Exploring “Women” and “Gender”: Trajectories of Migration Research in Turkey

Abstract

Turkey has a long and rich history of migration flows; however, the acknowledgment of women migrants in Turkey’s migration context is a relatively recent feature in developing knowledge. Since the 1990s in Turkey, there have been important attempts by migration scholars, mostly women, to make the diversity of women’s migration visible and to develop and use a gendered perspective. This chapter reviews some of these attempts in literature on women/gender and migration in Turkey. For this review I tentatively offer to distinguish the literature on women/gender and migration studies in Turkey into five groups which reflect much of the diversity of the Turkish migration experience: the migration of ethnic Turks from Balkan countries or soydas women; Turkish migrant women in Europe; the migrant women from the former socialist states; the migration experience of black women from sub-Saharan Africa; and women members of the recent waves of migration from Syria. I will briefly review the literature on the first four groups, while leaving the last one to Part 3 of this book. The literature cited in this review has been deliberately chosen to show the gendered approach used and to discuss the opportunities and challenges in analyzing the gendered migration in the Turkish context.