Construction of Wife and Mother Identities in Women’s Talk of Intrafamily Violence in Saraycık-Turkey

Abstract

The present study explored how Turkish women in squatter communities on the fringes of an urban center positioned themselves in talk about family violence. Women’s talk revealed their interpretative repertoires with respect to intrafamily violence and power relations, how they constructed identities as wives and mothers, and how they envisioned alternative, more egalitarian social relations. Three focus groups, each comprising 10 women from Saraycık, a poor neighborhood of Ankara, met for an hour once every week for a period of 9 weeks. Six questions about intrafamily violence provoked conversations about power relations and violence with their children and husbands. Transcriptions of these conversations were analyzed for manifest content, latent content, interpretative repertoires, and the functions served by the interpretative repertoires. On the basis of the categorization, I identified the complexity of women’s positions, particularly with respect to their children as both the central meaning of life and children as getting on women’s nerves. Many interpretations placed blame on a member of the family—the woman herself, her children, or husband. Some women envisioned an alternative future that would be achieved through education, employment, and the exercise of agency. The findings imply that the constructed wife and mother identities of Turkish women in the economically vulnerable urban squatter settlements include tension and complex experiences that are in flux as the women imagine other possibilities.