Extending the ‘Private’ Sphere: Conservative Women ’s Politics of Charity in Turkey

Autor(en)

Ayse Esra Dursun

Abstrakt

This paper puts forward the thesis that conservative women, organized through charity NGOs, extend the 'private' sphere in Turkey's current neoliberal-conservative environment by contributing to the discursive privatization of poverty and social protection in general. The starting points for the current study are the feminist movements that challenge patriarchy but also the observation that organized conservative women in Turkey actively contribute to patriarchal structures. This paper considers two Istanbul-based NGOs run exclusively by women. It studies their politics of charity against the overall policy environment under the ruling AKP; characterized by a meshing of neoliberalism with religious conservatism. Privatization of poverty and social protection is intrinsic to neoliberal restructuring and its constitutive ideology, conservatism, in Turkey. This paper shows that Islamically oriented conservative charity NGOs, run by women, reinforce rather than challenge neoliberal-conservative patriarchy. They do so by emphasizing women's roles as 'natural' caregivers and discursively extend the 'private' sphere to depoliticize (female) poverty and promote community-based charity.

Organisation(en)

Institut für Politikwissenschaft

Journal

Journal of Gender Studies

Band

28

Seiten

948-959

Anzahl der Seiten

12

ISSN

0958-9236

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2019.1653269

Publikationsdatum

11-2019

Peer-reviewed

Ja

ÖFOS 2012

504014 Gender Studies

Schlagwörter

ASJC Scopus Sachgebiete

Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous), Gender studies, Social Sciences (miscellaneous)

Link zum Portal

https://ucris.univie.ac.at/portal/de/publications/extending-the-private-sphere-conservative-women-s-politics-of-charity-in-turkey(18b9a212-5291-41c2-b731-a2bd7e34daeb).html