This study traces the relation between male violence and masculinist norms that attribute political agency exclusively to men. Through critical analysis of a recent campaign initiated as an effort to fight violence against women in Turkey by addressing men as the only agents endowed with agency to solve the problem, we explore the ways in which this discourse risks marginalizing women who seek empowerment through women's solidarity. We uncover three patterns: (1) the assumption of a "cultural particularity" in Turkey nested in the traditional family structure which should allegedly be left unquestioned; (2) glorification of values attributed to the masculine; (3) taking violence as an individual problem of "anger management." We argue that this campaign is inimical to the aim it declares because by marginalizing feminist efforts to question the social and structural patterns of male violence, it deprives women of political agency essential in the struggle against this problem.
Islamic fashion and lifestyle magazines enable the global circulation and consumption of newly emerging images of, narratives about, and discourses on Muslim women across the globe. Such magazines also trigger debates by making visible the language of commodification and consumerism that is increasingly shaping Muslim subjectivities. In particular, Âlâ—the pioneering Islamic fashion magazine in Turkey—has been the target of extensive criticism by Islamic intellectuals and columnists. This study contextualizes these criticisms within the broader debate on veiling fashion and Islamic consumerism in the context of 2010s Turkey, a context in which the Islamic bourgeoisie has been strengthened and class cleavages among veiled women have been further sharpened. The study analyzes the opinion columns focusing on Âlâ published in the Islamic, pro-government newspaper Yeni Şafak, as well as the responses of Âlâ’s editors and producers to such criticisms. The findings demonstrate that the magazine is criticized for making visible the surge of consumerism among the Islamic bourgeoisie, for blurring the boundaries between Islamic and secular identities, and for fragmenting an idealized imagination of Islamic collectivity by emphasizing class cleavages among veiled women. I argue that these criticisms of Âlâ in Islamic circles reflect a concern with the erosion of the symbolic connotations of veiling in Turkey, particularly in terms of marking the boundaries that define the imagination of an Islamic collectivity.
This study looks into the politics of appearance in the retail sales labour market for women in Turkey and explores how norms of ‘being presentable and fashionable’ prevailing in different retail landscapes map onto intersections of class, status and the fault lines of Turkey’s
identity politics. In an attempt to understand how such norms are constructed, this article employs the discussion on aesthetic labour and focuses on the aesthetic labour requirements in large-scale retailers selling or competing with global brands, small-scale retailers and tesettür
retailers. The article relies on data derived from participant observation, in-depth interviews and focus groups conducted with saleswomen and employers in different retail landscapes in five cities of Turkey between 2009 and 2012. The study suggests that large-scale retailers and shopping
malls require retail workers to convey an appearance and deportment that fits in with globally circulating images of what is taken to be ‘normal’, middle class and fashionable, leading to the exclusion of saleswomen with headscarves as they are perceived to manifest a particularity
and deviation from a normalized middle-class identity. On the other hand, in tesettür chain stores competing in the area of global veiling fashion, the headscarf is usually a requirement as a part of the globally relevant, Islamic middle-class image that retail workers are expected
to embody. The norms of aesthetic labour in both kinds of large-scale retailers differ sharply from small-scale retailers, where embodying local gendered norms, and the ability to manage relations in local marketplaces surface as the most salient requirements from retail saleswomen.
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