Istanbul Appearances: Beauty and the Making of Middle-Class Femininities in Urban Turkey

This chapter contributes to the debate on the standardization of bodily appearances by probing an understanding of cosmetic surgery, in particular nose and female breast (reduction) surgery in urban Turkey, as a gendered and racialized desire for a ‘normal’ body image. Given the construal of large female breasts and noses as particularly problematic in urban Turkey, the treatment of these bodily ‘deformations,’ in medical language, is commonly considered as a right to a ‘normal’ rather than (merely) ‘beautiful’ look. There are strong normative ideals of gendered images and subjectivity in urban Turkey that are regulated not only by patriarchal control of the female sexual body, but also by an emphasis on self-discipline and an ethos of women taking care of themselves.

The aim of this study is to investigate the determinants of child labour in urban Turkey with a special reference to low household income or poverty as one of its root causes. Studies done elsewhere have produced mixed results which necessitate the relationship to be studied at country-level. The data from urban Turkey indicate that children from poorer families stand at a higher risk of employment. This finding is confirmed using various measures of household material well-being. Simulation results have further pointed out that current interventions are not likely to produce a sizeable impact on the child labour problem.

Questioning agency and empowerment: Women's work-related strategies and social class in urban Turkey

The number of grandmothers who provide regular care for their grandchildren and do housework for their daughters or daughters-in-law is increasing in Turkey. While perpetuating traditional gender roles for themselves as a surrogate daughter, wife, or daughter-in-law, these women nonetheless enable younger women to distance themselves from obligatory care work at home. The sociocultural concepts of kinship ties, economic need, or love for grandchildren do not fully explain why grandmothers assume the role of caregiver for their grandchildren. Drawing on interviews with 25 grandmothers from middle-class families in urban Turkey, this article shows, first, that these women’s gendered subjectivity is formed by both habitual and intentional actions that defying the oppression and resistance duality within patriarchal Turkish society. Second, in dialogue with the scholarship on the “classic patriarchal bargain”1and feminist analyses of neoliberal social policy, the article suggests that these grandmothers’ inarticulate desire to live in solidarity with the younger generation of women may be turned into a government instrument in the context of Turkey’s increasingly family-centered neoliberal social policy environment.

In Turkey, the Alevi cultural ‘revival’ of the 1990s has been followed by a multifaceted identity-formation process that involves conflicting religio-cultural agendas, intersecting discourses and differing politico-ideological affiliations. Lacking a focus, this process continues to trigger an enriching public debate on Alevi identity, which has been coined an ‘enigma’ and is considered to be associated with ‘ambiguity’ and ‘ambivalence’ by many. What lies beneath the veil of ambiguity has to do with the ‘anti-essentialist’ transformation of Alevism, which reaches beyond religious, cultural and political orthodoxies. As a result of diverse political loyalties, contestation of discourses on Alevi culture and identity and the equivocal character of the Alevi subject, the Alevis seem to be resisting essentialism. In urban Turkey, an anti-essentialist discourse potentially influencing Alevism, I argue, enables the Alevi self to act with a sense of reflexivity and to search for ways to avoid political, cultural or religious orthodoxies.

Biochemical and behavioral indices related to BMI in schoolchildren in urban Turkey

In urban Turkey, voluntary associations, grass-roots protest actions and other forms of civic activities often are organised on the basis of mutual trust and interpersonal obligation, rather than on an individual, contractual membership basis. Trust and reciprocity characterise communal life in general and are the means by which individuals, and particularly women, express and reinforce their family and community identities. These voluntary associations are not based on clan, tribe, family or other primordial ties; rather they represent a free choosing of individuals with whom to associate within the web of one’s acquaintances and community. This creates a political space for women to act publicly without leaving the privacy and security of their communal and gendered roles. Furthermore, this web of already existing community ties is the foundation of a civic culture upon which both Islamic and secular groups build organisational infrastructures among the working class. In this chapter I shall argue that such a civic culture exists and has preceded recent Islamist political successes in Turkey. This leads me to question the usefulness of speculation about the compatibility of Islam and civil society. Informal civic association teaches citizenship skills that may, in time, lead to further politicisation and institutionalisation and thus pave the way for a more participatory system and encourage more accountable governance.

The paper investigates the Turkish consumers' willingness to pay for a label which guarantees that pesticide residues in tomatoes do not cause health problems. Tomatoes are a widely purchased food item in urban Turkey. By focusing on tomato purchases and pesticide residues only, we were able to investigate realistic consumer choices related to safety labels across a diverse set of consumers. Modified market method was used to estimate the willingness to pay for a label. To elicit tomato purchasing behaviour under alternative prices and residue scenarios, a survey was conducted with 1,005 randomly selected urban households. A tobit model was used to estimate the demand shift due to the presence of a label. To determine the variables that affect the probability of purchasing the labelled food, a probit model was estimated. The results indicate that the willingness to pay for a label is determined by the individual's perceived health risk reduction due to purchasing labelled produce.

Based on life-story narratives of trans women, this article aims to shed light on the role of the law in their exclusion from public spaces in urban Turkey over the last four decades. In the light of Giorgio Agamben’s work on the sovereign exception, I argue trans women in Turkey routinely find themselves in the position of homo sacer: the bare life that has been rendered politically disqualified and consigned to death. Unlike in Agamben’s account, in which subjects are turned into homo sacers in a singular gesture of the sovereign, my analysis directs attention to the myriad ways states of exception can be created. The experiences of trans women in urban Turkey demonstrate that exceptional legal regimes can be generated by suspending – or by simply not enforcing – the law, as well as, conversely, by establishing an overwhelming presence of the law in daily life. Rather than opposing legality to sovereignty, I argue closer attention needs to be paid to the interfaces of law with negative forms of power and to increasingly sophisticated ways of articulating biopolitical concerns to legal practices revolving around sovereignty.

Online dating platforms are increasingly used to explore dating and relationships by young adults. Although a growing body of evidence shows that they pose disproportionate and gendered risks to women's safety and health, the question of how young adult women respond to and resist these risks is not sufficiently understood. The present study aims to fill this gap by exploring how women navigate safety and exercise agency when dating men online in a non-Western traditional context in transition, that is, urban Turkey. Data were collected through qualitative interviews with 11 women users of dating apps, aged 24–33 years, and thematically analyzed from a feminist perspective. The analysis showed three themes that captured the women's extensive and individual safety-building labor when dating men via apps: (a) bearing the burden of risks, (b) exercising control in the midst of risks, and (c) planning for a safe exit. The conservative gender order that fails to effectively respond to gender-based violence and reinforces the stigmatization of women for dating online exacerbated their effort in contemporary Turkey. Our findings extend previous work by showing that women's safety work and agency in online dating are socioculturally, contextually, and continually mediated.

This paper investigates, in a unified framework, the effects of sibship size, birth order and sibling sex composition on children's school enrolment in urban Turkey. We utilize an instrumental variable estimation method to address parents’ joint fertility and schooling decisions using twin births as instruments. We find no causal impact of sibship size on school enrolment. However, there is evidence for a parabolic impact of birth order where middle‐born children fare worse. Sex composition of siblings matters only for female children. Our finding that birth order and sibling sex composition matter more for poorer households suggests that scarce financial resources play an important role in bringing about the sibling composition effects.

This study investigated socioeconomic conflict between the host community and Syrian refugees in urban Turkey. It was aimed to explore the mediating role of political trust in the relationship between personal economic satisfaction and socioeconomic threat perception toward refugees among the host community. Accordingly, 243 local urban residents from different cities of Turkey including Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir were reached using a cross-sectional survey approach and convenience sample method. Regarding the Turkish political, social and economic culture and previous studies, assessment tools were generated for the purpose of this study to measure socioeconomic threat perception, personal economic satisfaction, political trust, and satisfaction with public policies. The participants’ age, city, education, gender and income information were obtained using a demographic form. Data was collected via an online survey program. Controlling for demographic variables (age, city, education, gender, and income) and satisfaction with public services, the indirect effect of political trust was analyzed using a bootstrapping method via PROCESS Macro plug-in for SPSS. The research findings showed that personal economic satisfaction was significantly associated with political trust and socioeconomic threat perception. Moreover, political trust was also significantly related to socioeconomic threat perception. More importantly, in accordance with the main hypothesis of the study, it was found that political trust mediated the relationship between personal economic satisfaction and socioeconomic threat perception. According to this result, it can be said that less satisfaction with personal economic conditions led to less political trust, which then resulted in greater socioeconomic threat perception toward refugees. The results were discussed in the light of previous findings, Integrated Threat Theory, Realistic Group Threat Theory, and System Justification Theory. Lastly, limitations and suggestions for future research were evaluated in the discussion part of the study.

Street-Level Governing: Negotiating the State in Urban Turkey, by Elise Massicard. Translated by Adrian Morfee. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2022. 344 pages. $32 cloth, paper, e-book.

The article ‘Prospective associations between recalled parental bonding and perinatal depression: a cohort study in urban and rural Turkey, written by Berker Duman, Vesile Senturk Cankorur, Clare Taylor and Robert Stewart was originally published electronically on the publisher’s internet portal (currently SpringerLink) on January 10, 2018 without open access.

Street-Level Governing: Negotiating the State in Urban Turkey