July 21st, 2007
Gendering of Turkish Women
Picture courtesy of http://www.petersommer.com/galleryimages/culture/Leading-Donkey-Photo-Turkey.jpg
This post is a response to Hopeful Girls, Troubled Boys by Nancy Lopez. I personalized the issues she cites in that book of racialized and gendered lived exerperiences of second generation immigrant youth.
The gendering practice that was eloquently reported by Lopez is not unique. What makes this study compelling to read are the political overtones mixed with racial practices that are observed at the micro level of social interactions and at the macro level of institutional practices. Whenever and wherever power is contested, there will be a struggle between factions of people divided along power lines. Race in this country is a reality that is rooted in the history and struggle of people of color who were involuntarily displaced from their native homes. Gender in another country where power is given to one gender, e.g., men, is a more defining nature of oppression.
Like many Muslim countries, Turkey is a place where women are subordinated to men and suffer from their subjugated location in the unrelenting social structure. They grow up into their predetermined locations through entrenched practices that gender them to obey a paternalistic man, father, brother, who knows what is best for them. I have been troubled with power and gender inequality in my own family long before I read this book. However, the stories of the second generation youth in Lopez’s book reminded me of the gendering that women in my family are subjected to. I will talk about only one aspect of gendering, although I am aware that there are countless venues where their gender is a marker for stunting what Paulo Freire calls “untested feasibility” in life, or opportunities the oppressed would have attempted if they were not oppressed.
I was born in the remote regions of central Turkey which was held captive by the conservative traditions, which feed the dark practice of denying schooling to girls. Girls would be better off staying illiterate and in the captivity of illiterate villages. Their work is needed on the fields to tend to the harvest, to herd the livestock, and to wait for a husband who will be chosen for her. When they get married, they usually end up in an other village toiling in the heat of the summer and wading through the knee-high snow in the winter. This is the story of women who would have had different lives if they were born in a Western country. A life that abounds with opportunities and free will to unleash the potential they have. One of them is my mother. I love her dearly, but feel sorry for her and her wasted life in this unequal world where she was brought down to an object, was used in the fields, and was taught to fear change and possibility. Her location in life shares the same oppression that second generation youth of Caribbean descent experience in Hopeful Girls, Troubled Boys. I was hopeful as least for my sisters who wanted to continue studying and to break out of this vicious cycle. It was only a hope and a dream that may come true in a more “democratic, polite, and humane” future, as Freire would say. They were too denied further education, and automatically underpowered.
Oppression surfaced again in my father’s relentless insistence and success in getting aborted my unborn sibling. My mother’s teary and sullen face during the turmoil was her only struggle against the oppressive decree. In the end it did not matter if she wanted that baby or how much she fought for it because the decision was already made by her man, who never fathomed her pain, and never will. This is where the oppression is starkly displayed: incognizance of the men about the oppression they exert on women.
There are women in Turkey who are not as oppressed as those in my family, but I know it is widespread in most Turkish families. In a patriarchal society, where men are accorded more power, Turkish women are reeling from oppression that portrays men as the agent. Macro level structural practices are embedded in the daily interactions between men and women, which dictate an order of world in which women are subjugated to the dominant gender. Their location in life as secondary and subservient is reinforced and solidified daily; any diversion is met with punishment that only spells problem for them. As Freire and Lopez would agree, men should not be blamed for the oppression as their overt actions might readily suggest, for they are also under oppression, of macro level structures.
