The Hegemony of "Conservative Sisterhood": Women Teachers of the Gülen Movement in Turkey

• In Event: Roundtable Session 11
  In Roundtable Session: Critical Analysis of International Education Issues

Abstract

This study focuses on the Gülen Movement’s gender politics within the context of the women teachers at one of the Movement’s school in a peripheral rural city in western Turkey. Through an ethnographic, conversation-based account of the women teachers as active and committed adherents of the Community, this study a) traces the key themes in the Community’s gender discourses on femininity and womanhood, b) characterizes the extent of women’s participation in the Community with a discussion of the gender ideology that is overwhelmingly associated with patterns of familial realm and relations, and c) reveals the emerging pedagogical model, “hegemony of conservative sisterhood,” with its emphasis on placing domestic pedagogical potentials at the center of it.

Author

• Duygun Gokturk, Middle East Technical University