Emergence of a Discourse or New Articulations of Orientalist Biases: The First Ethnographies on Women and Islam in Turkey
Abstract
The ethnographic study of the relationship between gender and Islam in Turkey has a recent history
which dates back to the early 1980s. The ethnographies conducted by Carol Delaney, Julie Marcus and
Nancy and Richard Tapper constitute the initial discursive period with a number of commonalities in
their research questions and analysis, most important of which is a claim about how gender hierarchy is
legitimized in Turkish society through Islamic premises. Based on the critiques of Western
ethnocentricsm, Orientalism and First World feminism and Michel Foucault’s theorization of discourse,
power and knowledge, this study makes a discourse analysis of the published works of these studies. It
discusses the ways they are influenced by and reproduce the academic Orientalism in studying Islamic
cultures in their discursive representations of Muslim women. Muslim women’s agency, subjectivity
and otherness in the ethnographies are highlighted as the most critical issues to be analysed in this
respect. The analysis suggests that all of them represent Muslim Turkish women as victims of religion,
patriarchy and traditions, fail to consider the complexity and diversity of Islamic beliefs and rites, fail to
contextualize the Islamic culture they observed, and suggest the existence of a persistent and constant
legitimating structure for the gender hierarchy.
Keywords
References
- Delaney, Carol, The meaning of paternity and the virgin birth debate. Man, 21, no. 3, (1986): 494-513.
- Delaney, Carol. The seed and the soil: Gender and cosmology in Turkish village. Berkeley, etc: University of California Press. 1991
- Foucault, Michel, The Archaeology of knowledge: Translated from the French by AM Sheridan Smith. Pantheon Books, 1972.
- Foucault, Michel, Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, 1972-1977. Random House LLC, 1980. Foucault, Michel, "The order of discourse," In Untying the Text, R. Young (ed.), 48-79, Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul,. 1981.
- Keddie, Nikki. R., Women in the Middle East: Past and Present, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007.
- Lazreg, Marnia, “Feminism and Difference: The Perils of Writing as a Woman on Women”, Feminist Studies, 14, no.1, (1988): 81-107.
- Marcus, Julie, A world of difference: Islam and gender hierarchy in Turkey. London & New Jersey: Zed Books, 1992.
- Minh-ha, Trinh T. “Speaking Nearby; Interview by Nancy Chen.”Visualizing Theory: Selected Essays from Visual Anthropology Review, (1994):1990–1994.
Details
Primary Language
English
Subjects
Women's Studies
Journal Section
Research Article
Authors
Petek Onur
*
This is me
0000-0001-8922-2686
Publication Date
May 26, 2019
Submission Date
January 11, 2019
Acceptance Date
-
Published in Issue
Year 2019 Volume: 11 Number: 1