Keeping “Women” Alive by Letting Women be Killed

• In Event: Women as Disposable Subjects: Embodied Forms of Precarity and Radical Hope in Context of Turkey

Abstract

This paper explores how femicide is justified and resisted in the Turkish context. Using critical discourse analysis, I demonstrate how “women” is produced as a universal category with conservative/patriarchal/neoliberal standards, which determine who is justifiably killable. All (perceived) members of the category can be “legitimate” targets of fatal violence, despite their differences in performing/be(com)ing “women.” To explain this paradox I suggest using a theoretical framework, combining seriality (Young), necropolitics (Mbembe), governmentality (Foucault) and intersectionality (Crenshaw), that accounts for both the systematic/comprehensive nature of violence and differential distribution of precariousness among “women.”

Presenter

• Sumru Atuk, CUNY, Graduate Center