Nowhere is Safe but Home: Emergency Rule in Public Interactions from Kurdish Women's Perspective in Diyarbakir, Turkey

• In Event: 2429 - Open Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Roundtable 12

Abstract

ABSTRACT

This article examines women’s changing experience in public spaces of Istanbul and Diyarbakir, Turkey upon increased policing before and after the attempted coup of July 2016. One aim of this research is to engage recent debates in sociology about gender, policing, and public spaces. Building on thirty in-depth interviews I conducted with Turkish women in Istanbul and Kurdish women in Diyarbakir during the summer of 2017, I elicit how ordinary people embrace, cope, and make sense of gradual or sudden increase in policing of public spaces. Despite the stark contrast in the temporality and the level of policing between Istanbul and Diyarbakir, women experience similar fears and insecurity during their daily interactions in public spaces. I argue that the curtailed rule of law and normalized state of exception conditions in Turkey damaged women’s already disadvantaged socio-economic wellbeing and experiences in public spaces.

[Keywords: Martial law, state of exception, military coup, public spaces, policing of female bodies, politics of gender, Turkey]

Author

• Basak Gemici, University of Pittsburgh