Hilal Alkan & Nil Mutluer

Wednesday, 30 November 2016, 5.00 pm - 6.30 pm |
Forum Transregionale Studien, Wallotstr. 14, 14193 Berlin

The Politics of Gender and Ethnicity in Turkey


Hilal Alkan

(Istanbul / EUME Fellow 2016/17)

& Nil Mutluer
(Phillipp Schwartz Fellow at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin)

Chair: Kader Konuk
(Universität Duisburg-Essen / EUME)

Abstract
Turkey has been going through a fast transformation lately. Particularly in the last period of the AKP government, the Turkish political scene witnessed  a deepening and widening polarization between the AKP and almost all of its opponents, including the Kemalists, and the Kurdish and Turkish left, which increasingly took on a gendered, sexualized and ethnicized quality. In this talk, we look at the role gender and sexuality play in the AKP’s (Justice and Development Party) identity politics. We argue that in this political endeavor of the governing party, reproduction has become of key importance, and legal amendments as well as discursive tools have been successfully employed to regulate it. One focus of this panel is to elaborate on how relations and politics on gender and sexuality have shaped and have been shaped by the AKP in creating the values of "New Turkey". Second, the panel will focus on how these policies unfold when it comes to Kurdish women and the women active in Kurdish politics.

Hilal Alkan received her PhD in Political Science from the Open University, UK and her MA in Sociology from Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. In her dissertation, titled “Enchanted Welfare: Islamic Imaginary and Giving to Strangers in Turkey”, she focused on civic charitable initiatives in Turkey. Her research involved a ten-month ethnographic study of the local aid organizations of the Central Anatolian town of Kayseri. With the interdisciplinary lens of citizenship studies and economic anthropology, Alkan developed a framework that utilizes gift theory to analyze the daily encounters between different actors of charitable networks. She published some of her findings in the chapter “Ethics of Care, Politics of Solidarity: Islamic Charitable Organisations in Turkey” (in Ethnographies of Islam: Ritual Performances and Everyday Practices, eds. T. Pierret, B. Dupret and P. Pinto, Edinburgh University Press, 2012). Alongside charitable giving and welfare provision, her research interests include gendered spatial formations (especially urban anthropology), women’s experiences of war, and care ethics. She has been teaching at a number of Turkish universities for the past four years. She is also a member of the Women’s Initiative for Peace, which works on gendering the peace process and documenting gendered rights violations during conflict in Turkey.

Nil Mutluer, Assist. Prof. Dr. graduated from the Bilkent University’s Department of International Relations. She received her Master’s Degree in Cultural Studies from Istanbul Bilgi University and did her PhD in Gender Studies at Central European University in Budapest. She has taught at Istanbul Bilgi, Kadir Has and Fatih universities. She has also taught a course on Human Rights and Democracy at Getronogan Armenian High School in Istanbul. Until very recently, she has been the Head of Sociology Department at Nişantaşı University. Currently, she is a Philipp Schwartz fellow at the Diversity and Social Conflict department of Humboldt University in Berlin. She is an active member of the Helsinki Citizens Assembly (hCA-hYd), the Association for Supporting Women Candidates (Ka-Der), Green Thought Association and P. E. N. Turkey. She co-produced the weekly sociological and political analysis television show ÖteBeri broadcasted on IMC Tv. She has edited books and wrote scholarly and non-scholarly articles on gender, nationalism, belief, everyday life and urbanization in various journals and newspapers. She is the consultant of the 46th Antalya Golden Orange Award (Altın Portakal Ödülleri) winning documentary called “Me and Nuri Bala” (2009, directed by Melisa Önel) which is about the life story of the first feminist transvestite stand up artist of Turkey, Esmeray.

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