Gender and Politics in Contemporary Turkey

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Vendredi 10 février de 12h30 à 14h

ULB-Campus du Solbosch-av. Jeanne, 44-1050 Bruxelles-Salle 15 215 (15e étage)

Organisation : Işil Erdinç - Seda Gürkan - Aude Merlin

 

Résumé des présentations :

Elif BECAN, ATER à l’Université Paris Nanterre

Negotiating Criteria of Loss of Nationality: A Case Study on Bureaucratic Profiling of Gender and Economy in Turkey (1940-1943)

This research on citizenship government and deprivation of citizenship practices in Turkey correlates the experience of a woman, Hanriyet Goldenberg, residing in Tehran since 1929, who was stripped of her Turkish nationality in 1939 with exclusionary policies implemented by the Turkish authorities during the first half of the twentieth century. Her petition file, which is a rare example of such files that could be found in the Republican archives in Ankara, gathers her personal letters written in 1940 to annul the government decision as well as the negotiations made between Minister of Interior Ahmet Fikri Tüzer, who is unfavorable to the annulment, and the ambassador in Tehran, Cemal Hüsnü Taray, who defends the interests of H. Goldenberg, during 1942 and 1943. By focusing on the negotiations over the annulment of this deprivation decision, this research aims to contribute to the reflection on the usage of intertwined conceptions of race, gender, and economy by decision-making bodies in Turkey.

This case study sheds a light on the bureaucratic process of profiling and allows us to grasp the use made of variables based on hereditary and economic reflections concerning citizenship. It particularly highlights malleability of the criteria attached to the figure of the "good national" and the different priorities accorded to this conception by the government and the diplomatic corps. It also shows the way in which the victims stage their migration trajectory according to the discourse on the "national interest" constructed and imagined by the authorities.

 

Ozan SOYBAKIS, Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow à l’Université de Stavanger

« Turkish Islam Facing Globalization: Conservative Political Masculinity as a Marker of a New Populist, Ethnic and Nationalist Distinction »

In the current context of the public visibility of Islam, the arrival of the AKP into power in 2002 and its ideological mutation during the 2000’s, seem to have played a crucial role in opening of the public space to Islamic presence in Turkey. This new visibility helped to define the contours of a public and Turkish Islam that values individualism and contemporaneity over tradition. While the AKP, with its neo-liberal identity, has successfully “connected” conservative Islamic milieus with global dynamics, it has mobilized its anti-Western attitudes in its conservative and populist posture. Therefore, any history of public Islam in Turkey can be questioned as a systematically frontal confrontation with Western-style modernization. The “modern” of Kemalism is being blurred behind the conservative “modern” of the AKP, still searching for its socio-cultural legitimacy. Less visible than conservative women, men have also been transformed during this period yet hidden in the masculinist and cosmopolitan dynamics of the Turkish urban space. As performed through populist, ethnic, and nationalist discourses and practices, the conservative political masculinity seeks to distinguish itself not only from secular forms of masculinities but also from traditional Islamic gender models, roles, and practices.

 

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