Living on the Edge: Womanhood between Expectations and Fears in Turkey

Turkey has been witnessing great economic, social and political transformation accompanied with increasingly authoritarian policies, especially since the 2007 parliamentary elections. Within the limits of this presentation, the repercussions of this manifold transformation particularly as regards female subjectivity and the reconstruction of gendered relations in Turkey will be discussed and problematized by pointing out the correlation between female sexuality and gender-based criminality as to the Foucauldian account. In a broad sense, although violence against the women and children is always an openwound in Turkey, it has witnessed incredibly high levels of gender-based crimes on the grounds of the lame excuses. It may take daily gender questions in a country at face value, but it is well-argued that this factual situation has been consciously exacerbated through the visibility of these crimes and relevant court decisions, leading us to identify inclusionary and exclusionary social values that provide the combined technology for discursive practices. In this context, the related questions might be about the roles of norms and moral rules as regards determining which form of female life is valuable or non-valuable, and further questions might be about the law-norm relation by tracing the neoliberal rationality of Turkey. In fact, the possible questions might be formulated in several ways. Suffice it to say so far, the analysis of gender-based crimes through the lens of Foucauldian literature makes the social and political tactics and strategies of neoliberal rationality in Turkey more comprehensible.