Bringing “A Different Femininity”: Immigrant Women from Bulgaria and Local Co-workers on a Factory Floor in Turkey

Abstract

This article draws on life-course interviews with a group of Turkish immigrant women from socialist Bulgaria and locals who shared the same factory floor for approximately two decades starting from the late 1970s in the city of Bursa, Turkey. It examines the relational processes that simultaneously shaped both the immigrant and local gendered understandings of employment. The contrasting norms that immigrant women and local co-workers attributed to work evolved into everyday contestations on the factory floor. Through these interactions, the work-oriented image of women embodied by immigrants placed pressure on understandings held by co-workers, specifically regarding women’s paid labor as secondary to men’s. However, the immigrants could not entirely change institutionalized gender expectations, and therefore simultaneously reworked their public conceptions of work to better accommodate their new situations. The findings contribute to the literature on gender and immigration by showing that immigrants selectively adopt gender norms present in their new destinations and, distinctively, that immigrants may simultaneously shape receiving gender contexts.