World Congress for Middle Eastern Studies

Barcelona, July 19th - 24th 2010

· NOT_DEFINED date: MON 19, 5-7 pm

· NOT_DEFINED language: English

· NOT_DEFINED description:
Chair: Tugce Ellialti (PhD student-University of Pennsylvania, USA)

Paper presenter: Tugce Ellialti (PhD student- University of Pennsylvania, USA), "The Social Construction of Women’s Sexual Morality: Narratives about Virginity Loss and Premarital Sex in Contemporary Turkey".
This paper examines the thoughts, attitudes and behaviors of educationally advantaged, middle and upper-middle class, young, single men and women living in metropolitan Turkey regarding premarital sex and virginity. Drawing from in-depth interviews, I seek to understand how socio-economically privileged young people think and make decisions about their sexual lives and construct narratives regarding their sexual experiences. I also focus on their thoughts about other people’s sexual lives and practices in order to have a better grasp of their perceptions of premarital sex in general. I investigate the gendered construction of sexuality by analyzing men’s and women’s sexual attitudes and behaviors towards premarital sex, the meanings they attach to first sex, and the related criteria both men and women develop and maintain for making decisions in their sexual lives. In my research I found that whereas love, commitment and trust come to the fore in women’s narratives, these criteria are absent in men’s accounts. Also, most women judge other women’s sexualities on the basis of these criteria. In the light of my findings, I argue that although most women engage in premarital sex, they continue to surveil and discipline themselves in accordance with the novel moral discourses redefining proper feminities that have come to dominate public discourses in Turkey beginning from the late 1990s. In this sense, throughout the paper I examine how the ongoing societal emphasis on virginity and the intricate relationship between womens namus and their sexualities regulate the sexual behavior of young women in Turkey and shape the ways in which they negotiate romantic and sexual relationships. Finally, I discuss the implications of womens discourses of proper feminities and moral sexualities for womens sexual experiences outside and before marriage


Paper presenter: Asl' Zengin (PhD Student, University of Toronto, Turkey), “Intimate Repercussions of Law: Familial Moral Order, 'Unchaste' Women and Prostitution in Turkey”.
Recent anthropological work has contributed to a great deal of discussion about the intimate politics of the state. What is at stake in much of this work is a significant emphasis on the state’s involvement in organizing family life along with regulations around marriage, domesticity and childrearing. Yet not much work has been done on the state’s intimate interventions into quotidian lives, which fall outside of dominant forms of intimacies. In this paper, I suggest that an analysis of the intimate politics of the state necessitates an understanding of the links between dominant moral order and sexuality, as well as their relation to establishing hierarchies between different forms of intimacies. Hence, I attempt to open a discussion about what I would call ‘marginalized intimacies’ by analyzing the relation between the state and prostitution in Turkey with a particular emphasis on a discursive analysis of the Prostitution Code. In Turkey, prostitution is regulated by the state in accordance with a specific code that deals with the registration and placement of sex workers in brothels. Moreover, this legal code is also concerned with the organization of women’s lives inside those brothels. Placed under the meticulous control of state practices, female sex workers are marginalized, subjected to violent practices in their everyday life conditions. Through its organization of female sexuality, the Prostitution Code both constitutes and reconstitutes explicit and implicit culturally specific gender roles, and which in turn shape the intimacies within those spaces. That being said, I will argue that the way the Prostitution Code is written reflects an official discourse that constructs hierarchies between different forms of sexualities through which moral social life and intimacy is organized by the Turkish state. In other words, by drawing on a discursive analysis of legal codes and texts on prostitution, my paper problematizes the state’s construction of a dominant form of sexual intimacy that values women’s modesty, chastity, virginity and their sexual investments into familial and social reproduction. I will also discuss how dominant forms of intimacy concerning family life in Turkey organize intimate practices between prostitutes and clients, while simultaneously defining who can work as a prostitute and where.

Paper presenter: Omer Caha (Professor, Fatih University, Turkey), “Attitudes towards Women in Turkish Society: The Case of Istanbul”.
Based upon a field work that I carried out in Istanbul my paper will focus on the attitudes of Turkish society towards women's status and roles. The paper will quest how Turkish society perceives woman's nature, her familial, social, economic and political roles. The key question that will be asked in that respect is whether Turkish public has an egalitarian outlook in regards to the gender roles in familial as well as in social, political and economic life. It is generally accepted by the sociologists who observe Turkish society that traditional values still continue to mark the status of women in various aspect of social life. The secondary position of Turkish women to men in social, economic and political life is generally connected, by such sociologists, to the traditional values prevailed in Turkish society. Moving from a questionnaire that I have conducted over 560 respondents from different districts of Istanbul my paper will discuss whether such evaluations are correct or not from the point of view of the Turkish public. My research emphasizes basically on such issues as cultural perception of woman's nature, division of labor at home and in the society, the evaluation of women's work in the public sphere, women's administrative positions, domestic violence against women, honor crimes seen in traditional regions of Turkey and women's participation in politics at local and national level from the public's lenses. All these issues are analyzed also in reference to the gender, education, income and age variables.

Paper presenter: Sertac Sehlikoglu-Karakas (Graduate Student, University of Toronto, Canada), “Modern, Feminine and Islamic: Female Customers of ''Veiled'' Hotels in Turkey”.
There is a growing market for the leisure demands of Muslim families, especially for those with concerns about modesty and gender segregation. Alternative tourism hotels -commonly referred to as ‘tesettür (veiled) hotels’- offer guests high-quality alcohol-free bars, ‘halal’ (Islamically permitted) food, women-only pools and recreation rooms, and other ‘halal’ entertainment options. More importantly, these hotels offer a whole experience for Muslim women and families in responding to their aesthetic as well as spiritual concerns while maintaining ’halal’ etiquette”.
Based on fieldwork and published media material about the newly growing ‘tesettür’ hotels of Turkey which have become a magnet of popular, as well as academic attraction, the paper offers a preliminary discussion of the particular consumption practices of women. From an ethnographic perspective, I participated in leisure activities in gender segregated spaces, interviewed female customers, and examined their expectations from the hotels as consumers. I offer a multilayered analysis of the leisure practices of Muslim women in the context of the newly emerging market of ‘tesettür’ hotels through decoding notions that are deeply interconnected and enmeshed into each other. My argument is that, particular consumption practices can provide a rich resource to decode the margins of the local culture. Particularly, I focus on the consumption process of these Muslim women as part of defining and redefining their new identity that is Islamic as well as modern and luxurious. How are the dominant discourses on modernity and Islam materialized through consumption in these sites of leisure? I also explore whether and how women are taking advantage of existing political and economic conditions to open up a space to build their identity.