as spaces of modernization and consolidation of the nation-state project.Zeynep is a social scientist with an interdisciplinary background, currently working on digital dissidence, queer movements in Turkey and digital intimate publics. She completed her master’s degree in the Comparative Studies in History and Society Program at Koç University. Zeynep has also been actively involved in civil society work, advocating for freedom of expression. She is a founding member of the Civic Space Studies Association and the co-coordinator and translator for LGBTI News Turkey, where she occasionally contributes as a writer. Her translations have also appeared in publications such as Cogito and Jacobin. Currently, she continues her doctoral studies in the Design, Technology and Society program at Koç University.Zeynep’s research depicts the genre of melodrama as conducive to the enmeshment of ableism, hetero-patriarchy and nationalism. Melodrama’s sensationalist nature, coupled with its simplistic depiction of events and character development, can be seen as an infrastructure of essentialist representations reproducing ableism, hetero-patriarchy and nationalism.Zeynep highlights the fact that Turkish melodramas responded to the side effects of modernization efforts of Early Republican Turkey. The rapid industrialization, urbanization, state-led rise of a national bourgeoisie, internal migration from rural to urban areas had led to urban sprawl, poverty and a disenchanted working class. Melodramas became the medium through which emotions arising from these complex social events can be filtered and reduced to a dichotomy of traditional values vs modern lifestyles. A middle class consisting of able bodies is the golden mean of representation in melodramas, through which hetero-patriarchal gender norms are reproduced.By drawing upon eugenic discourses that had been circulating amongst the intelligentsia, Turkish melodramas marginalize both extreme richness and extreme poorness. Melodramas equate both with moral corruptions such as excessive drinking, overt sexualization, or gluttony and idleness. People living at these extremes are marked as undesired citizens via grotesque demonization or extreme victimization. For example, the image of a rich woman excessively drinking signifies that woman as a villain who does extreme evil deeds to separate the hero and the heroine. On the other hand, the image of a poor woman excessively drinking signifies that woman as a victim whose subjectivity had been completely erased by every unfortunate event that happened to her.Gendered representations of disability are incorporated into melodramas as a crucial narrative tool to perpetuate hetero-patriarchal norms. For example, melodramas equate mobility impairment with asexuality or sexual dysfunction. As Zeynep puts it: “Wheelchair users are often depicted as failing from performing their gender roles, as a husband that satisfies his wife or as a wife that can be procreated with.” Moreover, bodies that are marked as female and male experience different effects of disability in Turkish movies. For example, female blindness means vulnerability to male sexual aggression. Blind women are depicted as in need of male protection and care. Male blindness, on the other, means loss of patriarchal control over women.

In this episode, we will pick up where we left off with Elif Birced and discuss how government becomes a source of insecurity for academic labour. Elif will also talk about the possibilities of solidarity against the precarization of academia.Back in the 10th episode, Elif revealed different ways in which neoliberal restructuring of Turkey’s economy has led to the establishment of foundation universities and precarization of work conditions in social sciences.Today, Elif will zoom in on the government’s direct involvement in politically contributing to the precarious working conditions in Turkey. She mentions three methods that the government uses in order to control universities and facilitate precarization. The first one is the state apparatus called the Council of Higher Education which has authority over procedures of hiring and promoting academics, conducting disciplinary proceedings and so on. The second method is putting pressure on foundation universities via its boards of trustees. Since the members of the board of trustees have business ties with the government, they are inclined to hinder or censor academic researches that challenge and criticize the government. The final one is the economic deterrents such as taxation on the businesses of the board of trustees’ members. The state has always been a power agent in the rise of bourgeoisie class since the foundation of the republic. Thus, governments can utilize this historical legacy of control over the bourgeoisie class via different economic deterrents.In the second part of the episode, Elif will help us find reasons to be cautiously hopeful for solidarity against precarization of academia! During her fieldwork, she observed three crucial incentives for solidarity. The first is a court decision that constitutes a precedent for precarious graduate student assistants to sue the foundation universities if their payment and fringe benefits are significantly less than their counterparts in the state universities. The second is the existence of prior labour movement in their universities. Finally, Elif will show how the Gezi Park Movement helped graduate student assistants to question their working conditions and how it inspired them to initiate collective actions against precarization.However, Elif will also mention barriers against solidarity. The first one is sexist behaviours within solidarity networks. With a striking example of asking women to “use their sexuality when negotiating with male members of the university administration”, Elif explains how sexist behaviours within solidarity networks have alienated women from participating in those networks. The second one is different class positions of faculty members and graduate student assistants. Intra and intergroup hierarchies within a university, as Elif will elaborate, prevents the construction of solidarity networks that bring faculty members and graduate student assistants together.

In this episode, I am hosting Selin Altunkaynak Vodina. We will talk about the gendered and racialized discourses that are reproduced during the social encounter between Syrian and Turkish women living in the South East of Turkey. Selin will start with one of the most reproduced discourses; the sexist and racist claim that Syrian women go after and “steal” Turkish husbands. The discourse, unfortunately, has been reproduced in the media in various forms. However, Selin will take a novel approach and trace such discourses as they are reproduced within the daily social encounters between Syrian and Turkish women.Selin is a PhD candidate in Humanistic Studies at Rovira i Virgili University in Spain. She is currently conducting research about the social relations between Syrian and Turkish women living in the South East Region of Turkey. While advancing on her PhD, she has been also assuming different positions within humanitarian organizations in Turkey since 2015. Her work in the humanitarian sector helped her gain diverse experiences in the areas of refugee protection and social cohesion of refugees.Selin will utilize Deniz Kandiyoti’s famous concept ‘patriarchal bargain’ in analyzing the racially charged discourses directed at Syrian women. She will argue that different images of Syrian women have caused a perceived disturbance in patriarchal order within Turkish society. Such sexualized and racialized images include Syrian women being “well-groomed”, wearing make-up and so on. Selin will reveal that in an effort to bargain with the patriarchy and sustain their own limited power within a patriarchal system, Turkish women depict themselves as dedicated mothers and wives who are better than Syrian women in taking care of their houses, children and husbands. Thus, the patriarchal bargain effectively reproduces two discourses at once; the sexualized and racialized discourse directed at Syrian women and the discourse of wifehood and motherhood as the proper signifiers of womanhood. Finally, Selin will share her candid accounts of the patriarchal bargains she had to do in order to conduct her research. As a woman researcher in Turkey, Selin had to bargain with the patriarchy on many levels for example as a daughter of a middle-class family and as an unmarried young woman conducting research on her own. She will mention how she navigated patriarchal expectations in the field and in her personal relations. 

In this episode, we will pick up where we left off with Nilay Kılınç and discuss women’s experiences of return migration from Germany to Turkey. Nilay will make a compelling case to consider return migration as resistance to patriarchy in the diaspora.Back in the 11th episode, Nilay talked about the transnational phenomenon of ‘return migration’ and further complicate it by adding onto a gender dimension. Nilay also warned us to be cautious of seeing return migration as a smooth departure from Germany and a warm welcome in Turkey. Today, Nilay will tell us stories of resistance in which second-generation Turkish-German women have been able to disengage from two patriarchal narratives imposed upon them. The first is the image of dutiful daughters as carriers of “traditional Turkish culture in the diaspora.” The second is the image of modernized women who should integrate into German society by forgoing their cultural ties with “a strictly traditional diaspora.” Each image demands and exerts control over women’s bodies and choices. Return migration, as Nilay will detail, will become a crucial way for women to disengage from such expectations and become autonomous in self-realizing their futures.Finally, Nilay will introduce locality as an essential dimension of gendered experiences of return migration. The locality in Turkey where Turkish-German women settle upon returning can promote or hinder resistance to patriarchy and autonomous self-realization. However, Nilay gives us reasons to be hopeful even in cases where women migrate to more conservative localities in Turkey. Nilay will reveal how women transform the localities that they settled in a way for them to be more autonomous.Nilay holds her PhD from the University of Surrey, wherein she wrote her thesis on the notion of ‘searching for self’ for the second-generation Turkish-Germans in their post-return lives in Turkey. She is currently a fellow at the Centre of Advanced Studies in Sofia, Bulgaria, researching about the highly-skilled Turkish immigrants’ ‘alternative diaspora spaces’ in Europe. Nilay has a BA in International Relations from Istanbul Bilgi University and an MA in European Studies from Lund University.

In this episode, I am hosting Nilay Kılınç. We will discuss the transnational phenomenon of ‘return migration’ and further complicate it by adding onto a gender dimension. In Nilay’s research, the term return migration refers to the second generation Turkish-Germans migrating back to Turkey from Germany. Nilay urges us to consider return migration as a paradoxical concept, especially for the second generation. Born and raised in Germany, the second generation had minimal physical contact with Turkey, which had been usually in the form of short holiday trips. Their memories of Turkey were mostly shaped by stories they acquired from their parents. Thus, Nilay warns us to be cautious of seeing return migration as a smooth departure from Germany and a warm welcome in Turkey.Nilay holds her PhD from the University of Surrey, wherein she wrote her thesis on the notion of ‘searching for self’ for the second-generation Turkish-Germans in their post-return lives in Turkey. She is currently a fellow at the Centre of Advanced Studies in Sofia, Bulgaria, researching about the highly-skilled Turkish immigrants’ ‘alternative diaspora spaces’ in Europe. Nilay has a BA in International Relations from Istanbul Bilgi University and an MA in European Studies from Lund University.Nilay will situate today’s episode in her impressive ethnographic fieldwork spreading over eight years, eight cities of Turkey and including more than 120 interviews with returnees.Nilay identifies six reasons for return migration: return as a search for self-identity, involuntary return through family decision, return for marriage or romantic relationship, return for education and career purposes, return as an adventure, and finally force return or deportation.Nilay will share stories of three critical steps during a return migration; tales of returnees’ lives in Germany, their stories of returning, and their stories of establishing their lives upon returning to Turkey. Each reason and each step of return migration generates gender-specific experience for returnees. Nilay will provide ample examples of differing gendered experiences of return migration. For instance, migration literature on the guest workers of Germany usually depicted women as dependent migrants coming into Germany via family reunification. However, the stories Nilay gathered during her fieldwork reveal that women were also autonomous migrants travelling to Germany in search of work.Besides, return reasons and experiences of returning may differ according to gender. For example, Nilay notes that only men were deported from Germany as a result of committing crimes.Finally, the localities in Turkey, where the second generation had settled play an essential role in the post-return lives of women. Settling in more conservative regions of Turkey, women experience clashes and hardship with strong hetero-patriarchal social life. However, Nilay shares remarkable stories of women transforming their immediate surrounding and carving out autonomous economic and social spaces within more conservative localities.

In this episode, I am hosting Elif Birced. We will talk about the neoliberal restructuring of higher education in Turkey. By drawing upon her interviews with 40 professors and graduate student assistants, Elif will make a compelling case for the precarization of work conditions in social sciences as a result of this the neoliberal restructuring. She will also discuss the intersectional role gender plays in the precarization of academia.Elif is a PhD student at the Department of Sociology at Boston University. She is interested in economic sociology, work, organizations, and sociology of culture. Elif has a B.S. in Economics from Middle East Technical University and an M.A. in Cultural Studies from Sabancı University. Her M.A. thesis was about the precarity of academic labour in Turkey with a particular focus on the experiences of professors and graduate student assistants in the social sciences.Today, Elif will be revisiting the impressive fieldwork she conducted for her M.A. thesis. She will first introduce her own interpretation of the concept of “precarity”. Elif adopts Guy Standing’s approach to precarity but also brings her own twist to the concept. While Standing describes precarity in two dimensions – objective and subjective, Elif points out to the need for considering precarity also as a relational concept.Thus, Elif analyses precarity in three dimensions. In the objective aspect, she looks for structural patterns of insecurities at work such as lack of protection against arbitrary dismissal, lack of adequate and stable income to sustain life or absence of any representative body in the workplace. In the subjective dimension, she focuses on how individuals experience these insecurities. Individuals may accept, internalize or give consent to several right violations committed under the name of neoliberal restructuring. Finally, Elif introduces the relational dimension of precarity, which signals to the importance of relations established, for example, between professors and graduate student assistants and how these relationships affect one’s perception of her precarious position.Elif’s unique approach to precarization of higher education also opens up a valuable space to acknowledge and analyze the direct role of government in creating political insecurities in the workplace. While Elif was conducting her fieldwork in 2016, a group of academics was calling upon the government to end its attacks in the Kurdish villages of Southern East Turkey (for more detail, please listen to the podcast on Academics for Peace), and they were fired from their jobs. Elif points out the fact that social scientists may experience a heightened sense of vulnerability in the workplace if their academic works criticize the government or do not conform to the official government accounts.Finally, Elif will reveal different ways in which gender could become integrated into precarity. She will talk about how job insecurity for women may lead to silencing of sexual harassment in academia. The lack of protection mechanisms against sexual harassment in universities only makes it more precarious for women to work as professors and graduate student assistants.