Analysis of sexual narratives of educated young women within a wider network of disciplinary practices on women’s sexuality within the context of Turkish modernity
Analysis of sexual narratives of educated young women within a wider network of disciplinary practices on women’s sexuality within the context of Turkish modernity.
Analysis of sexual narratives of educated young women within a wider network of disciplinary practices on women’s sexuality within the context of Turkish modernity.
Drawing on Foucault’s analysis of bio-power and disciplinary practices
Participants-with university education, aged between 18 and 25, living in Ankara, the capital.
Foucauldian approach to narrative analysis-microanalysis of narratives around sexuality, always positioning them within specific historical, political and socio-cultural contexts,considering power as a productive force that saturates the construction of narratives.
Foucauldian approach to narrative analysis-microanalysis of narratives around sexuality, always positioning them within specific historical, political and socio-cultural contexts,considering power as a productive force that saturates the construction of narratives.
Focusing on the deployments of the regulatory discourses to explore the questions: how do these discourses participate in the constitution of young women’s sexualities?; how are they deployed and contested in women’s narratives.
Education of women has been a long-standing element of the Turkish modernisation.
Education of women has been a long-standing element of the Turkish modernisation.
Educational institutions have been designed to construct women as well-educated so that they will internalise and carry on the secular, progressive, westernised processes in modern Turkey while simultaneously being shaped by traditional gender discourses.
Sites of disciplinary practices surrounding young women’s sexuality.
Education has also created spaces for young women to move beyond the dominant discourses of Turkish modernisation while deconstructing their gendered configuration and re-constructing their relationship with these dominant discourses.
narrative moments that reveal how educated young women of my research become effects and instruments of power through their discursive positions within the ‘modern’ sex/gender system in contemporary Turkey.
narrative moments that reveal how educated young women of my research become effects and instruments of power through their discursive positions within the ‘modern’ sex/gender system in contemporary Turkey.
constitute a space where young women craft and perform positions in micro contexts where ‘technologies of gender’ (de Lauretis,1987), interact with ‘technologies of resistance’ (Tamboukou, 2003).
In telling their stories, the participants negotiate contradictory and precarious ethical positions as subjects simultaneously escaping from and trapped within the regulations surrounding their sexuality.
Bulut
Bulut
My sister is three years older than me. She has always had boyfriends. She was hanging around with them. I was like the good girl, setting her in order. My dad was so strict about it. […] We had unspoken rules at home. We all knew that we could not have boyfriends […].
There were popular girls and boys at school. They were going out with each other. I wasn’t one of them. I was a moderate girl with long socks, long skirt, wearing a boy’s shirt with short hair. There was no atmosphere to be otherwise. I was going home after school. My mum was working then. I was taking care of my younger brother, doing my homework in the evening and going back to school in the morning. There was nowhere I could meet boys [...].
Later, I started to go to classical music concerts at the weekends. It was like a blossoming for me [...]
I felt relieved outside home by these outings. I hadn’t had any problems with my family until then. The problems started with these concerts. To that point, I was (errr), compared to my sister,more modest, more respectful to parents, more serious whereas she was loose, lazy, and unsuccessful […].
Ladin
Ladin
I found myself in another world when I moved to Ankara for university. Besides, METU… you know, you’re a METU graduate as well, is a comfortable space in terms of these[sexuality and relationships]. […] First of all, I was away from my family. Nobody judges you. People in D [the city she is from] would find it (err) strange if you walked around with your boyfriend. But (err) you don’t have this problem in METU campus. You can hug your boyfriend, kiss him. There I learned to be comfortable with my sexuality. But, when you’re outside of that world, everything changes again.
Cigdem: Can you tell me more about this?
Ladin: I’m still a postgraduate student in METU, but also working in a research company here [Ankara]. Colleagues at the office are open-minded and nice, but it’s not like being in METU. You need to respect their values. I can’t be as comfortable as I was in METU. I’m a grown-up; don’t have to explain everything about myself but…
Cigdem: But?
Ladin: I mean (smiling) I mean, you’re like acting; showing your different faces in different places. My family or my colleagues at work don’t need to know about the self that my friends at METU know […].