Understanding Female Domestic Workers’ Daily Mobilities: A Case Study in Ankara

This study analyzes female urban practices and gendered mobility patterns focusing on waged domestic labour. Regarding conventional wisdom which domestic labour relates to private sphere, female domestic labour is considered as “invisible”; however, this research explores female domestic workers’ visibility and spatiality in the city because domestic labour has been grasped as the juxtaposition of gender and class relations with their distinct spatial contradictions. Considering Turkey’s on-going political structure and political attitude towards women, to discuss female domestic workers and their daily practices across the city have ever been so noteworthy. What is the novel in this study is that it is based upon ethnographic data collected from workers during work-home trip, also from the author who is one of the characters: “de te fabula narratur”, meaning that as the study refers to workers' experiences, it would do for the author so. Drawing on the fieldwork conducted in Ankara through in-depth interviews, this research project will investigate spatial practices of women in domestic labour by tracking their mobilities including the first arrival in the city-all of interviewees are rural-to-urban migrants and gaining mobility across the city by involvement in the labour market, then touching upon daily stations of domestic workers such as their own homes, workplaces as homes, public transportation, therefore it aims to undertake how women develop survival strategies as a response to increasingly deepening insecure work conditions, and the maintenance burden (both familial and personal) through suppression on the means of survival, resulting in the transformation of waged domestic work. In fact, the (re)structuring political and economic atmosphere creates inequal mobilities among domestic workers as it has been for any urban residents/workers. By following 32 women’s diversified and/or similar urban mobility patterns for last thirty years, their urban stories will be narrated.