Dressing Up Ahlak: A Reading of Sexual Morality in Turkey

by Hilal Ozcetin

M.A., Central European University, 2006 B.A., Baskent University, 2005

Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the

Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

in the

Department of Sociology and Anthropology

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

© Hilal Ozcetin 2015 SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY

Fall 2015

ii

Approval

Name: Hilal Ozcetin Degree: Doctor of Philosophy Title: Dressing Up Ahlak: A Reading of Sexual Morality in

Turkey Examining Committee: Chair: Wendy Chan

Professor

Dany Lacombe Senior Supervisor Professor

Parin Dossa Supervisor Professor

Simten Cosar Supervisor Professor Faculty of Communication, Hacettepe University

Cindy Patton Internal Examiner Professor Department of Sociology and Anthropology

Sedef Arat-­Koc External Examiner Associate Professor Department of Politics and Public Administration Ryerson University

Date Defended/Approved: December 3, 2015

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Ethics Statement

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Abstract

This dissertation analyzes sexual morality discourse through a reading of dressed female

bodies in Turkey. It explores how sexual morality (ahlak) is shaped by Islamist and

secularist discourses in Turkey and the ways in which ahlak (morality) imposes control

mechanisms over women’s bodies in Turkey. The thesis argues that even though

secularist and Islamist discourses are seen in a dualistic framework, the patriarchal sexual

moralities they impose on the bodies of women are not binary oppositions. Both utilize

dress as a technology of the body to conceal female sexual bodies and regulate the

visibility of women in public space. However, as a result of the different ways in which

sexual moral norms are inhabited, these two discourses are perceived as oppositional.

Thirty-­one interviews were conducted with women involved in women’s movements in

Istanbul and Ankara (Turkey) in 2010. The data analysis suggests that the sexual morality

that aims at hiding the female sexual body through dress constrains the mobility and

freedom of women in public spaces in Turkey. The study also shows that sexual morality

has been maintained through state surveillance (such as laws and regulations on public

morality and on dress) and through the public gaze (such as the judging gaze, sexual

harassment and violence). Yet, the analysis of the sexual violence cases in regards to

sexual morality and dress point out that sexual morality has become more conservative

as a result of the increased conservatism in politics in the last decade. While this analysis

shows sexual morality to be a disciplinary discourse and a practice producing ‘docile

bodies’, it also reveals that women are not passively subjected to this morality. Women

fashion different modalities of agencies that reveal various ways of living, embodying, as

well as subverting and challenging the norms of sexual morality in Turkey.

Keywords: Dress;; Sexuality;; Women;; Ahlak;; Agency;; Turkey

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Dedication

To my mother and sister

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my supervisor Dr. Dany Lacombe for her guidance and support

without which I would not have been able to finalize this dissertation. I am also thankful to

my committee members Dr. Parin Dossa and Dr. Simten Cosar, for generously committing

time and energy to provide valuable comments and encouragement. I would also like to

extend my sincere thanks to Dr. Sedef Arat-­Koc and Dr. Cindy Patton for their part in the

examination of this dissertation and moreover suggesting interesting directions for the

future of this research topic.

I had the great fortune of having dear friends who have helped me along this

journey. Thank you dear Efe Peker, Sule Yaylaci, Didem Turkoglu, Nil Mutluer, Esin

Gozukara, Onur Bakiner, Pinar Gurleyen and Serbulent Turan Sibel Eranil, Efe Can

Gurcan, Ataman Avdan, Aazadeh Madani, and Carla Winston for tolerating me during

harder times as well as your friendship and support over the years. Thank you little Daphne

Yagmur Turan for cheering me up without fail.

Special thanks also to Hulya Arik, Alp Biricik, Soudeh Jamshidian, Gulay Ayyildiz

and Kemal Yigitcan, who were integral to this journey. Thank you for your enthusiastic

support and fantastic company.

A very special thanks to Mike Chiang who came into my life during the writing

period and helped me in every way possible through stressful times. His unconditional

love, encouragement and friendship made it possible to finish this dissertation.

I thank my beloved mother Yuksel Sevim Baysin, and sister Bihter Ozcetin Yazlik

who have supported me in various ways when I am in need. I am grateful for their

encouragement and faith in me. Thank you my dear niece Esin for bringing joy and

laughter to my life.

I will be forever grateful to my late grandmother Ayse Ozcetin and late aunt Sengul

Ayyildiz for instilling in me the desire to pursue my own goals;; I will always miss them. Last

but not least, much appreciation to my brother-­in-­law Serkan Yazlik and extended family

for their unwavering confidence in me.

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I owe my deepest gratitude to the women who shared their time and stories with

me. I would like to thank for their time and cordiality.

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Table of Contents

Approval ................................................................................................................ ii Ethics Statement ................................................................................................... iii Abstract ................................................................................................................ iv Dedication ............................................................................................................. v Acknowledgements .............................................................................................. vi Table of Contents ................................................................................................ viii List of Acronyms .................................................................................................... x Glossary ............................................................................................................... xi

Chapter 1. Introduction ................................................................................... 1 1.1. Field Research and Method ......................................................................... 7 1.2. Organization of the Dissertation ................................................................. 12

Chapter 2. Theoretical Background ............................................................. 18 2.1. Introduction ................................................................................................. 18 2.2. Key Themes and Concepts ........................................................................ 19 2.3. Sexuality and Morality ................................................................................ 24 2.4. Sexuality and morality through dress in Muslim Societies .......................... 27 2.5. Brief Review of Fashion Studies ................................................................. 33 2.6. Morality, Sexuality and Gendered Body through Dress .............................. 39 2.7. Feminist Approaches on the Body and Fashion ......................................... 42 2.8. Regulation of Dress in Gendered Spatial Context ...................................... 46 2.9. The Study of Ahlak and Dressed Bodies: Brief Notes on Methodology ..... 51

Chapter 3. Gendered Moral Bodies: The Analysis of the Female Body in Secularist and Islamist Political Discourses ............................ 54

3.1. Introduction ................................................................................................. 54 3.2. Women in the Republic of Turkey .............................................................. 57 3.3. Dress Reform: Modern ‘Asexual’ Bodies .................................................... 61 3.4. The Quiet Years: Women in Turkey from 1945 to 1980 ............................. 72 3.5. The Invisible Becomes Visible: The Rise of Islamist Movements and the

Headscarf ‘Question’ .................................................................................. 77 3.6. State Surveillance: The Secular Gaze of State over Women’s Bodies ...... 82 3.7. Conclusion .................................................................................................. 90

Chapter 4. The Socio-­Political Discourses of Sexual Morality: Disciplined Bodies .......................................................................................... 94

4.1. Introduction ................................................................................................. 94 4.2. Choosing the Dress: The Emerging Themes ............................................. 96

4.2.1. Casual Dress versus Hanım Hanımcık Dress ............................... 96 4.2.2. Sexualized and Desexualized Bodies ......................................... 102

4.3. The Politics of Dress ................................................................................. 107 4.3.1. Dressed Bodies in the 1960s and 1970s ..................................... 107

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4.3.2. Moral Muslim Bodies ................................................................... 112 4.4. Violence against Women: “Provocative” Dress ........................................ 119 4.5. Conclusion ................................................................................................ 123

Chapter 5. Space, Dress and Sexual Morality ........................................... 125 5.1. Introduction ............................................................................................... 125 5.2. Women’s Mobility in Public Spaces .......................................................... 127 5.3. Rural Spaces and Mahalle (Neighbourhood) ........................................... 130 5.4. The Veiled Bodies on Campuses ............................................................. 135 5.5. Workplace: Dress Like a Lady, Act Like a Man ........................................ 141 5.6. Streets at Night: ‘Immoral’ Woman ........................................................... 147 5.7. Conclusion ................................................................................................ 150

Chapter 6. The Modes of Agencies: Women’s Movements and Sexual Morality ....................................................................................... 152

6.1. Introduction ............................................................................................... 152 6.2. Challenging State Surveillance ................................................................. 153 6.3. Taking Back the Streets!: Contesting the Public Gaze ............................. 157 6.4. The Veiled Agencies: The Question of Bodily Rights ............................... 160 6.5. “Does Moral Woman Mean Headscarved Woman?”: The Debate on the

Headscarf and Islamic Sexual Morality .................................................... 163 6.6. Conclusion ................................................................................................ 174

Chapter 7. Conclusion ................................................................................. 177 7.1. The Significance and Contribution of the Study ....................................... 183 7.2. Limitations and Future Directions ............................................................. 185

References .................................................................................................... 187 Books and Journal Articles ................................................................................ 187 Newspaper Articles ........................................................................................... 197 Websites ............................................................................................................ 199 Appendix A. Research Participants ......................................................... 200

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List of Acronyms

AP AKP CHP DP RP NGOs YÖK

Adalet Partisi (Justice Party) Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi (Justice and Development Party) Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi (Republican Peoples Party) Demokratik Parti (Democratic Party) Refah Partisi (Welfare Party) Non-­governmental organizations Yükseköğretim Kurulu (Higher Education Council)

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Glossary

Ahlak Morality

Ahlaklı Ahlaksız Başörtüsü Hanım hanımcık İffet İffetli İffetsiz Mahrem

Mahalle Namahrem Tesettür (Tesettür Fashion)

Türban

Moral Immoral Headscarf Lady/Ladylike Chastity Chaste Unchaste Privacy/Private sphere/Women’s space. It literally “refers to intimacy, domesticity, secrecy, women’s space, what is forbidden to a foreigner’s gaze, it also means a man’s family” (Gole, 1996, p.7). Neighbourhood Non-­mahrem/Public/Public sphere. It refers to a stranger who is not related to the woman. It refers to the ‘new’ Islamic dressing code. Tesettür is defined as the türban (a veil), which tightly covers the head and the neck accompanied by a loose long overcoat called pardesü. Headscarf/Veil. It is argued that türban symbolize the Islamist ideological orientations and it was described in a way that could be differentiated from the traditional headscarf, which did not cover all of the hair in the front and in the back, and the ear lobes.

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Chapter 1. Introduction

On February 11th 2015, Özgecan Aslan, a twenty-­year-­old university student from

Mersin in the southern province of Turkey, was killed following an attempted rape. On that

day, she had taken a minibus in the afternoon from school to her home, and the driver of

the minibus attempted to rape her. She resisted by using pepper spray and fought back.

The driver, who failed to rape Özgecan, stabbed her and beat her to death with an iron

bar and then with the help of his friend and his father, he disposed of her body by burning

it (Rape and murder, 2015;; Turkish women, 2015;; Özgecan'ın annesi, 2015;; Universiteli

kiz, 2015). This murder was widely reported in the Turkish and international media.

The brutality of Özgecan’s murder sparked furious protests all over the country and

on social media. Women took to the street to protest her murder and sexual violence

against all women in Turkey. This murder also sparked media attention to the increasing

violence against women in Turkey. During the protests newspapers reported that,

according to the Ministry of Family and Social Policies, four in every ten women in Turkey

are subjected to physical and sexual violence by their fathers, husbands or boyfriends

(Protests against, 2015), and according to data from the Turkish Ministry of Justice,

between the years 2002 and 2009, the number of women murdered in Turkey increased

by 1,400 percent (Koc, 2015;; Murder, 2015). Meanwhile, women and celebrities wore

black across the country and shared their photos on social media to condemn the murder.

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The hashtag #sendeanlat (tell your story) trended globally on Twitter with women sharing

their sexual harassment and/or violence stories (Rape and murder 2015;; Protests against,

2015).

During all these discussions and protests against the murder of Özgecan and

sexual violence against women, on February 14th, Nihat Doğan, a famous singer in Turkey,

tweeted a message in which he argued that “women wearing miniskirts and getting naked

do not have a right to make a fuss when they are harassed by perverts deprived of morals

due to the secular system” (Nihat Doğan’in, 2015). A large number of complaints were

filed against him and even though he apologized for his tweet on TV, he was fired from

the Turkish version of Survivor. As a response to his tweet, some men launched an online

protest to condemn the murder of Özgecan, and they wore skirts and shared their photos

on social media. They invited men to wear skirts to another protest, which was held in

Taksim (Istanbul) on February 21st to say that the miniskirt is neither an invitation nor an

excuse for rape (Turkish men, 2015;; Özgecan Aslan, 2015). For the first time in Turkey,

many men wearing skirts attended the protest in Taksim to challenge sexual violence and

the sexual morality discourse, which dictates to women what to wear and how to behave

in public spaces.

While the claim that a dress style can be ‘provocative’ and ‘revealing’ has been

utilized to label women as ‘immoral’ and ‘available/loose’, particularly in cases of sexual

violence in Turkey, the protests following the attempted rape and murder of Özgecan

brought the issue of sexual morality into question for the first time for a large amount of

people. The intense discussions about this murder in the mainstream media not only

created awareness about the link between sexual violence and morality, but also shone

light on the issue of dress in regards to morality for the people of Turkey. For instance, on

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February 18th, following the news of Özgecan and Nihat Doğan’s controversial statement,

it was reported that a vice-­principal of a high school had demanded that her students form

a team to harass female students wearing short skirts at the school. At a meeting with the

class council on February 9th, the vice-­principal had reportedly told the students “male

students could follow girls who wear short skirts to make them feel uncomfortable, after

which the students would eventually have to dress ‘properly’.” (Turkish teacher, 2015).

The interesting point about this news is that even though she made the statement on

February 9th, it only appeared in the mainstream media after the murder of Özgecan, which

augmented the discussion on sexual morality in regards to dress.

While the connection between dress and sexual morality has played a significant

role in The Republic of Turkey, dress norms are a widely neglected area of study in the

social and political history of Turkey. Discussions on dress norms in Turkey have

predominantly focused on Muslim women wearing headscarves. Studies on the

headscarf/veil have explored the construction of femininity during the modernization

process and revealed the significance of the headscarf in state policies and the lives of

headscarved citizens. These studies have focused on the political discourses of dress

norms and official regulations on dress. Scholars have approached the issue of the

headscarf from various perspectives and enabled a discussion on how the dress code on

the headscarf regulates and shapes women’s bodily experiences. Yet, academic interest

on the headscarf has not fully captured the significance of dress norms more generally

and their relation to female sexuality and morality. This limited focus on the headscarf has

left out numerous discourses on women’s dress and appearances that have produced

control mechanisms over women’s bodies. Hence, through a reading of dressed bodies in

Turkey, my dissertation aims to explore sexual morality discourse and how it constrains

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and shapes women’s experience of their bodies, and to what extent women resist or

conform to control and regulation.

The image of a moral woman is defined by various discourses on sexuality, which

involves the differentiation of parts of the female body, some parts that are open to the

public gaze and others that are to remain hidden. Considering the cultural relativity of the

concept of morality, the construction of the moral female sexualized citizen varies along

different discourses on sexuality in various cultures and sub-­cultures. Even though Turkey

is not unique in regards to its patriarchal sexual morality discourse which regulates and

control women’s bodies through dress norms, Turkey presents us with a particular cultural

setting where women’s bodies have become the site of conflict, shaped by battling morality

forces acting upon the bodies through the norms of dress. In Turkey, there have been two

competing socio-­political discourses – secularist and Islamist – which define a certain type

of body as moral and create control mechanisms to impose the image of ‘moral woman’ –

constructed in any given discourse – upon its members.

One of the vital questions that also needs to be answered is why it is that female

bodies are at the mercy of power in the first place? To answer this question, I will explore

the dualistic thinking that identifies women with their bodies, and how this Cartesian

thinking centers female bodies in the center of the discourses on dress. After this

theoretical discussion, I will look at the history of the Republic of Turkey and its political

discourses to examine how female bodies have become the target of the political

discourses of Islamism and secularism and to demonstrate how and why these discourses

come to target women and their visibility in public spaces.

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Building on data I have collected in field research and literature, one of the main

questions I examine in this dissertation is how the dominant discourses of secularism and

Islamism have shaped sexual morality in Turkey, and how female bodies are controlled

through dress norms in regards to it. In this dissertation, I make use of the Turkish term

ahlak (morality), a term that refers to moral standards as a broad term in relation to

sexuality, which is constructed around values such as namus (honor), saygı

(respectability), ayıp (shame), tevazu (modesty), müstehcenlik (obscenity) and iffet

(virtue/chastity). Bu using dress norms as a frame of reference for analyzing the

relationship between gender, sexuality and ahlak, I endeavour to reveal the sexual

morality discourse in Turkey.

Most importantly in this dissertation, I argue that even though the secularist and

Islamist discourses have been perceived as contradictory, both discourses embody sexual

morality and identify female sexuality as a threat to public order. Indeed, by definition, an

ahlaklı woman is one who conceals her sexual body through dress in the public space.

This is the reason why when norms around ahlak are being discussed in the context of

Turkey, one should not fall into the mistake of labeling sexual morality as Islamic or

secularist. I also argue that the sexuality morality discourse is maintained by these political

discourses and imposed on women’s bodies by state surveillance (through laws and

regulations of dress) and by the public gaze (through sexual harassment and violence).

The discourse of morality and sexuality, which was imposed on the female body

during the Ottoman Empire, was primarily shaped by Islamic discourse, which construes

women’s body as mahrem, a body that needs to be invisible to the public gaze

(namahrem). Mahrem literally “refers to intimacy, domesticity, secrecy, women’s space,

what is forbidden to a foreigner’s gaze, it also means a man’s family” (Gole, 1996, p.7).

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As Gole (1996) points out, the Western conceptualization of the ‘private sphere’ is not the

exact translation of mahrem due to the distinctiveness of domestic space in the Muslim

world. In the Islamic moral order, the female body establishes the boundary between the

realm of mahrem (privacy) and namahrem (non-­mahrem/public) Namely, the boundary

between mahrem and namahrem is based on the visibility and invisibility of the female

body. The Ottoman Empire maintained the moral order through segregation and veiling

which ensured the invisibility of the mahrem in public space. With the foundation of the

Republic of Turkey, the secular modernist discourse aimed at deconstructing and

reconstructing the boundary between mahrem and namahrem by opening the public

space to women and freeing them from the constraints of Islam (Gole 1996). However, in

this dissertation, I endeavour to question the secular Kemalist1 discourse and its aim to

deconstruct the concept of the female body as mahrem and to liberate women from the

patriarchal constraints.

While the Republican discourse drew on the European secularist discourse, it

preserved some components of the Islamic ahlak in the name of protecting tradition

(gelenek görenek) and constructed a “new” ahlak, which amalgamated the norms of

European modernity and Islamic norms (Arat, 1997). The Republican discourse continued

to define the Turkish female body as mahrem, but it expected this body to conceal its

sexuality with modern clothes. The Republican discourse has thus imposed power on

women’s bodies through modern dress. Even though the new Islamist discourse, which

emerged in the 1990s, claims to be a modern discourse valuing women’s participation in

1 Zurcher (2004) defines Kemalism as follows: “It [Kemalism] never became a coherent, all-­embracing ideology, but can best be described as a set of attitudes and opinions that were never failed […] The basic principles of Kemalism were laid down in the party [The Republican People’s Party] program of 1931. They were republicanism, secularism, nationalism, populism, statism and revolutionizm (or reformism)” (p. 181).

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public space, it has also continued along the same sexual morality line and has not

permitted women to exist in the public space as sexual beings. In other words, I claim that

even though secularist and Islamist discourses are seen in a dualistic framework, the

patriarchal sexual morality norms they impose on the bodies of women are not binary

oppositions. One of the goals of this study is to investigate how both Islamist and secularist

discourses utilize dress as a technology of the body to maintain the mahrem of the female

sexual body, and regulate the visibility and mobility of women in public space through

sexual morality.

Dress norms are regulatory conventions that enable the repetitious production of

sexual morality. They produce disciplinary effects that can easily entrap women and, as a

consequence, it is difficult to comprehend their agency. Women’s capacity for agency is

a debated issue. Drawing on Saba Mahmood’s (2001;; 2006) theory on agency, I argue

that to comprehend the experience of women, we need to go beyond the humanist

‘liberatory model of agency’, which equates agency with resistance and explore different

modalities of agencies. In this study, I will not only explore how women resist and

challenge the discourse of sexual morality but I will also endeavour to show how sexual

morality norms are “… lived and inhabited, aspired to, reached for, and consummated”

(Mahmood, 2006, 192) by women in Turkey.

Field Research and Method

At the beginning of August 2010, I started conducting in-­depth interviews in

Istanbul to investigate how Islamist and secularist discourses on the headscarf were

reflected in women’s everyday practices and their narratives of their bodily experiences.

Initially, the motivation behind this study was to expand the discussion on headscarf in

8

order to include the secular/secularist feminists’ point of view and explore how the

discussion on headscarf was affecting not only headscarved women but also secular

women’s experience of their bodies and how they identify themselves with their bodies.

By conducting in-­depth interviews, I had the opportunity to generate questions based upon

the answers I received. I asked the participants to describe their daily lives and activities.

In order to connect the interviewees to their bodily experiences, I introduced a few

supporting questions (such as whether they have ever encountered a problem due to their

attire and, whether they have been identified as secularist or religious because of the

dress they wear) to explore how they fashion their subjectivities in the context of headscarf

debates. Even though I was expecting them to describe their everyday life experiences,

which would reveal whether they confirm or resist the contradicting definitions of an 'ideal'

woman and femininity in secularist and Islamist discourses, they expressed their

discontent about how they have been regulated and limited in the public sphere by sexual

morality, forged around norms of dress in general. They stated that in Turkey, the

discussions around dress and body focus on the issue of the headscarf, but exclude other

dressed bodies and regulations/control that are imposed on female bodies in various kinds

of public spaces.

After five interviews in Istanbul, I realized that the discursive practices of dress not

only act upon the bodies of headscarved women but they also regulate and shape the

bodily experiences as well as everyday lives of all women living in Turkey. The common

component that emerged from the interviewees’ narratives was the discomfort and sexual

harassment they experienced as a result of their “immodest”, “improper”, “inappropriate”

and “sexually alluring” dress style. Their accounts pointed to a sexual moral discourse,

which was constraining their freedom and mobility in public spaces. Hence, after going

9

through the data that I had collected from my five interviews I decided that focusing only

on the headscarf was limiting my understanding of the way the dress code affects women.

Thus, I decided to address the norms of dress in relation to sexual morality and how the

discourses on women's appearances and dress norms produce control mechanisms over

their bodies and how these discourses affect their bodily experiences.

As a result, between August and December 2010, I conducted 31 unstructured in-­

depth interviews with women from different backgrounds who are involved in women's

movements around Turkey. After getting involved with the activities of feminist/women's

non-­profit organizations (NGOs), I realized that activities, events and campaigns on the

female body, including the issue of the headscarf were being organized jointly by

feminist/women NGOs both in Istanbul and Ankara. I conducted 15 interviews in Ankara

and 16 interviews in Istanbul. I chose to interview women’s rights activists in order to

investigate the extent of organized resistance against sexual moral discourses in Turkey.

The interviewees were urbanized middle-­class women with at least a bachelor degree.

Only one of the participants, who was managing a canteen/tea house in Ankara, had a

high school diploma. Only one of the participants was a housewife and the rest were either

students in graduate school or had a career. I conducted all of the interviews in Turkish,

and I translated the data myself. I used a snowball-­sampling technique to recruit the rest

of the participants for this study. At the beginning of the research, I drew from numerous

contacts I had established during my Master’s research and my involvement in Turkish

women’s movements to recruit my first participants, and then I conducted interviews with

their colleagues and/or friends involved in the women’s movement in Turkey. To protect

the privacy of the interviewees, their real names are replaced with pseudonyms.

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The women I interviewed in this research were involved in women's movements

either as members of feminist and/or women's non-­governmental organizations (NGOs)

or as independent participants in campaigns, discussion groups, meetings, and

workshops on women's issues/gender equality. While the participants were active in

women’s organizations, not all of them identified themselves as feminists. Therefore,

instead of labeling them as feminists, I identify the subjects as religious and secular

women’s rights activists. I need to note that I do not use ’secular’ and ‘religious’ as binary

oppositional terms. I identify the participants as religious who pursue a religious life.

Included in this category are the participants wearing headscarves. These participants

also stated the importance of religion in their lives and how it also shapes their choice of

clothes. The secular women are composed of non-­religious (deist or atheist) or Muslim

women or secularist/Kemalist, who do not necessarily pursue religious lives. These

women do not wear the headscarf and shape their lives around Islamic norms. In Turkey,

over %90 of the population is being registered and identified as Muslim but they do not

necessarily pursue religious lives in which religion is in the center of their lives and

identities. I prefer to use “religious” and “secular” to identify the subjects of this study.

The accounts of the research subjects provided rich data to scrutinize how sexual

moral discourses shape women’s relations to their bodies, and to what extent women

conform with, subvert or resist the gendered norms of space. Having interviews with

women involved in women’s movements provided a unique opportunity to investigate the

extent of resistance against and conformity to sexual moral discourses.

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All interviewees were members of e-­mail groups on women's issues. The online

groups are Birbirimize Sahip Çıkıyoruz (We Look Out for Each Other), Henüz Özgür

Olmadık (We Are Not Yet Free), Kadın Kurultayı (Women's Convention), Feministbiz (We

are Feminists), and Feministler Uyumuyor (Feminists are not Sleeping). These email

groups were not only important cyber platforms to generate discussions on gender and

sexual issues, but also crucial cyber platforms to organize and announce protests nation-­

wide. The interviewees were involved in various NGOs: Kadın Dayanışma Vakfıi

(Women's Solidarity Foundation, Ankara), Sosyalist Feminist Kolektif (Socialist Feminist

Collective, Ankara and Istanbul), Amargi Kadın Akademisi (Amargi Women's

Cooperative), Kadın Adayları Destekleme ve Eğitme Derneği -­ KADER (Association for

Education and Supporting Women Candidates, Ankara Branch), Ankara Kadın Platformu

(Ankara Women's Platform, Ankara), Uçan Süpürge (Flying Broom, Ankara), Başkent

Kadın Platformu (Capital Women's Platform, Ankara), Ayrımcılığa Karşı Kadın Hakları

Derneği – AKDER (Women's Rights Organization Against Discrimination, Istanbul), Türk

Kadınlar Birliği (Turkish Women's Union, Ankara) and Kadının İnsan Hakları – Yeni

Çözümler Derneği (Women for Women's Human Rights – New Ways, Istanbul). Some of

the participants were also the founders of, and/or writers in, the following national feminist

publications;; Pazartesi (Istanbul), Kazate (Istanbul), and Amargi (Istanbul).

Both my role as a researcher in the field and my subjectivity became crucial in

relating the participants of the research and their experiences. I was raised by a secular

middle class family, and while I spent my childhood in a small conservative town on the

west coast of Turkey, I also lived in Ankara – the capital city of Turkey – during my late

teen and young adult years. Hence, my background helped me connect with the

participants’ sexual and bodily experiences in both rural and urban spaces in Turkey.

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Since I was perceived as an insider who also had similar experiences as my subjects, I

had an easier time to create subject-­subject (inter-­subjectivity) relations with the

participants.

My position as a graduate student at a university outside of Turkey brought both

advantages and disadvantages. Since I was not a student in Turkey, it created a different

dynamic with the academics I interviewed. Rather than being perceived as a student of

theirs, they interacted with me as their peer and/or as a researcher, which changed the

hierarchical power dynamic. On the other hand, they gave me the impression that because

I was an academic working on gender issues in a culture I was familiar with, they did not

need to explain their statements.

Organization of the Dissertation

This dissertation includes seven chapters, including this introduction. Chapter I

Introduction presents an overview of the research scope, including the arguments,

research question, field research experience, method and outline of the thesis. Chapter II

Theoretical Background introduces the main concepts and theories, which inform my

analysis in this study. First, I introduce the main concepts of this study through Michel

Foucault’s theories on power, discourse and sexuality. I also discuss feminist theories,

such as Judith Butler’s theorization of gender and gender performance which is influenced

by Foucault’s works. Second, I briefly explore the relation between sexuality and morality

and how these concepts have been defined and discussed in different cultural contexts. I

subsequently examine sexual morality and dress norms in Islamic societies through the

scholarly works on Muslim women, such as the works of Fatima Mernissi (187, 1995),

Haleh Afshar (1998), Lila Abu-­Lughod (1990) and Saba Mahmood (2001;; 2006). It is

13

important to explore Islamic sexual morality, not only because Turkey is a Muslim majority

society, but also because religion still plays a significant role in Turkish traditions,

particularly in defining morality, sexuality and femininity. In this section, I will also focus on

Mahmood’s (2001;; 2006) theory on agency that challenges the definition ‘liberatory model

of agency’ Mahmood’s (2001;; 2006) detaches agency from resistance and enables us to

consider different modalities of agencies. Later, I explore the relation between dress,

sexual morality and the gendered body through the discussion of fashion studies. I will be

mostly drawing on the works of Joanne Entwistle (2000a;; 2000b;; 2007), whose works

utilize the Foucauldian concepts of power, discourse and body to explore the production

of ‘disciplined’ bodies through the norms of dress. I will subsequently investigate the

interplay of space and sexual morality, and how spatial discourses of sexual morality

shape dressed bodies. At the end of this chapter, I will explain why and how I use the

theories discussed in the chapter to analyze the data.

Chapter III Gendered Moral Bodies: The Analysis of the Female Body in Secularist

and Islamist Political Discourses analyzes the two dominant political discourses (Kemalist

and Islamist) and how they have shaped sexual morality since the foundation of the

Republic of Turkey in 1923. Through secondary works on the socio-­political history of

Turkey and gender and women’s issues in Turkey, I examine how sexual morality, shaped

by Kemalist modernist and Islamist discourses, defines an ahlaklı (moral) woman based

on her dressing style. In the first part, I focus on the early Republican era and the gender

reforms to investigate how the ahlaklı woman was defined in the modernity project. I

discuss the dress reforms and early Republicans’ and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s (the

founder of Republic of Turkey) speeches to reveal how the social construction of the new

female citizens was defined as “asexual” but modern through the sexual morality

14

discourse of Kemalism. In the second part, through limited studies on women between

the years of 1945 and 1980, I explore how gender reforms and sexual morality shaped

women’s experiences of their bodies. I also briefly examine the discourse of leftist

movements in the 1960s and 1970s to examine their challenges against the discourse of

sexuality and morality and how they used their dress styles as the symbols of their

resistance. After this brief discussion, I continue my exploration with the new Islamist

movement that emerged in the 1990s. The goal of this section is to reveal the similarities

between the Islamist and Kemalist discourses on sexual morality, and to investigate the

new ‘modern’ headscarved women and their challenge to the Kemalist discourse. I will

also examine how law has been utilized as a mechanism of surveillance in the secular

modern discourse to regulate women’s bodies against the threat of Islamist discourse and

practices.

Chapters IV, V and VI are the analysis of the data I collected during my field

research. Since the subject of this dissertation mainly emerged from the interviews, I

organized the next three chapters based on the emerging themes of the participants’

narratives. Thus, after demonstrating how secularist and Islamist discourses shape sexual

morality in Turkey, Chapter IV The Socio-­Political Discourses of Sexual Morality:

Disciplined Bodies explores how sexual morality shaped women’s experiences of their

bodies. In the first part, I explore the choices women make about their appearance and

dress style. Through a discussion on casual dress and hanım hanımcık (“lady” or

“ladylike”) dress, I aim to explore the role sexual morality plays in producing ‘docile bodies’.

The term hanım hanımcık – “ladylike” – is a significant term to examine the sexual morality

discourse as it is used to define women who conform and follow sexual moral norms. My

analysis also shows how the sexual morality discourse desexualizes the bodies of aging

15

women and mothers. In the second part, I investigate how sexual morality defined by

Islamist and secularist discourses shape women’s bodily experiences. At the end of this

chapter, I discuss sexual violence as a disciplinary tool of the sexual morality discourse.

Based on the participants’ narratives, I explore whether the shift in the dominant discourse

from a secularist to an Islamist one has increased the conservatism of the definition of an

ahlaklı woman and could be related to an increase in the cases of violence against women.

Chapter V Space, Dress and Sexual Morality analyzes participants’ experiences

in different public spaces, in which their presences are disputed, even though they are

free to participate in these spaces. The goal of this chapter is to demonstrate how the

sexual moral discourse of the space imposes control over women’s bodies and constrains

the mobility of women in public spaces. In the first section, I focus on public transportation

(such as buses, minibuses and ferries), which is an important means for women to move

in between spaces in the urban cities of Turkey. In the second section, I compare

participants’ experiences in rural and urban spaces and in mahalle (neighbourhood) and

city centers to unveil the differing definitions of the ahlaklı woman in these spaces. While

women’s experiences in these spaces suggest the existence of a public gaze over their

bodies, their experiences at workplaces and university campuses point to the presence of

state surveillance of sexual morality. Hence, in the third section, I investigate how the ban

on the headscarf shaped women’s experiences and made women develop strategies to

deal with the ban. Then, I explore how dress is utilized to impose sexual moral norms in

the workplaces and how women utilize dress as a strategy to manage the gender regime

imposed on them by the male gaze and the patriarchal structure governing space.

Chapter VI The Modes of Agencies: Women’s Movements and Sexual Morality

engages with the discussion on sexual morality and dress in the women’s movements in

16

Turkey. In Chapter VI, I aim to give space to women’s voices to demonstrate different

modalities of agencies in the struggle against sexual morality, a morality that reinforces

sexual violence against women, and limits the freedom of women in the public spaces in

Turkey. First, I discuss women’s resistance of the state’s discourse on sexual morality and

its surveillance mechanisms. In this context, I look at women’s challenges against laws,

such as the Turkish Penal Code regulating “unjust provocations” and “impudent/indecent

(hayasız) manners,” as well as women’s challenges against state policies and practices,

such as state-­sponsored virginity tests. Second, through an exploration of the campaigns

against sexual violence, I question women’s resistance by revealing how women have

internalized patriarchal sexual morality, which labels women who deviate from dress

norms as ‘immoral’. After this discussion, I investigate religious Muslim women’s different

modalities of agency based on their arguments about sexual and bodily rights and the

debate on the headscarf. Even though religious Muslim women have been criticized as

being submissive to the patriarchal Islamist discourse – particularly because of their

unwillingness to participate in campaigns to claim ownership of their bodies – I will

demonstrate their different modalities of agency. At the end of the chapter, I will discuss

the new agencies and voices of young feminists in the movements. I will show the seeds

of a stronger challenge against sexual morality, which unfortunately has been becoming

more conservative with the increasing dominance of the Islamist discourse.

In Chapter VII Conclusion, I provide a summary of the overall discussion of this

study and tie the arguments of each chapter together to paint a picture of the sexual

morality discourse, a discourse that attempts through the dress code to make women’s

sexual bodies invisible in public. After providing the findings of the study, I point out the

contributions of this dissertation and make some suggestions for future studies.

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Chapter 2. Theoretical Background

Introduction

In this chapter, I will explore the theories, which inform my research and introduce

the central concepts of this study, mainly;; sexuality, body, gender, power, discourse and

morality. These concepts are discussed in postmodern and post-­structuralist studies,

largely influenced by the works of Michel Foucault. I will examine Foucault’s discussion

on the discursive body, which makes a crucial epistemological contribution to the

exploration of the never-­ending interplay between power and its technologies on and

through the body and sexuality. Foucault’s analysis claims that the body and sexuality are

constructed through discourses and the body is inscribed with relations of power. After

providing an account of Foucault’s theory on body, power, discourse and sexuality, I

devolve on Judith Butler’s theory of gender performance. Then, I briefly discuss how the

studies have explored the intersectionality of sexuality and morality in the literature, and

then I focus on Islamic sexual morality through the studies of Fatima Mernissi (187, 1995),

Haleh Afshar (1998), Lila Abu-­Lughod (1990) and Saba Mahmood (2001). I pay particular

attention to Mahmood’s (2001;; 2006) conceptualization of agency as “capacity for action”,

which enables the analysis to employ a more comprehensive perspective including

multiple modalities of agencies.

Later, drawing on fashion studies, I focus on theoretical debates concerning the

role dress plays in modern capitalist societies. Then, I examine how feminist theories

explain the relation between dress, morality, sexuality and the gendered body. My goal is

to reveal how dress draws gender boundaries, reproduces sexual differences, and

ultimately regulates and controls female sexuality and the female body.

19

It must be noted that this literature looks at dress code mainly from a Western point

of view and excludes the various dress styles and practices in Muslim-­majority societies.

While secular ideology has assumed a monopoly at the state level of the Turkish republic,

religion still plays a significant role in Turkish traditions, particularly in defining morality,

sexuality and femininity. Therefore, to understand the norms of religious and modern attire

I must explore Islamic norms of sexuality and morality. Finally, I discuss studies on the

female body with reference to public space and dress codes to show how spatial

discourses shape the female body in and across certain spaces.

Key Themes and Concepts

I have built a theoretical framework for my thesis based upon debates in fashion

studies, feminist studies and sexuality studies that investigate the concepts of sexuality,

gender, body, dress and morality. Since the theoretical background of my study is mainly

informed by Foucauldian feminist theories, in this section I focus on how sexuality, gender

and body have been defined by Michel Foucault in relation to power and discourse. I then

move to Judith Butler’s theory of gender performance, which has offered a frame for

feminist theories on dress and body.

One of the most significant reasons that studies on body and dress/fashion have

been unpopular until the development of cultural studies in the late 1960s was the idea of

Cartesian dualism, which has dramatically influenced the ways in which the human body

has been conceptualized. From a Cartesian perspective, the self is detached from the

body: “This dualism privileges an abstract, prediscursive subject at the center of thought

and, accordingly, derogates the body as the site of all that is understood to be opposed to

the spirit and rational thought, such as the emotions, passions, needs” (McNay 1991,

20

p.126). In a dualistic construction, the body is experienced as the alien, which is not the

self;; it is the enemy, as well as the prison from which the soul, or mind tries to escape

(Bordo, 1993a). Within this context, bodies were commonly regarded as natural and

individual possessions that were outside the social concerns of sociology. When sociology

began to question the acceptance of the nature/society and mind/body division, theorists

began to conceptualize the body as central to the human actor and the sociological

endeavour (Shilling, 1993). Even though contemporary sociology has been prone to

question these dualisms, the tension between the body as living organism and as a

cultural product continues to underpin the understanding of the body.

As a dualistic concept, the body has been closely associated with women whereas

the mind has been equated with men (Grosz, 1994). The association of the body with

women has been the central reason why discourses on dress have constituted woman as

the object and the victim of fashion (as in the case of early studies on fashion which will

be discussed in the following section). Dress was not considered a matter of male concern

because men were identified with the mind rather than the body. It is a common cliché

that women care about their appearance more than men and that appearance is

superficial and trivial. However, since women are more closely associated with dress and

the body, dress regimes that act upon female bodies are more visible and rigid and women

are more likely to be condemned morally for their dress choices on the grounds of being

immodest or sexually alluring (Tseëlon, 1996).

Michel Foucault is one of the most prominent scholars who provided a critique of

this Cartesian thought through his analysis of modernity. In Discipline and Punish, (1977)

Foucault explores how Judeo-­Christian forms of power upon the body have changed with

the emergence of modernity, by focusing on the changes in regimes of punishment. He

21

contends that at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the target of power shifted from

body as flesh to the social body, and from particular individuals to the population at large

(Foucault, 1977). In other words, he claims that with modernity, the body has become an

object of concern for states.

Foucault’s account of modernity not only provides a strong critique of the dualistic

understanding of mind and body, but also opens up a new ground to discuss the body and

power/knowledge relation. While most social analysts tend to regard power in a negative

and repressive manner, Foucault (1990 [1978]) conceptualizes power as an essentially

decentralized, positive and productive set of networks and relations. Although Foucault

does not deny the phenomenon of repression, he rejects its theoretical primacy and

argues that power generates a multiplicity of effects. For Foucault (1990 [1978]), power

produces its own resistance, and resistance comes from new discourses and/or “counter

discourses” which produce new ‘truths’ opposing the dominant ‘truths’. He argues that

discourse is irreducible to language, and power is constituted in discourses, and this

power may be exercised through multiple social relations and practices. He claims that

the body is inscribed by power relations and it is constructed through and within

discourses. He views the body as a site of competing discourses, and as central to human

subjectivity. Unlike the Enlightenment model of a unified subjectivity, his perception of the

body is one that has multiple subjectivities. Thus, the body is inseparable from the self,

acting as the locus of human subjectivity (McLaren, 2002).

Foucault’s theorizations on the body play a significant role in my inquiry on the

subject of how bodies are managed and regulated as various forms of discipline. Foucault

(1977) argues that a new form of “disciplinary power” emerged with the growth of modern

western capitalist societies. This new regime of power is centered on the production of

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“docile body” which is defined as disciplined and self-­controlled body. “A body is docile

that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved” (Foucault, 1977, p.136), and the

advent of a docile body engaging in self-­discipline and self-­control has increased in

accordance with the increase in overarching state control and regulation. Discipline acts

to limit, shape, and survey bodies through systems, institutions, and disciplinary

techniques. It normalizes behaviour, acting as a powerful social regulator within all

institutions of modern society. Foucault (1977) defines this disciplinary power as a

surveillance mechanism, which offers an invisible constant, interrupted and powerful

supervision.

While in Discipline and Punish, Foucault (1977) analyzes how power operates on

the body through disciplinary techniques, in History of Sexuality Volume One, he conducts

a genealogical analysis of the modern construction of sexuality. He contests the

conception of sex as a natural phenomenon and develops an anti-­essentialist account of

the body and sexuality. For Foucault (1990 [1978]), sex is socially constructed and is

produced through the exercise of power relations, which in turn functions as the means to

regulate and control sexuality (Foucault, 1990 [1978], p. 155). In other words, sex is not

a natural phenomenon, but is another way in which society exerts control over the

individual body through multiple competing discourses (Foucault 1990 [1978]). Therefore,

Foucault’s perception of body and sexuality is one that has multiple subjectivities as a

founding premise, unlike the Enlightenment model of a unified subjectivity that naturalizes

sex into an ahistorical phenomenon. The body thereby becomes inseparable from the self,

and assumes the position of the locus of human subjectivity. (McLaren, 2002).

Foucault’s insistence on the body as something both socially and historically

constructed has made significant contributions to feminist thinking, particularly the

23

analysis of the body, gender and sexuality. Feminists critiqued Foucault’s gender-­

blindness and proceeded to reinterpret his work. In so doing, Foucauldian feminist

researchers have explored the ways power operates on women’s bodies through the

inscriptions of patriarchal socio-­cultural norms. Even though Judith Butler has not focused

on the relation of dress to gender construction particularly, her theory on the gendered

body and sexuality, which has utilized Foucault’s theory, helps us to analyze the role of

dress in the construction of gender and sexuality. According to Butler (1990), gender is a

discursive construction, which constitutes bodies as “naturally sexed” and through gender

performativity, sex is imposed on the body. In Gender Trouble, Butler (1990) argues that

bodies become gendered bodies through “stylized repetition of acts” (1990, p. 191). In this

context, dress norms are among the styles and techniques that gender the bodies (Puwar

2004). Butler (1990) denaturalizes the categories of sex, sexuality and gender, and claims

that gender comes to be written on the body. Following this line of logic, sex categories

are produced by and through social practices, such as dress styles. In other words,

through repetition of dress styles, the sexual difference is materialized and

normalized/naturalized. For instance, though baby’s sexuality is obscure at first glance;;

the sex of a baby is understood through the color and styles of dress. Distinctions of

gender difference in dress, such as style and color are arbitrary rather than being natural.

Dress that draws attention to the body and accentuates the signs of bodily differences

naturalizes the sexual difference, which is in fact socially produced (Entwistle, 2000a).

Even though Foucault’s conceptualization of power, discourse and sexuality as

well as Butler’s gender performativity theory is instrumental in this study, these theories

do not necessarily explore on dress or morality in depth. In the following sections, I discuss

the concept of morality in the context of sexual discourses.

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Sexuality and Morality

Morality in English refers to what is right and what is wrong and it is “… a set of

principles and judgments based on cultural concepts and beliefs by which humans

determine whether given actions are right or wrong” (Heintz, 2009, p. 3). Due to its cultural

relativistic nature, morality can only be studied within its cultural context. Most of the

literature on the concept of morality has focused on how cultural differences develop

concepts of justice, rights, duties as well as right and wrong, which constitute the

framework of morality in individualistic and collectivist societies. The literature reveals that

the moral domain, which reflects the norms of Western individualistic cultures, are not

valid for the members of non-­Western collectivist societies (Acar, 2011). “In collectivist

cultures morality comprises duty, community, and divinity orientations, whereas in

individualistic cultures, the moral system revolves around personal freedom and rights

(Shweder, Much, Mahapatra, & Park, 2003).” (Acar, 2011, p.3).

By maintaining the duality between the ‘Western-­as-­individualistic’ and ‘non-­

Western-­as-­collectivist’ cultures, however, this literature risks falling into the trap of

reproducing the orientalist duality between ‘West’ and ‘East’ and homogenizing these

societies as individualistic and collectivist. In so-­called ‘individualistic societies’, moral

values are not only shaped around personal rights and freedoms independently, just as it

is a misconstrued assumption that there is no conceptualization of personal rights and

freedoms in collectivist societies (Heintz, 2009). Furthermore, this dualistic view does not

leave any room for individuals’ subjectivity in their own (sexual) moral choices, particularly

in so-­called ‘collectivist societies’. In these ‘collectivist societies’, individuals are not blunt

supporters of community moral values who do not have any agency;; rather there is a

complex relationship between the discourses of morality and the subjectivity of individuals.

25

The exploration of how individuals fashion their moral selves with reference to moral

frameworks/models informed by sexual discourses, as well as how individuals conform to

or contradict moral discourses, reveals a dynamic relationship between subjects and the

existing discourses on morality.

In this exploration of how people shape their moral selves through sexual morality

discourses, examining who defines and enforces moral discourse and which discourses

are the most effective in a given society requires a detailed analysis of power relations

within and through the contradicting and/or conforming socio-­political discourses of its

historical context. In parallel to Foucault’s question of “how, why, and in what forms was

sexuality constituted as a moral domain?” (Foucault, 1986, p. 10), discourse on morality

needs to be explored in the analysis of sexuality from a socio-­historical point of view. As

Howell (1997) argues, while not all moralities are particularly concerned with sexual

behaviours or sexual discourses, the intersectionality of discourses on morality, body and

sexuality should not be ignored. According to Foucault, one of the roles of morality is to

identify what is different by signifying what is deviant. Thus, “morality supports a

continuous process of confirmation and reiteration of what is commonly appreciated as

culturally acceptable and thus ‘normal’ behaviour”;; therefore, it can be perceived as a

“normalizing” power, which constitutes self-­governing subjects (Rydstrom, 2009. p. 120).

Sexual discourses are not static, and they inform and shape culturally acceptable

moral behaviour and dress styles based on the dominant political discourse, which defines

how much of the female body needs to be covered/hidden from the public. For instance,

in one of her studies, Wieringa (2009) discusses the sexual panics of Indonesia, and

demonstrates how the discourse of morality, which is produced through female body and

dress style, has changed throughout the colonial and postcolonial history of Indonesia.

26

Even as Muslim women are perceived as covering too much of their bodies in the

contemporary West, colonialists were concerned with the almost nude female bodies in

Indonesia. In contrast to the pre-­colonial discourse on morality, which also informs the

traditional dress style (which leaves the large part of the belly exposed), the current Muslim

movement in Indonesia perceives Western dress style as too decadent, and thus as a

threat to Indonesian morality (Wieringa, 2009).

Like Wieringa, Rydstrom (2006) also explores the morality panics of Vietnam,

which were created by the exposure to Western culture, defined as a ‘poisonous culture’

by the Vietnamese government, and examines the ways in which moral codes intersect

with female sexuality. She argues that Vietnamese women experience various social

controls in their everyday lives;; thus, they “… have to carefully balance their verbal and

bodily behavior in order not to provoke well-­established assumptions about appropriate

female ‘morality’” (2006, p. 284). According to the moral codes of Vietnamese society,

women should avoid premarital sex, divorce, adultery as well as drawing attention to their

bodies and sexualities through their clothing. In the case that these moral codes were to

be violated, not only the women’s but also their families’ reputation and morality would be

damaged (Rydstrom, 2006).

Although the translation of the Turkish word ahlak is morality, I argue that it does

not carry precisely the same meaning. With the Europeanization of the Turkish culture

since the foundation of the Republic as well as the introduction of sexual rights and

freedoms discourses, particularly in the 1990s and 2000s, the definition of ahlak has been

both structured around the individual’s sexual choices and the community’s traditional

sexualized notions of morality. In Turkey, the discourse on morality has been changing as

the socio-­political discourses have changed;; though, even in the ‘Western’ secularist

27

Republican discourse, the roots of Ottoman Islamic and traditional morality discourses can

be traced back, particularly in the gendered citizenship construction. Thus, in the next

section, I will be discussing the Islamic discourse on sexuality together with morality, which

guide me to reveal the intersectionality between secularist and Islamist sexual moral

discourses. Analyzing this discourse will not only help comprehend the rising Islamist

movements’ discourses in contemporary Turkey, it will also help understand the shift from

Ottoman Islamic discourse to the secularist discourse of the early Republic on morality

and sexuality.

Sexuality and morality through dress in Muslim Societies

The aforementioned literature concerning sexuality, the body and gender mainly

focuses on secular ‘modern’ societies. Turkey is a secular ‘modern’ society in its socio-­

political structure, and the cultures of Turkey carry some Islamic norms mainly because of

its Muslim majority population as well as the heritage of the Ottoman Empire whose socio-­

political life was structured according to Islamic rules (Shari’a). When women’s dress

styles and the norms of dress are considered, it is safe to argue that the secular as well

as Islamic norms of morality have been reflected in discourses on female body.

Since the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923, the female body has become

the locus of the conflict between secularist and Islamist discourses. Even though the early

Republican state aimed at secularizing society the sexual moral discourse imposed on the

female body still carried the traditional notions of morality (Arat, 1997). Since the 1990s,

with the rise of Islamist movements as significant players in the political economy realm,

the question of “who is the ahlaklı woman” has become a more debated issue because of

the diversified Islamist and secularist discourses. Dressing styles and the appearance of

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women in the public sphere have become one of the defining features of ‘ahlaklı woman’

identified in various Islamist and secularist discourses, which are time and space specific.

Due to differences between the culture of Turkey and the culture of North America and

Europe, Western discussions would fail to explain the discourses on morality, gender and

the body in Turkey. For this reason, I will introduce literature that analyzes sexuality,

morality and the gendered body in Islamic sources and Muslim majority societies.

Fatima Mernissi’s (1995) observations on the construction of women’s sexuality in

Islam have addressed the significant role of veiling and sexual morality. Her analysis

shows how veiling as an Islamic2 practice emerged from the Islamic discourse of sexuality,

and she contends that the Islamic practices of secluding and veiling women result from

the construction of female sexuality as powerful. She explores sexuality in Islam through

the works of Abū Hāmid Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-­Ghazālī,3 and claims that Islam

accepts women and their sexuality as destructive and unreliable and as a threat to the

order of the ummet (religious community) (Mernissi, 1987). Moreover, this powerful

sexuality has the potential to cause fitne (disorder), which can lead a man to wrongful

deeds. Men, who are mentally, physically and morally superior to women, must take

responsibility to control them (Berktay, 2000). Mernissi (1995) claims that to suppress

women’s potentialities and power, Muslim male authorities have developed the practices

of seclusion and veiling. (Mernissi, 1995). For Islamic morality and order, as well as the

salvation of men from powerful female sexuality, women must be invisible in the public,

2 I differentiate between the adjectives ‘Islamic’ and ‘Islamist’. In this dissertation, Islamic I used to identify customs and practices that emerged from sources of Islam (Quran, hadith, the life of the prophet);; whereas, I use the concept ‘Islamist’ to identify particular political discourses of Islam.

3 Abū Hāmid Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-­Ghazālī (1058-­1111) is one of the acclaimed scholars in Sunni Islamic thought.

29

and this is achieved through seclusion (Mernissi 1995;; Afshar 1998). If a woman

participates in public life, her sexual, alluring body must not be hidden from the public

gaze;; her body needs to be concealed trough the practice of veiling.

There is also an extensive debate over how the Quran defines the way women

must cover their bodies4. Haleh Afshar (1998) provides a Quranic verse to illustrate the

demand for veiling women which advises women to be modest:

And say to the believing women that they cast down their looks and guard

their private parts and do not display their ornaments, zinat. (XXIV: 31

quoted in Ashar, 1998)

For both Afshar (1998) and Hajjaji-­Jarrah (2003) however, the meaning of zinat is

highly debatable. Islamic scholars define it in different ways, although zinat is commonly

interpreted as everything used to enhance or beautify one’s appearance, including make-­

up, and decoration of the body with clothes. In this context, women must wear modest

attire and a headscarf to protect her and ummet’s (the community’s) morality (Afshar,

1998). The understanding of the female body and sexuality in both Islam and Judeo-­

Christianity is considerably similar. As it is explained in Tseëlon’s study, in Judeo-­

Christianity woman needs to hide her body with dress not to be sexually desired by men,

and “never to [be] desired means never to be seen” (Tseëlon, 1997, p. 13). “Never to be

seen” is achieved through limiting a woman’s access to the public and when she is in

public concealing her body with dress, as it is also defined in Islam.

4 Even though Islam also defines how men should dress, men’s dress code has never been a widely debated issue in the public.

30

The role of the veil in Muslim societies differs across Muslim majority/Islamic

societies according to the prevailing socio-­political discourse. For instance, Afshar (1998)

contends that Iranian state perceives the veil as ‘protection not limitation’ and a sign of

respect for women to protect them from becoming a sex object, as is the case for women

in the West. Here it is possible to arrive at a symmetry in terms of the religious and

secularist readings of morality over women’s bodies: On the one hand, in the counter-­

secularist discourse which seeks to maintain an Islamist gender regime, the European

woman has become a symbol of corruption and immorality (Najmabadi, 2005). On the

other hand, the mainstream orientalist discourse in Europe and North America defines

Muslim culture as inferior due to the gender regime of Muslim societies, which is equated

with the domination of women. Hence, in Foucauldian terms, the female is the site of the

conflict of the competing discourses of Orientalism and Islam.

Even though Orientalist readings of Islamic discourse argue that the dominant

Islamic morality and sexuality locates women as “passive” agents, postcolonial studies on

Muslim societies have revealed that Muslim women are not only passive subjects. In this

respect, resistance is a significant issue that needs to be explored in feminist research,

particularly to deconstruct the stereotype of passive Muslim women. For instance, Leila

Ahmed’s studies (1992;; 2011) on Muslim women and the veil in Egypt and the United

States not only reveal the counter-­discourses against the colonial and contemporary

orientalist North American discourses after 9/11 but also deconstruct the stereotype of the

passive Muslim woman. By focusing on Egyptian and American Muslim women activists

in the 1990s, she demonstrates how the veil has become the significant marker of

women’s subjectivity. Here I should immediately note that I agree with Lila Abu-­Lughod

(1990) who warns us not “to romanticize resistance” and “to read all forms of resistance

31

as signs of ineffectiveness of systems of power” (42). As she suggests, some forms of

resistance can also be understood as the reinscription of relations of power or a shift in

power relations, rather than an opposition to the dominant power group. To illustrate her

point, Abu-­Lughod gives the example of young Bedouin women who wear lingerie and

cosmetics to oppose their parents and gender norms. Abu-­Lughod (1990) argues that this

type of act can also be understood as reinscribing alternative forms of power that are

produced by global capitalist consumer discourse, rather than oppositional discourses.

Saba Mahmood (2001) claims that even though Abu-­Lughod’s conceptualization of

resistance allows us to move one step beyond the binary of resistance/subordination, due

to her failure to problematize the universality of desire to be free from relations of

subordination, she does not successfully deconstruct the equation of agency with

resistance. Drawing on Butler’s critique of the humanist concept of agency, Mahmood

(2001;; 2005;; 2006) provides a more compelling account. Mahmood points to Butler’s

questioning of “humanist liberatory politics”, which presupposes that all humans are

endowed with an innate desire for freedom from subversions, but they are “thwarted by

relations of power that are considered external to the subject” (Mahmood, 2005: 20). Thus,

Butler locates agency within modes of power rather than outside them, and “more

important, suggests that the reiterative structure of norms serves not only to consolidate

a particular regime of discourse/power but also provides the means for its destabilization”

(Mahmood, 2006: 190). Butler detaches the notion of agency from resistance, which

constrains agency to “liberatory politics”, and expands it to entail not only the acts that

result in “progressive politics” change but also “...those that aim toward continuity, stasis,

and stability” (Mahmood, 2006: 212).

Mahmood further argues that even though Butler’s critique of the liberatory

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conceptualization of agency is useful to abolish various strains that undergird the non-­

liberal Western movement, Butler’s theory has certain tensions. Mahmood (2006) claims

that even though Butler acknowledges that the conceptualization of agency does not only

include resistance to subordination, Butler’s discussion of agency focuses more on

“operations of power that resignify and subvert norms” (191) and, therefore, her analysis

of agency often privileges counter-­hegemonic modalities. The other significant tension

Mahmood notices is that Butler’s model of performativity and agency is conceptualized in

a dualistic framework: consolidation versus subversion of norms. Instead of dualistic

conceptions of norms, Mahmood (2006) defines agency as “a capacity for action that

historically specific relations of subordination enable and create” (Mahmood 2001, p. 203)

and argues that “the variety of ways in which norms are lived and inhabited, aspired to,

reached for, and consummated” needs to be explored in order to reveal multiple forms of

agencies (192). To illustrate her argument, Mahmood (2006) offers the example of Islamic

female modesty. In spite of a consensus about its importance in Egypt, the majority of the

mosque movement in Egypt argues that the veil is one of the main expressions of “true

modesty”, and “they [majority of the mosque movement] draw, therefore, an ineluctable

relationship between the norm (modesty) and the bodily form it takes (the veil) such that

the veiled body becomes the necessary means through which the virtue of modesty is

both created and expressed” (Mahmood, 2005, p. 23). Egyptian secularist authors likewise

regard modesty as an appropriate feminine conduct;; however, they consider the veil an

unnecessary element of modesty’s enactment. Mahmood (2005) points out that “this

debate lies not so much in whether the norm of modesty is subverted or enacted, but in

the radically different ways in which the norm is supposed to be lived and inhabited” (23-­

24). In this context, I believe that Mahmood’s perspective is compelling in the

deconstruction of the dualism between Islamist and secularist discourses, in that it reveals

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how not all of the norms of modesty and morality imposed by secularist and Islamist

discourses are binary;; rather, the way in which norms are to be lived by women vary

according to the discourse.

It must be pointed out that this definition by no means undermines the importance

of resistance and attaches a broad meaning to it, which makes it a futile concept. But

instead, as Ibrahimhakkioglu (2012) states, the reformulation of agency suggests a more

inclusive perspective that “… shifts the focus from ‘resistance’ to ‘capacities for action’ or

‘inhabitation’”. (p.8). I also believe that Mahmood’s conceptualization of agency is not only

detrimental to deconstructing the Eurocentric view on women, which reduces them to

docile oppressed individuals with no agency, but also enables us to understand

headscarved women’s experiences in a different way. Mahmood (2001) states that even

though the “false consciousness thesis” was rejected after the 1960s as an explanation

for women’s participation in such movements that seem adverse to their interest, liberal

secularist feminists continue to ask ‘why would women participate in a movement which

is patriarchal and supposedly subordinate them?’ The question of the ‘docility’ of women

is explained in Mahmood’s work through deconstructing the dichotomy between

subordination and resistance and the universalized normative presumption that Muslim

women should inherently desire to be free from Islamist patriarchy (2001;; 2005;; 2006). I

argue that her conceptualization of agency enables us to see the whole range of agencies,

which have been excluded by liberal feminist analysis.

Brief Review of Fashion Studies

The question of why people dress the way they do has acted as a central theme

in the research of fashion in the recent decades. Examination of this question requires an

34

understanding of the different relations between the body and sexuality since the simple

answers of “protection from weather conditions” and simplistic explanation of ‘modesty’

could only provide reductionist accounts. As Entwistle (2000a) argues, “human bodies are

dressed bodies” and “in almost all social situations we are required to appear dressed,

although what constitutes ‘dress’ varies from culture to culture and also within a culture,

since what is considered appropriate dress will depend on the situation or occasion” (p.

6). Even though the interest in the body has provided the incentive to analyze how we

dress it more closely, the focus of most fashion studies has rarely been on the relationship

between the body, the dress code and morality. While the sociology of the body has failed

in acknowledging the significance of dress, other disciplines such as art, linguistic,

psychology and history have explored dress by separating it from the body. For example,

art history has examined the dress as material object and analyzed its historical

development. These studies, however, detached the dress from the body, and omitted the

social and critical dimension of dress in relation to body (Entwistle, 2000a).

Since the nineteenth century, the literature about fashion has been treated as an

irrational phenomenon, a topic that carried no intellectual weight. This explains why this

area of study has not been perceived as a legitimate research topic in academia

(Kawamura, 2006). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, theorists (Simmel

1904, Veblen 1899, Sumner 1906, Toennis 1887) conceptualized fashion as imitation

and/or class differentiation, and this analysis of fashion “…is typically a view from above

since it assumes that social inferiors envy superiors and engage in imitative activities to

emulate their ‘betters’ in order to gain recognition and even entry into the privileged group”,

as Kawamura argues (2006, p. 20). These studies have examined the concept of fashion

and dress as the sign of socio-­economic position in the class system in ‘modern’ societies.

35

One of the earliest and most influential studies on dress5, Theory of the Leisure Class

written by Thorstein Veblen in 1899, examined the socio-­economic dimension of dress

and defined it as a form of ‘conspicuous consumption’ (Entwistle and Wilson, 2001, p.2).

According to Veblen, fashion is a tool of social battle and women’s dress displays only the

role of “the bourgeois lady of the house [which] is to demonstrate her master’s ability to

pay …” (Entwistle, 2000a, p.59). Veblen’s account of fashion perceives women as passive

beings, in his words “men’s chattel”, and their clothes are the signifiers of their status

(Entwistle, 2000a).

Elsewhere, Jean Baudrillard (1981) has followed Veblen’s logic to attack

consumerism (Wilson 2003). Like Veblen, Baudrillard examined the economic dimension

of dress in consumer society and condemned fashion as unnecessary and wasteful. He

further argued that fashion was irrational due to its nature of rapid change. Due to the

dominance of this perspective, research on fashion, as well as dress norms, was

condemned as futile throughout the twentieth century. According to Wilson (2003), this

“over simplified and over-­deterministic” nihilistic account of fashion “…perceives our world

as a seamless web of oppression;; we [women] have no autonomy at all, but are the slaves

of an iron system from which there is no escape” (p.53).

The dismissal of dress as a superficial research topic, as well as its position of

marginality in fashion studies, reveal the weight of Veblen’s account of fashion, particularly

women’s dress, in academic studies until recently. The development of cultural studies in

5 In various disciplines, different terms have been employed in the literature;; ‘fashion’, ‘clothing’, ‘costume’, ‘dress’, ‘adorment’, ‘outfit’, ‘attire’. The aim of this dissertation is to address the lack of relation between ‘morality’, dress and body;; thus, embarking on the debates on the distinction between the concepts would not provide any necessary theoretical extension. Instead, I will use these concepts interchangeably and/or I would use the specific wording within the context of specific disciplines.

36

the late 1960s challenged the conceptualization of dress as just “material” object and

eventually caused a change in the way dress was studied (Entwistle and Wilson, 2001).

Following the discussions in cultural studies, gradually sociologists, historians and social

psychologists have involved the social and cultural dynamics of dressing and fashion in

their studies. However, as Entwistle (2000a) argues, when dress and fashion began to be

examined in cultural studies, history, and other disciplines, rather than paying attention to

the body these studies were “focusing instead on the communicative aspects of

adornment (often adopting the rather abstract, and disembodied linguistic model from

Saussure) and examining the spectacular, creative and expressive aspects of dress,

rather than the mundane and routine part it plays in reproducing social order” (p. 36).

These studies examined the link between the dressing style and cultural identity of the

wearer, and treated dress as a form of material communication (Barnard 1996;; Barthes

1985;; Eco 1979;; Lurie 1981). Indeed, these scholars have tended to see dress as a kind

of language and a matter of representation of social and cultural identity.

Among critics, it is often said that dress cannot be thought as a form of language

because of the ambiguity and uncertainty of its meanings. For instance, when Tseëlon

conducted research to examine the communicative aspect of dress, she asked a group of

women to come to the focus group dressed in a way that would express who they are.

Then, she compared how women identified themselves and the response to those women

made by others based on their dress. She found out that there is a significant

misunderstanding about the identities of those women. (Entwistle, 2000a). As many

scholars argued (Entwistle, 2000a, Davis 1992), dress does not communicate a fixed

meaning and they do not carry a precise message about the identity of the person.

37

Significant theories in the literature on fashion have also emerged which have

focused on its role in modern societies. Scholars such as Bell (1976), McDowell (1992)

and Tseëlon (1992) understand fashion as an integral element of modernity, which has

provided the social conditions (namely social mobility) necessary for its emergence

(Entwistle, 2000a). In medieval and early modern Europe, there was minimal social

mobility and “…sumptuary laws prohibited people in the subordinate ranks from living or

dressing like those above them” (Kawamura, 2006, p. 24). Thus, fashion did not exist

because people were required to dress according to their ranks and status and they were

not allowed to change the style of their dress. However, with industrial capitalism as well

as a modern democratic social system where social mobility is more flexible, fashion

phenomena occurred and developed as a tool in the battle for social status (Kawamura,

2006;; Entwistle, 2000a). The link between fashion and democratization in society is very

striking in the theories that explore fashion within the context of the development of

modernity. According to Tarde, Spencer, Simmel and Toennis “fashion functions as an

equalizing mechanism because imitation is one of the means to reducing inequality,

suppressing caste, class and national barriers.” (Kawamura, 2006, p. 25). As Baudrillard

argues, fashion only appears in open-­class societies where social mobility is possible and

it challenges the old hierarchies, but he also adds that fashion is modernity’s emblem,

which pretends to abolish socio-­economic inequalities (Kawamura, 2006).

Another attempt to understand the significance of fashion and dress in modern life

came from late twentieth century research (Bauman, 1991;; Davis, 1992;; Finkestein, 1991;;

Giddens, 1991). In a postmodern world which has lost its certainty, the modern self faces

an identity crisis and anxiety. According to these scholars, fashion provides symbols for

the fashioning of self;; however, as Davis (1992) argues, it only opens up temporary

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possibilities rather than fixing the identity. In a postmodern world, ‘modern identity’ has

become a ‘reflexive project’ because the modern self is increasingly becoming aware of

its appearance (Entwistle, 2000a). As Featherson (1991) argues, the self is defined by the

kinds of appearances that people can create through the consumption of the goods and

services that enable the shaping of a person’s body, by way of establishing a degree of

control over their lives and bodies in the modern life. Schilling (1993) makes a similar point

and argues that “the body projects” in which the body is seen “… as an entity which is in

the process of becoming;; a project which should be worked at and accomplished as a part

of an individual’s self-­identity.” (p. 5). Schilling (1993) states “the body projects” that

emerged in the late twentieth century reveal how the body and appearance have become

subjected to several social and political discourses, which are encouraging people to

discipline their bodies and gain control over their appearances. Even though these

theories question the mind-­body duality by illuminating the unquestionable relationship

between the self, appearance and the body in modern life, one problem with these theories

that they fail to approach the matter in its totality—at the crosscut between class, race and

gender—while at the same time they lack empirical work on the construction of the self

and its relation to sexuality (Entwistle, 2000a).

The body of literature, which examines dress in everyday life empirically and

considers the factors of race, gender and culture, has mostly originated from anthropology.

Anthropologists have illustrated that all human cultures dress the body in some way,

through clothing, tattooing or other forms of body painting (Andrewes, 2005). Even though

it would be difficult to make generalizations about anthropological studies on dress and

fashion since they focus on particular forms of dress styles in various cultures, Entwistle

argues, “one thing they do share is an interest in the local practices surrounding dress”

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(Entwistle, 2000a, p.75). Entwistle and Wilson (2001) mention that most of the

anthropological studies on dress are focusing on “traditional” and/or non-­Western

societies. Some of the examples are Joanne Eichler’s studies on African clothing,

Hansen’s study on the Zambian economy of taste and style in terms of clothing

(Kawamura, 2011), Huma Hoodfar’s (1991) and Leila Ahmed’s (1992) studies on the

meaning of veiling in Egypt. Even though these accounts explain dress in a given culture

and the meanings attached to it in specific cultures, they focus mainly on the ‘traditional’

dress styles and costumes without paying sufficient attention to the body and sexuality in

the discourses on dress and how people’s everyday choices of dress are shaped by age,

sex, gender, class, tradition, culture and morality, and how different sexes experience the

social control mechanism over their bodies through the discourses on dress. In brief, most

of the theories discussed above do not particularly focus on the relationship between

dress, body and sexuality in tandem with morality. In this dissertation, I aim to portray the

close-­knit relationship between bodies and dress in sexual moral discourses.

Morality, Sexuality and Gendered Body through Dress

Dress matters, and plays a key role in our everyday social and cultural encounters.

Exploring the role of dress and its cultural inscriptions over the body (Entwistle 2000;;

Entwistle and Wilson, 2001) orients us toward a conflicted zone: morality and modesty.

When we dress up improperly, we simultaneously face social and moral condemnation. In

other words, as Entwistle (2000a) rightly observes “clothes are often spoken of in moral

terms, using words like ‘faultless’, ‘good’, ‘correct’” (p.8). Even when bodies go naked in

certain spaces, such as in the private sphere or when bodies are allowed to be seen naked

as in the case of art, they are controlled and regulated by social mechanisms.

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When contemporary life is considered, it is safe to argue that where the body is

subjected to the public gaze, it needs to be dressed according to the norms and

conventions of the cultural discourse. As Andrewes (2005) stated in her book Dress as

Cultural Tool, dress must be studied in its relation to the body, which forms and shapes

the body. In other words, dress not only forms and shapes the body but it also prompts it

to act and move in an appropriate manner. Bodies, which do not conform to moral norms

and regulatory discourse, are to be ridiculed, marginalized and defined as deviant. “The

ubiquitous nature of dress would seem to point to the fact that dress or adornment is one

of the means by which bodies are made social and given meaning and identity” (Entwistle,

2000a, p. 7).

Particularly, dress draws attention to sexual difference and sexes the body;; thus it

plays a significant role in the construction of gender identity. As Gaines (1990) argues,

dress conveys sexual difference and gender “‘as self-­evident or natural’ when in fact

gender is a cultural construction that dress helps to reproduce” (quoted in Entwistle,

2000a, p. 21). In other words, as Butler (1990) claims, bodies are “naturally sexed” through

dress techniques in the discourses of gender. Considering the role dress plays in

reproducing sexual difference and gender, it might be surprising to see the lack of interest

in academia in analyzing the relation between gender, dress and the body. This is mainly

because of the influence of early studies (such as Veblen’s perspective) in discouraging

the research on dress, and the Cartesian legacy (mind/body dualism), which associates

women with the body and labels the body as inferior compared to the mind.

The body/mind dualism also becomes important when the gendered feature of

morality is in question. In her studies, Efrat Tseëlon (1995) gives a number of examples

to illustrate the association of femininity and dress, and to explicate how women’s

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association with the body and appearance has been placing them into a morally inferior

position. She examines the ancient myths about femininity, such as the myth of Eve,

Pandora and the Virgin Mary. She argues that the adorned female body is inherently

problematic in Judeo-­Christian morality because by using her beauty, a woman can tempt

men from their godly way. The unadorned body is threatening because nakedness is

defined as shameful after the Fall (the creation myth), which is also blamed on a woman

in Judeo-­Christian morality. To respond to this fear of women’s sinful and alluring sexual

bodies, female sexuality had to be controlled;; thus, modesty in dress as a moral duty

emerged out of Eve’s sin. This duty was not only to herself but also to the eyes gazing at

her sexual body. To prevent the desire of her body by men, her body needed to be

concealed (Tseëlon, 1995). “Thus, a discourse of modesty and chastity in dress came to

encode female sexuality […] From early Christianity to Medieval Christianity the

importance of female apparel formed part of the theological discourse” (Tseëlon, 1995,

pp. 12-­13). The representation of female sexuality and morality in these myths not only

informed the early and medieval Christian era, but also Western moral attitudes on

women’s appearance (Tseëlon, 1996). Even though Tseëlon’s study sheds light on

morality and sexuality, it fails to provide a comprehensive account of how discourses on

morality shape dress norms and create an illusion of freedom from religious constraints.

In contemporary Western democratic societies, it is common to think that dress

styles in the “modern and secular” societies are more “liberated”, and they are more

relaxed and casual due to individualism and the increased freedom of women (Huisman

and Hondagneu-­Sotelo, 2005). However, along the line with the studies discussed above,

I claim that through a Foucauldian lens, it is possible to see how the discourses on dress,

through morality, operate to discipline the body. The discourse on the moral social order

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imposes particular rules and norms upon the bodies, and in this morally regulated social

situation, individuals recognize that there are ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ ways of being and

dressing. In modern society where the female body is the focus of the attention and the

vehicle of the self, dress as a ‘disciplining technique’ becomes important.

Feminist Approaches on the Body and Fashion

From a Foucauldian point of view, dressed bodies are the products of particular

discourses, which are gendered since they naturalize sexual difference. The ways in which

discourses on morality and dress act upon female bodies demonstrate how dress has

been regulated along the lines of gender and sexuality. As mentioned at the beginning of

this section, dress serves as a signifier of sexual difference. Dress plays a significant role

in drawing gender boundaries and reproducing sexual difference. It enables bodies to be

seen as ‘man’ and ‘woman’ on heteronormative grounds. Even though the different styles

and colors of dress are arbitrary in the distinctions of gender, dress, by drawing attention

to the body and accentuating the signs of bodily differences, naturalizes sexual difference.

What appears like a natural body is in fact socially produced.

By drawing on Foucault’s theory, feminist scholars invoked Foucauldian concepts

of power and discourse in their analysis of gender and body. Barkty’s study (1988) does

not particularly focus on dress, but her analysis of ‘beauty regimes’ demonstrates how

power operates differently on female and male bodies, and how women’s relationship to

their bodies is socially constructed through discourses on the ‘ideal’ female body and

appearance. Bartky (1988) argues that although women and men are subject to the same

disciplinary practices, they produce distinct modes of embodiment that are feminine, and

function “to overlook the forms of subjection that engender the feminine body to

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perpetuate the silence and powerlessness of those upon whom these disciplines have

been imposed” (1988, p. 64). She examines the beauty image as one of the “disciplinary

regimes of femininity”, and contends that dieting and exercise as well as the selection of

clothing and the application of cosmetics are the disciplines imposed on female bodies

used to attain the current fashionable slender body in Westernized hegemonic culture.

Barkty (1988) insists that the pressure on women to conform to 'proper' style of motility is

only not imposed externally;; women also internalize those norms and become self-­policing

subjects who conform to these patriarchal norms. Through surveillance processes, the

female body becomes the object of the male gaze, and woman begins to focus her

attention on preparing herself to be viewed and gazed. In this context, diet, exercise, and

dress are tools employed to discipline and transform female bodies into feminine bodies

subject to the male gaze.

From a feminist Foucauldian perspective, dress is considered as a tool for

regulating and controlling the gendered moral bodies through the discourses on sexuality.

Thus, sexuality discourse forms the criteria for determining which bodies are morally

acceptable and which are not morally acceptable. Even though the definition of

‘acceptable’/’proper’ or ‘unacceptable’/’improper’ bodies varies historically and culturally,

“dress is part of what Haraway (1991) terms “border wars” or attempts to fix the continually

shifting boundaries between a proper and improper femininity, or a right and a wrong kind

of girl” (Pomerantz, 2007, p. 375).

Dress and codes of dressing may also involve violence against women as a

disciplinary technique. In cases of sexual assault and/or rape, the link between discourses

of morality and the way women dress and display their body becomes explicit. In most

cases, it is women who are morally condemned for dressing up immodestly and/or

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seductively;; moreover, they are not only accused for their action but also for men’s

behaviour for following their sexual temptation too (Entwistle, 1996;; 1997). This discourse

on female sexuality can also be found within institutions such as the justice system.

According to Wolf’s studies (1991), in rape cases all over the United States (except

Florida), lawyers can cite what the woman was wearing at the time of attack as a way to

discredit her victimization. Lees (1999) who also conducted a similar study, argues that

judges in the UK base their judgments in sexual assault cases on what the woman was

wearing at the time of the attack (Entwistle, 1996). In this context, as Moor (2010) argues,

so-­called “provocative, body revealing dress style is perceived to be delivering consent for

sexual advances” (p. 115).

What constitutes ‘sexually alluring’, ‘provocative’ or ‘erotic’ dressing style is

another debated issue since none of the regulations at either the institutional or judiciary

level provides a clear identification of what should be considered as ‘erotic’. A growing

number of recent studies have examined links between dress and sexuality in their

analysis of eroticism. As Wilson (2003) states “It seems so obvious that dress must bear

some relationship to sexuality that the assumption goes virtually unquestioned” (91), and

dress may enhance the sexual attraction because it conceals and reveals the body at the

same time. Wilson (2003, p. 91) claims that even though the link between dress and

eroticism should not be ignored, attempts to explain dress and fashion in predominantly

sexual terms would fail mainly because what kind of appearance gets defined as sexually

arousing varies from one culture to another as well as throughout time. It is also very

difficult to make a claim on what kinds of clothes would be sexually appealing. Likewise,

against common assumption, women do not always dress up for men to attract them

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sexually. Moreover, as Polhemus and Proctor (1978) argue, this account on dress and

eroticism fail to explain many dress styles that are not erotic yet ‘provocative’.

The concept of ‘provocative dress’ is essential in understanding the role of dress

in the construction of the female body and sexuality within the discourses of morality. The

definition of ‘provocative dress’ within various discussions is basically defined as sexually

alluring and revealing dress, which deviates from the norms of dress in a given situation

(Lynch, 2007). Thus, since it is difficult to make generalizations about what the provocative

dress is, female dress styles are more likely to be defined as ‘provocative’ rather than

male dress styles. In this context, Foucault’s notion of power and the construction of the

body through and within discourses can be applied in understanding how the regimes of

dress, particularly “provocative dress”, subject the female body to greater control

mechanisms rather than the male body.

The motivation for women’s sexually alluring appearance is viewed as the

women’s ‘naturally’ ‘narcissistic’ inclinations to seduce men and compete for sexual

attention (Entwistle 1996;; Lynch 2007). Barkty examines the presumption of the

relationship between femininity and narcissism and contends that this patriarchal

presumption pushes women to focus on their appearance and to prepare themselves to

be the sexual objects of male desire. When a woman begins to view her body as a

separate object, which is subjected to the male gaze, she learns to survey everything she

does, and to self-­discipline herself (Lynch 2007). In this system of domination based on

the male gaze, women are trapped in between two different discourses: the discourse of

modesty, which regulates sexuality by concealing it, and the discourse of objectification,

which defines sexuality by revealing it (Lynch, 2007). In this context, “both modest and

provocative versions of female appearance, according to Sterling, are locked into a male-­

46

constructed gendered gaze, with women socialized to confine enacted appearances to fit

male-­shaped reality” (Moor, 2010, p. 118). The question of whether women have space

for agency within these disciplinary discourses of sexual objectification and modesty is a

significant one to explore to understand the everyday life experiences of women. Bordo

(1993) suggests that women, by embracing the ‘ideal’ appearance, can gain access to

power within male-­dominated professional spheres. Like Bordo, Weitz (2002) also claims,

“women may manipulate their appearances […] in concert or contrast with social norms

for the purpose of gaining power, however limited that power may be” (Tyner and Ogle,

2007, p.78). The problem of agency arising from Foucault as well as feminist Foucauldian

theories, which claims that society exerts control over the individual body through

competing multiple discourses, is still in place. Even though Foucault views the body as a

site of struggle and as central to subjectivity and agency, feminists have criticized him

because his social constructionist view reduces bodies to ‘docile’ passive objects, allowing

little room for resistance and agency by ignoring the daily strategies to gain power and

subjectivity.

Regulation of Dress in Gendered Spatial Context

In the last two decades, feminist scholars have explored gendered bodies in and

through space and have demonstrated the spatializing of bodily discourses and practices

(Niranja, 2001;; Grosz 1994;; Longhurst 1995, 2008;; Puwar 2004). Studies of the female

body with reference to public space and dress codes have made significant contributions

in understanding how socio-­political discourses shape the ways in which the female body

can exist in certain spaces (Secor 2002, 2004, Gokariksel 2009, Cınar 2008, Puwar 2004).

These studies reveal not only the differences in the ways women and men experience

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space, but also demonstrate how sexual difference plays a productive role in the

construction of space. Don Mitchell states,

Social space is experienced bodily. It follows, then, that the production of space… at the same time serves to produce certain kinds of bodies… Such an abstract idea makes sense, however, only if we understand ‘bodies’ to be both the physical embodiment of particular people, and a culturally constructed set of ideas and ideals about what is bodily proper for men and women. (quoted in Booth, p. 78).

Similar to Mitchell, Entwistle underlines that “dress is always located spatially and

temporally” (Entwistle, 2001, p. 45) and dress is the means by which male and female

bodies are made appropriate, acceptable, ‘respectable’ or ‘decent’ within particular

spaces. The moral boundary between respectable and unrespectable women is defined

through the gendered norms of space. Different occasions, situations, and places operate

with different dress and moral norms, and when we dress we do so in accordance with

the norms of a particular space, such as a formal dinner, wedding, job interview, or work

place. “Most situations, even the most informal, have a code of dress and these impose

particular ways of being on bodies in such a way as to have a social and moral imperative

to them” (Entwistle, 2001, p. 48). Thus, as Bell (1976) also argues, even people who are

not paying much attention to their appearance will dress well enough to avoid social

condemnation and/or being labeled ‘immoral’ (Entwistle, 2001, p. 35).

It needs to be noted that social spaces are gendered due to the production of these

spaces in a dualistic manner. The formulation of public and private spaces in a modernist

binary fashion has been subjects of many feminist debates since it is closely related to the

dualistic identification of woman and man. In this public/private dichotomy, while public

space refers to the state and social spaces open to all, private space refers to the realm

of the home and/or familial space. Even though private space – home – associated with

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privacy that is free of public and state regulation, indeed it is produced and reproduced

within the web of power. Private space is not free of state surveillance and regulations,

such as laws, and as Nancy Fraser (1993) argues, the public spaces are not open to all.

Under the patriarchal discourse of enlightenment, femininity has been associated with

private space while public spaces are defined as masculine;; thus, female bodies have not

been welcomed in the public spaces. Women have been excluded from public spaces.

The entrance of the feminine body into public spaces has disrupted the boundaries

between the private and the public. The construction of public spaces has been contested

over time;; however, there are still certain bodies that are seen as “space invaders”:

While all can, in theory, enter, it is certain types of bodies that are tacitly designated as being the ‘natural’ occupants of specific positions. Some bodies are deemed as having the right to belong, while others are marked out as trespassers, who are, in accordance with how both spaces and bodies are imagined (politically, historically and conceptually), circumscribed as ‘being out of place’ (Puwar, 2004, p.8).

Even though public spaces (traditionally occupied by specific types of bodies –namely,

white heterosexual male bodies) have been subjected to change, and there is an

increased presence of women in the public realm, women have still been the “insiders as

outsiders” (Puwar, 2004).

Even though public and private cannot be seen as opposite sides of a dichotomy,

the categorization of the public and private spaces has been a means of restraining

women’s actions and mobility out of home. Although the public spaces (traditionally

occupied by specific types of bodies – namely, white heterosexual male bodies) have been

subjected to change and the separation has become more malleable, and there is an

increased presence of women in the public realm, women have still been the “insiders as

outsider” (Puwar, 2004).

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As “insiders as outsiders” in public spaces, women have had to think more carefully

about how they appear and dress. The way they experience spaces – such as the

workplace, streets at night, etc. – is different from how men experience these public

spaces. “The space imposes its own structures onto the individual who, in her turn, may

come up with strategies of dress aimed at managing this space” (Entwistle, 2000a, pp. 34-­

35). For instance, while wearing a short skirt and/or a revealing shirt might be appropriate

at a nightclub, one might feel vulnerable on the street on a quiet night;; thus, she might

wear a coat to cover up the outfit (Entwistle, 2000b). The other space where women

participate as “insiders as outsider” and develop strategies to manage the gaze and

gender regime imposed by the patriarchal structure of the space is the workplace.

When gendered bodies participate in the places where they are not the ‘figurative

authority’, according to Puwar (2004), they become highly visible as the deviations from

the norm in places where their capabilities will be questioned. In the male-­dominated

workplace, women are viewed suspiciously as being ‘ill-­fitting’, not being measured up to

the job;; thus, they have to prove that they are capable of doing the job and they belong to

the workspace (Puwar 2004). Women have to be ‘perfect’ in their job performances to

convince people because they are aware that any small mistake would be picked up since

they are being monitored strictly. Utilizing Butler’s theory in the context of dress at the

workplace, I perceive dress as one of the technologies of the body that has “the power to

produce – demarcate, circulate, differentiate – the bodies [they] control” (Butler, 1993,

p.1). Therefore, dress norms form the norms of which gendered moral bodies are

‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate’ at the workplace.

By taking a similar perspective, Entwistle (2007) focuses on the concept of ‘power

dressing’ and refers to the dress style of career women. She claims that because of the

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masculine norms and values (such as self-­control) that shape the gendered geography of

a workplace, women have to monitor their bodies and appearance more closely than men

and negotiate between the binaries of unacceptable and acceptable codes. Through the

analysis of John T. Molloy’s dress manual “Women Dress for Success” published in 1975,

she looks at the gendered dress norms at the workplace. Entwistle (2007) contends that

the discourse of ‘power dressing’ can be explored as feminine ‘technology of self’ within

the male-­dominated work space. She claims that the ‘dress for success’ model rapidly

gained popularity among women in the late 1970s and 1980s in their attempts to break

the glass ceiling to enter the workplace as career women. The ‘power dressing’ discourse

constituted a new visible kind of feminine subject through the use of ‘technologies of self’

to “…transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom,

perfection or immortality.” (Foucault cited in Entwistle 2007, p. 211). This discourse

provided women with the means to fashion themselves as career women through internal

self-­management. This ‘managed-­self’ is produced in the regimes of work, which have a

high degree of external management control, discipline and surveillance, and “dress can

be seen as an important aspect in the management and discipline of bodies within the

workplace” (Entwistle 2007, p. 213). Even when a strict dress code is not imposed,

management enforces a great deal of influence over the dress of employees through

surveillance mechanisms, such as panopticon-­shaped office spaces. Rather than

enforcing the dress code, companies will expect career women to internalize the dress

norms and manage their dress accordingly. Entwistle (2007) contends that when a woman

internalizes “the concept of career as a project of self,” fewer external constraints are

necessary. The ‘power suit’ becomes the signal of self-­controlled, responsible and

autonomous individuality, which was previously attributed to professional men in the

workplace.

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Even though I agree with Puwar’s and Entwistle’s examinations of femininity and

feminine body at work, I claim that gendered morality has been omitted in their analysis.

Along the line of Puwar’s argument, I argue that dress enables the repetitious production

of moral gendered bodies in particular spaces through socio-­political regulatory

conventions. Following Butler’s premise on gender performance, I also argue that not only

are gendered bodies constituted through performance but also that gendered bodies are

‘cultural fictions’ of moral women and men, which are produced in and through the

discourses of dress together with space.

The Study of Ahlak and Dressed Bodies: Brief Notes on Methodology

In this chapter, I introduced the central concepts of fashion and feminist studies on

sexuality, gender, body, morality and dress within a poststructuralist framework. Through

utilizing the theories discussed here, this study uses feminist discourse analysis as a tool

to examine the socio-­political history of the Turkish Republic and the accounts of the

research subjects to demonstrate sexual moral discourses in Turkey and how they

regulate and reinforce the patriarchal societal control via imposing dress norms.

Poststructural theories, particularly Foucauldian feminist theories, provide a

framework to explore the construction of gender and sexuality through language and

discourse, which produce traditional notions of gender and sexuality that are inscribed on

the body. In this scope, discourse analysis allows the research to unveil patriarchal power

dynamics, which are culturally and historically situated. Hence, drawing on Foucauldian

feminist theories, I examine how dress has been utilized in the materialization as well as

the normalization of sexual difference based on the definition of ‘ideal femininity’ in the

discourses on morality. The explorations in the following chapters unveil the normalization

52

process of a certain type of moral gendered body as well as how these images of “moral

women” have been reproduced through dress forms as “stylized repetition of acts”.

To comprehend the sexual morality, and the actors involved in the construction of

these discourses, socio-­political history and state regulations around dress norms need to

be explored. As Turner (1982) states, one of the effects of modernity was state’s and its

institutions’ increasing control over the bodies of its citizens. Foucault’s (1977) discussion

on the discursive body also reveals how the body has become the target of overarching

state control and regulation and the ways in which the disciplinary techniques are

employed by state institutions to produce docile bodies. In the context of Turkey, dress

has been used as a disciplinary technique to produce disciplined modern moral bodies.

Thus, the data for this project also draws on political history, and especially on state

regulations on morality in tandem with dress, to provide an examination of the role sexual

morality has played in the regulation of women’s bodies through disciplinary state

surveillance mechanisms in Turkey. So far, studies focusing on sexualized citizenship as

well as gendered state and legal discourses have not captured the role morality plays in

the regulation of women’s bodies in Turkey. Therefore, in the next chapter, I analyze the

political history and state regulations of the late Ottoman and Turkish Republic by utilizing

Foucauldian discourse analysis on “disciplinary power”.

Foucauldian discourse analysis of the body, employed particularly in feminist

theories, enables the analysis to examine the embodied experiences of women through

utilizing the concepts of the technologies of self and disciplinary mechanisms. In other

words, Foucauldian (1977) discourse analysis allows the researcher to examine which

discursive fields shape and constitute subjects and their bodily experiences through

dominant discourses. Thus, I also use the feminist discourse analysis to analyze the data

53

I collected during my field research to explore how the sexual morality shaped by Islamist

and secularist discourses is lived and embodied in Turkey. I analyze participants’

narratives on their choices of dress and their experiences to explore how the discourses

on women's appearances and dress norms impose control mechanisms and produce

“docile bodies”. Through an analysis of women’s experiences in various public spaces in

Turkey, I also investigate the ways in which the state surveillance as well as the public

gaze acts upon women’s bodies, and how sexual violence is utilized as a form of

disciplinary tool by sexual morality discourse to produce “disciplined bodies’. This analysis

does not only enable to unveil the control mechanism over women’s bodies, but also

women’s responses to the disciplinary sexual morality discourse. Hence, this feminist

discourse analysis will also allow me to reveal different modalities of agencies of women

in Turkey.

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Chapter 3. Gendered Moral Bodies: The Analysis of the Female Body in Secularist and Islamist Political Discourses

Introduction

Since the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923, the female body has been

the locus of conflict between secularist and Islamist discourses. Even though the early

Republic aimed at secularizing society, the sexual morality it imposed on the female body

carried the traditional notions of morality. The state’s secularist discourse continued its

dominance in Turkish society without any salient challenge until the 1990s. Since the rise

of Islamist movements as significant players in the politics and economy of the 1990s, the

question of “who is the ahlaklı (moral) woman” has become a more debated issue because

of the diversified Islamist and secularist discourses.

It needs to be women are not ‘free’ of sexual morality discourses in patriarchal

societies;; hence, they are being labeled as moral based on their conformity with dress

norms when they appear in the public sphere. The definition of moral women has been a

disputed issue in recent years both in western and non-­western societies. For instance,

as a transnational movement, ‘Slutwalk’ has shone a light on the relation between dress

and morality both in western and non-­western societies. ‘Slutwalk’ emerged as a response

to the statement “women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized”

(O’Reilly, 2012) made by a Canadian police officer at York University in Toronto in 2011.

Thousands of outraged women organized a protest against victim-­blaming patriarchal

culture which perceives women’s dress as an invitation to rape (Miriam 2012;; O’Keefe

2014;; O’Reilly, 2012). Since the first protest in Toronto, the movement has spread through

55

the major cities not only in Canada, but also in USA, Australia, Argentina, India, Singapore,

Sweden, the UK, and Switzerland (Ringrose and Renold 2012;; O’Keefe 2014). The

transformation of this local protest into a global transnational movement in a short period

of time shows that dress is being utilized in sexual morality discourses to discipline women

in patriarchal societies.

Even though the current discussions may point that dress is a new tool being used

to impose control over women bodies, it has a long historical roots. For instance, during

the Ottoman Empire socio-­political life was structured according to Islamic rules (Shari’a)

and women were obliged to dress in accordance with Islamic norms regardless of their

wealth and status. Women’s clothes were regulated more around the grounds of Islamic

morality, and the dress norms principally aimed at veiling women’s bodies and sexualities

from the male gaze in the public space.

When the Republic of Turkey was founded, women and their bodies were taken

as a site that symbolized the break with Islam and the ‘backwardness’ of Ottoman society.

The early-­Republican modernization project sought to make women publicly visible, and

to form a gender-­mixed social and public sphere (Gole 2004). While the Republican sexual

discourse might have seemed oppositional to the Ottoman one in terms of its attempt to

make women visible subjects in the public space (as opposed to the Islamic practice of

seclusion), the Republican discourse was not devoid of patriarchal sexual morality. In fact,

not unlike the Ottoman discourse, the Republican discourse defined sexual morality

through the female body by hiding the female sexual body from the public space

(Durakbasa 1998;; Kadioglu 1996). Instead of veiling women’s bodies, the Republican

discourse encouraged women to wear ‘modern’ dress styles. However, it did so in a way

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that asexualized female bodies, thus indicating that it too assumed the existence of a

powerful female sexuality capable of creating social disorder.

Even though studies analyze women in the early Republican discourse, none

explore the issue of dress and sexual morality. These researches analyze gender reforms

and the identification of the ‘new’ modern Republican woman through examination of the

early Republican literature and journals/newspapers as well as Atatürk’s and early

Republicans’ speeches. Based on these previously conducted studies, I will analyze the

early Republican discourse on women and the construction of the female body in relation

to sexual morality in the early Republican Kemalist6 discourse in order to reveal how the

modern Republican discourse concealed the female sexual body through the dress codes

they implemented. Again based on secondary sources, this exploration will be followed by

an overview of the history from the early-­Republican era to today. I will focus on the revival

of Islam as strong contestation against foundational Kemalist discourse. I will also

examine the implementation of legal regulations on dress against the threat of Islamist

discourse to demonstrate how law has been utilized as a mechanism of surveillance in the

secularist modern discourse to regulate women’s bodies. In this chapter, I will draw

attention to the early Republican discourse and the Islamist discourse because both

discourses target the female body as a site to inscribe and materialize their political

projects. In this section, I will reveal how these discourses share similar ideas about sexual

6 Zurcher (2004) defines Kemalism as follows: “It [Kemalism] never became a coherent, all-­embracing ideology, but can best be described as a set of attitudes and opinions that were never failed […] The basic principles of Kemalism were laid down in the party [The Republican People’s Party] program of 1931. They were republicanism, secularism, nationalism, populism, statism and revolutionism (or reformism)” (p. 181).

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morality, even though Islamist and secularist discourses are portrayed as oppositional

political discourses.

Women in the Republic of Turkey

With the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923, the modernization effort

accelerated through the reforms of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881-­1938) and the

modernizing elites in the early period of the Republic (1920s and 1930s). The new state

placed particular stress on a secular modern perspective (Mert, 1994). During the nation-­

building phase of the Turkish Republic, the modernizing elites of the Republic aimed to

invent a ‘new’ nation that broke its bonds with the Ottoman Empire;; to create, in Benedict

Anderson’s terms, an “imagined community” by transforming the empire from a “divine-­

ordered, hierarchical dynastic realm” (Anderson, 1991) into a nation-­state detached from

its Ottoman heritage. The transformation from empire to nation-­state and the process of

modernization were shaped according to the principles of Kemalism (Zurcher 2004).

The Kemalist modernization project aimed at ‘Westernizing’/‘Europeanizing’ the

nation. The terms ‘Westernization’ and ‘Europeanization’ were widely and overtly used by

nineteenth and twentieth century reformers to express “[…] the willing participation that

underlines the borrowing of institutions, ideas, and manners from the West” (Gole 1997,

p. 83). Therefore, the reforms that were realized during the time went beyond modernizing

state institutions;; the reforms aimed for a cultural shift, which would result in changing the

manners, behaviours, lifestyles and outlook of the people. In the scope of this project,

transforming the state and society from an Islamist one into a laic, secular, and ‘civilized’

one was the most essential goal of the modernity project that shaped the Kemalist

discourse of the Republican modernizing elites – the carriers of the modernity project.

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In the case of secularization of the Turkish nation, the Kemalist state determined

the limits of the religion’s role in the society and state. In the Turkish Constitution, the

Republic is officially defined as laic (after the French term laique), which refers to

separation between state and religion (Davison, 2003). Based on this institutional

arrangement between the state and religion, the Turkish state implemented some reforms,

such as abolishing the significance of religion in law and in the Constitution, and banning

the use of Islam for political purposes. However, instead of detaching itself from religion,

Turkish state put in place control over religion. When the Republic abolished the Caliphate

and Sharia in 1924, it also established the General Directorate of Religious Affairs whose

office has been attached to the Prime Minister. The General Directorate is responsible for

religious affairs, and it has been used to oversee, and regulate and religious doctrine and

practices (Davison, 2003). Moreover, the secularization process in Turkey was not limited

to the laicization of state and its institutions, but also the lives of individuals and society,

and modernizing the lives of its citizens.

The new Constitution and institutions did not contain Islamic principles, and religion

was defined as a private, individual matter that should not be displayed in the social and

political sphere (Lombardi, 1997). In other words, state policies were directed toward the

“privatization of religion”;; the state sought to prevent the inclusion of religion within the

identity of its citizens (Keyman, 2003). In order to achieve this goal, religion was put under

the control of the state at the constitutional, institutional and social level, and secularism

as a discourse was embodied by the state to form and regulate its ‘modern’ subjects

through state policies and institutions. In terms of wide-­ranging policies and practice, the

early Republican period aimed at transforming not only the public but also the private lives

of its citizens and their identities.

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The nation-­building and modernization process was highly gendered. Since the

beginning of the foundation of the Republic, the Kemalist modernity project used the

female body and women’s public visibility strategically to display Turkey’s new secular

character (Alemdaroglu 2005). Considering that the secluded and veiled female bodies in

Muslim societies had been conceived of as the signifier of the ‘inferiority’ of the East in the

eyes of the West, the most direct way of displaying the modern face of the nation to the

West was to unveil the female body and increase the visibility of women in the public

sphere. Thus, the Republican modernizing elite targeted the female bodies and sought to

make women publicly visible, socially and politically active, and to form a mixed-­gender

social and public sphere (Gole, 2004;; Cinar, 2008). Women were perceived as the carriers

and symbols of secularism and modernity;; hence, ‘women’s rights’, ‘women’s liberation’,

and ‘women’s visibility’ became essential to the Kemalist discourse (Gole, 2004). The

Turkish state promoted a ‘state feminism’, (Tekeli, 1995) and “made women’s equality in

the public sphere a national policy” (White, 2003, p.145).

Extensive reforms affecting women’s lives in Turkey began as soon as the

Republic was founded. Free elementary education was made obligatory for both male and

female students in 1924 and in 1926 with the introduction of a new Turkish Civil Code.

The new Turkish code was “a nuanced translation of the Swiss Civil Code of 1907” (Ozsu,

2010, p.63) and it replaced the previous codes based on Sharia. Within the new Code,

polygamy was outlawed, women gained legal rights in matters of marriage and divorce,

including the right to choose their spouse, an equal right to divorce, and the right to

demand child custody (Kandiyoti, 1987;; Cinar 2008;; Abadan-­Unat 1990). In addition to the

rights women gained through the new Civil Code, they also got the vote, first in municipal

elections in 1930 and then in national elections in 1934 (Arat, 1997).

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Even though the reforms claimed to ‘liberate’ women, Kandiyoti (1987) argues that

the extension of rights to women did not in fact mean to replace patriarchal structures with

egalitarian ones;; rather, they were seen as necessary tools for women to serve in the

modern nation-­building project. Within the scope of this project, the sexual division of

labour was maintained and women were reminded not to forget their primary duties and

responsibilities as mothers. Arat (1997), who analyzed Atatürk’s speeches, argued that

the motherhood discourse was very crucial to the construction of Turkish women’s

citizenship. Moreover, women’s education was justified on the grounds of enlightened

motherhood and childrearing (Kandiyoti 2000, Tekeli 1992). Children were to be raised

“scientifically” by educated mothers (White, 2003). As Arat (1997) notes, “He [Atatürk]

defends the education of women, not as their right – as an end in itself – or as a means to

liberate women, but as means of improving the quality of parental care so that the next

generation of men will be better” (p. 60). For instance, during one of his visits to a teacher

training school, Atatürk was asked a question by a student “What should the Turkish

woman be like?” and Atatürk answered:

The Turkish woman should be the most enlightened, most virtuous, and most reserved woman of the world... The duty of the Turkish woman is raising generations that are capable of preserving and protecting the Turk with his mentality, strength and determination. The woman who is the source and social foundation of the nation can fulfil her duty if she is virtuous. (Quoted in Arat, 1998, p. 1)

Since women were perceived as the carriers of secularism and modernity as well as

morality, they should be educated, secular and ‘modern’ to rear children with the

necessary qualities. In Foucauldian terms, this discourse of motherhood is a bio-­political

technology of life administration aimed at regulating and normalizing the population

through governmental policies. In the Turkish case, the education of women can be

interpreted as bio-­political in two ways. First, it can be argued that ‘normal’ society in the

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discourse of the modernizing elite was a secular society, where the state exerted power

through the institution of education to secularize its subjects and make them to be seen

as ‘normal’ citizens. Secondly, secularized educated women would subsequently rear

secularized children. In brief, the state did not aim to change the conventional sexual

division of labour, or to challenge the patriarchal order;; rather, the aim was to form a

secularized population.

The construction of women’s citizenship not only evolved around the discourse on

motherhood;; they were also constructed as ‘virtuous’ (iffetli) and ‘moral’ (ahlaklı) women

whose sexualities were hidden by the means of modern dress. In the modernity discourse

of the Republican state, the sight of the female bodies of citizens had become an object

of concern. Transforming the female body from its present ‘anti-­modern’ condition into a

European ‘civilized’ and ‘moral’ appearance was one of the Kemalist missions, and one

step towards this goal was changing the dress style.

Dress Reform: Modern ‘Asexual’ Bodies

In 1925, Atatürk was traveling around Turkey to introduce “civilized” and “modern”

dress. On one of his stops, in Kastamonu (a city in the Black Sea region), Atatürk appeared

in front of the crowd dressed in European style with a Panama Hat to convince the people

of the importance of embracing the European style of dress. In his speech, he compared

people to jewels and said,

‘In order to see the jewel shine, one must get rid of the mud.’ Getting rid of the mud, he insisted, meant wearing ‘shoes on the feet, trousers over the legs, shirts with neckties under the collar, jackets, and naturally, to complement all of this, a head covering to protect you from the sun’… ‘The name of this headgear is “hat”. The dress of civilized people is good enough for us.’ (Yumul, 2010 p. 352 quoted from Volkan and Itzkowitz)

62

After this visit, on November 25 1925, the Hat Law was introduced, which replaced the fez

with a European style hat.

The fez was introduced during the reign of Sultan Mahmud II, as a signifier of

modernization attempts in the nineteenth century Ottoman Empire. Even though the aim

in introducing the fez was to eliminate the existing sartorial order based on differences in

Ottoman bureaucracy, later “it was turned into an emblem of conservatism and religious

affiliation” (Yumul, 2010 p. 352). The Hat Law banned religious garb and the fez for men

working as bureaucrats and civil servants and by endorsing the Western style hat, the law

sought to erase the difference between Turkey and modern civilized nations (Cinar, 2008;;

2005;; Kandiyoti, 2000;; Olson 1985). It needs to be noted that the Hat Law was the state’s

only legal attempt to regulate the clothing style, and it did not target every male citizen but

only the ones working as civil bureaucrats and statesmen. In other words, as Cinar (2008)

claims, the “Hat Law was about the image of the state itself” (p. 69);; therefore, it did not

involve the visibility of men in the general public. Through certain male bodies, which

represented the state, the Republic differentiated itself from the Ottoman Empire, which

was pictured as uncivilized and barbaric.

Even though the state did not pass a similar regulation on women’s attire nor did

it ban the Islamic clothing7, the debates around Western attire mostly evolved around

7 The headscarf was not banned by the central state government;; however, there were attempts to regulate the dress code of women by the local agents of the state. Following the Hat Law of 1925, several municipals issued by-­laws to ban çarşaf (a garment that covers the body from head to toe and is usually black), which was perceived as a ‘threat’ against Kemalist reforms (Atasoy, 2009;; Arig 2007). Even though there had been discussions in the central government to ban the Islamic attire, the responsibility was left to the local governments and in the following decade, the municipalities continued to issue decrees to ban peçe (a garment that covers the face, expect the eyes) and çarşaf while also launching campaigns through the press to encourage women to dress up in European style (Yilmaz 2006).

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women’s clothing nonetheless because women’s bodies had become ‘discursive

instruments’ through which the new secular nation drew its boundary with its Other, Islam

(Cinar, 2008). Considering that the secluded and veiled female bodies in Muslim societies

have been conceived of as the signifier of the ‘inferiority’ of the East in the eyes of the

West, the most direct way of displaying the modern face of the nation to the West was to

unveil the female body and increase the visibility of women in the public sphere. Hence,

the state targeted women in its modernity project and actively engaged in promoting the

new ‘modern’ and secular images of women in the public sphere (Cinar, 2008;; Ozdalga,

1993;; Olson 1985). Thus, Cinar (2008) argues that Atatürk and the Republican

modernizing elite were “...quite aware that European perception of the Turks [was] sharply

conditioned by an orientalist view that saw the Islamic lifestyle as one that confines women

behind harem walls and by images of veiled women as a symbol of oppression and

barbarism” (p. 90).

Even though Turkey was never colonized nor the subject of colonial discourse, the

modernizing elite’s perception of Islam and the veil was similar to the colonial modernist

narrative. In her book, “ Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of A Modern

Debate”, Leila Ahmed (1992) examines the narrative on women in various Islamic

discourses at different time period in the Middle Eastern history, and demonstrates how

the veil was made into a visible sign of the oppression of Muslim women as well as the

inferiority of Muslim societies compared to western ones, and how this colonial discourse

affected the debate on women in Islam and modernity in the nineteenth and twentieth

century. Particularly, Ahmed’s account of the attempts to unveil women in Egypt in the

early twentieth century tells a similar story to the early Republican attempts to ‘liberate’

the public from Islam. The debates around veiling and the westernization of the Egyptian

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culture began in the late nineteenth century in Egypt during British colonization, and in the

twentieth century intellectuals began to discuss unveiling as an essential step in the

advancement of the society. Ahmed’s account of the modernization history of Egypt and

unveiling resembles the history of the Turkish Republic and how the veil began to be seen

as the marker of anti-­modernity.

Like in the European colonial discourse, Atatürk and his followers also regarded

the headscarf as a signifier of ‘backwardness’ and the Ottoman sexual order, thereby

drawing a clear distinction between a woman who wears a headscarf and one who does

not by designating the former as ‘uncivilized’ and the latter as ‘civilized’. For instance,

during the same visit in the Anatolian tour of 1925 mentioned above, when Atatürk

encountered women who were covering their hair and faces, he remarked:

In some places I see women who hide their faces and eyes by throwing a piece of fabric, a scarf, or something like that over their heads, and when a man passes by, they turn their backs to him or close up by sitting on the ground. What is the meaning and explanation of this behaviour? Gentlemen, would the mothers and daughters of a civilized nation assume such an absurd and vulgar pose? This is a situation that ridicules our nation. It has to be corrected immediately. (Quoted in Gocek & Balaghi, 1994, p.61)

As his speech reveals, Atatürk regarded the headscarf as a signifier of

‘backwardness’, and the binary categorization, rooted in Kemalism, identified ‘modern’

Turkish women citizens as non-­headscarf wearing, urban, secular, educated and visible

in the public sphere, in contrast to the headscarf-­wearing women, who were construed as

uneducated, rural, ‘anti-­secular’ and ‘anti-­modern’ (Gokariksel and Mitchell, 2005;; Cinar

2008;; O'Neil 2008;; Secor 2002;; Gole, 1996;; White, 2003).

Modern, ‘ideal’ Turkish women were identified as virtuous, nationalist, educated,

powerful and emancipated, hence unveiled, and “since the new Republican woman

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represented the modern, secular Westernized state, she was expected to behave and

dress in what the state defined as modern, Western manner” (White, 2003, p. 145). It was

not just about the attire of the women;; women were encouraged to change their Islamic

and/or rural lifestyles.

The display of the new ‘unveiled’ women with their European lifestyle was

imperative to the Kemalist modernity project. “The state was actively promoting the

appearance of women in public places, wearing modern clothes, engaged in modern

activities” (Cinar 2005, p. 63). Women were expected to participate in these ‘modern

activities’ and dress properly according to the occasion and space. Women were expected

to wear evening gowns and attend ballroom dances and dress up elegantly for evening

gatherings, and photographs of these women were increasingly published via the

sponsorship of the government (Cinar 2005). Atatürk was also eager to become the face

of this new world and he participated in the ballroom dance with his wife Latife Hanim as

well as his adopted daughter Sabiha Gökçen, who later became the public figures

representing the women of Turkey.

As Sibel Erol (1992) contends, the image of young girls in shorts and t-­shirts in

the Atatürk and Youth and Sports Commemorations became the emblematic

representation of this ‘new’ woman. The most challenging image that proved the

deconstruction of the Islamic sexual moral order was the image of women in bathing suits

on the beach. The sexual moral order of the Ottoman society was ensured through hiding

women’s bodies from the public gaze. Women in bathing suits challenged this sexual

moral norm by revealing “the parts of the female body that were deemed private under

Islam and hence covered by the veil” (Cinar 2005, p. 63). In the new Republic, female

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bodies became subjected to the public gaze and were expected to be dressed

appropriately according to modern norms and conventions of the Kemalist discourse.

As Gole (1996) argues, the distinction between the ‘civilized’ and ‘uncivilized’ dress

also affected beauty image and aesthetics. The understanding of ‘Eastern’ ‘oriental’

beauty –defined as long hair with a rounded curved body dressed in loose clothing-­ was

replaced with European beauty image defined as short hair with slim body, dressed in tight

clothing with corset. “You look European” (Gole 1996 p. 66) became the new way of

complimenting women, and women who did not look European in their dress and body

shape were singled out as “culturally ill-­suited for modernity” (Atasoy, 2009, p. 156). For

instance, the quotation Durakbasa uses from the article “Our Women and Sports” in a

Journal Aksam Spor (Night Sport) echoes the beauty image created within the modernity

discourse:

Today’s regime requires healthy and active, agile bodies… This generation who have been able to overthrow the black veil from their faces and the çarşaf from their backs should also be careful about the beauty of their bodies. For the mothers who are going to bring up the healthy generations of tomorrow, sports is as important as for men… in the national holidays for the youth, we witnessed our young girls with dismay, who did not exercise their bodies except for one class hour of physical education per week: Our young girls usually displayed a fat and clumsy body with big breasts and fleshy legs. Those young girls who have the greatest beauty of the Turkish race by birth... (Quoted in A. Durakbasa, 1998, p. 144-­145).

Following Barkty’s argument on the disciplinary regime constructed through beauty image,

I argue that together with the exposure of female bodies in the public sphere, this new

modern European image created new “disciplinary regimes of femininity” (Barkty 1988),

which began to discipline and transform female bodies into feminine bodies subject to the

male gaze. This new discourse on female bodies employed exercise and dress as tools

to discipline and regulate female bodies and it set the criteria for acceptable bodies.

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Through surveillance processes produced by the national discourse in the public space,

urbanized educated modern women in Turkey began to focus their attention on preparing

themselves to be viewed and gazed in the public space to which they had just gained the

right to participate.

Even though women were encouraged to participate in the public space, modern

educated women had to think more carefully about how they appeared and dressed up

(Gole 1996). In the modern dualistic logic, Puwar (2004) argues, femininity is associated

with the private space and masculinity with public;; thus, female bodies are not welcomed

in public spaces. Since the public space is structured around masculine norms in

patriarchal societies, women are always the “insiders as outsider” (Puwar 2004) in public

spaces. In the Republic of Turkey, public spaces were not only construed around the

norms of modernity, but were also structured through the masculine norms. In other words,

not only were Turkish women who did not look modern perceived as outsiders in the public

space, but so were European-­looking modern women who did not have an undisputed

right to be present in the public spaces. For instance, Durakbasa (2001) who conducted

interviews with women who were young adults in the early Republican era, states that

women were not always encouraged to go into particular professions – such as

engineering. They were encouraged to choose their career along the line of the mission –

the modern mother of the nation – assigned to women within the nationalist state

discourse. Through the analysis of a women’s journal in the 1940s and 1950s, Hock

(2013) also argues that women’s participation in the labour force was still disputed, a fact

that potentially labeled women “insiders as outsiders” in workspaces.

In the nationalist discourse, dress was utilized as a ‘technology of the body’ to form

‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate’ gendered moral bodies. ‘Acceptable’ bodies were not only

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defined as modern and unveiled, but they also needed to be dressed according to the

sexual moral norms of the modern secularist discourse. While on one hand the change in

women’s appearance was meant to portray the nation as ‘civilized’, on the other hand,

women were not allowed to act and dress freely according to the European lifestyle, which

emphasized their sexuality. Through seclusion and veiling practices, the sexual moral

order had been maintained in the Islamic Ottoman society. The elimination of the Islamic

practices of seclusion and veiling and the opening up of the public sphere required

restructuring of the gendered moral order. Therefore, as scholars like Durakbaşa (1998)

and Atasoy (2009) argue, even though Kemalist discourse claimed to free women from

religious norms, the traditional values of female modesty as well as religious moral norms

(such as sexual purity and virginity) were still carried out by the Kemalist modernity project.

Through examining Atatürk’s speech’s, Arat (1997) claims that due to the uneasiness with

European sexual culture, the nationalist discourse warned the ‘modern’ Turkish women

not to “mimic the European conduct and behaviour” as well as its promiscuity, but to keep

their traditional norms of modesty and “virtuous attitude” (Arat, 1997, p. 61). For instance,

on March 21, 1923, during his meeting with women in Konya, Atatürk defined the way

women should appear in public:

In cities, women’s dressing style and veiling manifest in two ways;; either they cover excessively or insufficiently. In other words, either an attire that is hard to depict, too covered, and murky or a dressing that is so lewd that it cannot be worn even in the most permissive balls in Europe. Both of these styles fall outside the scope of the recommendations of Sharia, of the dictates of religion. Our religion frees women both from that insufficiency and this excess. (Arig, 2007, p. 36) [my translation]

Arat points out that in his speeches, Atatürk not only encouraged women to dress

in a modern way, but also urged them to wear “attire that is recommended by the law of

God and commanded by religion” (quoted in Arat 1997, p. 62). As Atatürk’s speech

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reveals, instead of excluding Islam completely from its discourse, Kemalism utilized it as

a basis for its own secular morality. This Kemalist sexual morality, like Islam, has

perceived female sexuality as a threat to public morality and thus in need of seclusion. To

counter this threat, Islam requires women to hide their sexuality through veiling. While the

veil served as a sign of modesty and female sexual morality in the Islamic worldview, the

Kemalist discourse had to construct new moral codes to convey its message of sexual

purity. The moral order still depended on the regulation and control of female sexuality

due to the “close connection between female sexual purity and family or lineage honour”

(Kandiyoti 1987, p. 326). Therefore, Republicans also carried the concern that women

becoming educated and participating in the workforce and becoming more visible and

active agents in public life might create a threat to moral order and to the family. The

solution to this potential threat was stripping women of their sexuality;; in other words, the

solution was to veil their sexualities. In this context, women were constructed as “sexually

neutral” as “comrade women” in their work life (Arat, 1997, p. 61). “The citizen woman

dressed to downplay her femininity and sexuality, donning severe suits and a no-­nonsense

demeanor.” (White, 2003, p. 153). For instance, Acun (2007) who examined state

produced visual images, such as photographs, pamphlets and lottery tickets from the early

Republican period (1923 to 1960), claims that women were portrayed as asexual beings

in modest dress. Acun (2007) further states that to prevent women from wearing feminine

dress styles, which were labeled as sexually seductive, one of the states persons in office

during the single-­party period uttered, “we did not give freedom to women so they would

polish their nails and dance seductively” (p. 102). In other words, women were obliged to

suppress their sexuality or to be ‘asexual’ while they were in the public sphere where they

were seen as “space invaders” (Puwar 2004), who posed a threat to the moral order.

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The image of Kemalist women in ‘severe suits’ might seem conflicting with the

images of women in bathing suits and evening gowns. However, Entwistle (2001) reminds

us that different occasions, situations, and places operate with different dress and moral

norms and that “dress is always located spatially and temporally” (Entwistle, 2000b, p.

335). For instance, ballrooms during the early years of Republic had significant importance

in the display of the new secular national female body to the European gaze. Cinar (2005)

also argues that the image of women in bathing suits particularly in the first beauty

pageants were strong evidence for the global gaze that women and their bodies had been

liberated by the new secular state. While women in suits symbolized the new image of

professional Republican women, it is also differentiating Republican women from

European women who were perceived as promiscuous (Kadioglu, 1996). For instance,

Acun’s (2007) analysis of visual materials demonstrates that while women were pictured

in a European look, they were also portrayed in modest dress, which hid their femininity

and sexual bodies, unlike their counterparts (European women).

According to the Kemalist discourse, women could be modern and modest without

the veil, and the notion of morality, which was attached to female sexuality, set the norms

in not only how women appeared in particular spaces but also how they held themselves

when they encountered men (Aldikacti Marshall, 2013). This Kemalist notion of modesty

and morality resembles Abu-­Lughod’s (1986) examination of “modesty code” in the study

of the Awlad‘Ali, a Bedouin community, which practices Sunni Islam. Abu-­Lughod asserts

that, for the Awlad ‘Ali, the “modesty code” reduces the threat posed by sexuality against

morality, and this code identifies women who deny their sexuality as honourable women.

In other words, a modest woman is one who acts chastely and avoids men who are not

related. “The modest woman admits no interest in men, makes no attempt to attract them

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through behaviour or dress, and covers up any indication of a sexual or romantic

attachment (even in her marriage). The woman who does not is called a ‘slut’ (qhaba) or

a ‘whore’ (sharmuta)” (Abu-­Lughod 1986, p. 152). The same “modesty code” defined by

Abu-­Lughod is also quite visible in the narratives of early Republican women. For instance,

through the analysis of the narratives of women who were the first targets of the

Republican reforms, Durakbasa (2001) reveals that even though women were allowed to

dress in a European way and socialize with men, they also learned how to interact with

men. “In these new occasions of social mixing, men and women learned and practiced the

new rules of etiquette which mostly depended on management of social distance, where

new women preserved basic codes of female virtue and were highly cautious of not being

seductive.” (Durakbasa, 2001, p. 200). I agree with Kadioglu’s (1996) observation that

women who cannot balance the two are either labeled as too modern as to “warrant

promiscuity” (Kadioglu 1996, p. 178) or too traditional, meaning uneducated and

uncivilized, by the new Kemalist discourse of the state. In other words, the expectation to

balance the tension between modernity and tradition in public space in fact drew limits on

women’s appearances and gave less room to women to participate in the public space

with different modalities of agency. Rather, as the studies discussed above reveal, only

one homogenous ‘ideal’ woman was accepted in the public space.

The tension between modernity and traditional sexual moral norms materializes

the female body in a way, which must be dressed in a modern way without subjecting her

sexual body to the public gaze. The internalization of this gender-­specific issue can be

understood by looking at Judith Butler’s research. Butler’s (1990) theory on gender

performativity, which defines gender as “a doing”, provides an explanation of the

construction of ‘modern’ gendered identity through dress norms. In her theory, gendered

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identity and body needs to be considered a performative accomplishment, which is

constituted through “a stylized repetition of acts” (Butler 1990, p. 191). In this context,

dress is one of the techniques that genders the body and through the repetition of a dress

style over time, certain gendered bodies become “cultural fictions’ of what is a ‘real’

woman. Along the line of this theory, I argue that through the Kemalist discourse, modern

dress style was used to produce and reproduce the ‘cultural fiction’ of the modern Turkish

woman. Through the reproduction of this ‘cultural fiction’, women who were unveiled but

dressed to suppress their sexuality were ‘’normalized’ in the society as ‘modest’ and

respectable women. This gendered, moralized body has been “renewed and consolidated

through time” (Butler, 1990, p. 274) successfully in the discourse of state secularism until

the ‘modern’ Islamist women emerged in 1990s to challenge this ‘cultural fiction’.

The Quiet Years: Women in Turkey from 1945 to 1980

The nationalist discourse, which constituted the new image of ‘asexual,’ educated,

and unveiled women could not reach all women in the nation. Reforms mostly served and

informed urban Turkish women’s lives. Rural women were affected by neither the reforms

nor the new image of the secular women. As a result of education and development, the

state believed that women would internalize the cultural fiction of woman produced

through Kemalist discourse;; thus, through the normalization and internalization of the new

image of woman, the headscarf would disappear from public space eventually

(Saktanber&Corbacioglu 2008).

However, the modernization reforms implemented during the early years of the

Republic produced reactions from pro-­Islamic groups. As Karpat (1959) argues, after the

death of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi – CHP (Republican Peoples

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Party) government became unpopular among the masses, particularly in rural regions.

The main reason for the decrease in the popularity of CHP was the power that a small

group of bureaucrats held in the government and their policies, which was not inclusive of

the masses living in the rural areas (Karpat 1959). People “…resented the state constantly

imposing its will upon them without ever taking their sentiments into account” (Ahmad,

1993, p.105). The strict secularization project showed a slight decline during the period

from transition to multi-­party politics (1946-­1950) (Zurcher 2004). After 1950, political

parties such as the Demokratik Parti – DP (Democratic Party) brought religion as a cultural

tradition back into the political discourse to gain the support of a traditional and pro-­Islamic

population (Lombardi 1997). This party was shut down as a result of the military coup in

1960 however its successor, the Adalet Partisi – AP (Justice Party), governed the country

until the military coup in 1980 and continued to manipulate religion in its political discourse

(Aldikacti Marshall 2013;; Lombordi 1997). From the 1960s to the military coup in 1980,

the emphasis on religion was augmented in the discourses of center right political parties,

and used as a powerful political weapon against communism (Sakallioglu 1996;; Kongar

1998;; Aldikacti Marshall 2013).

There are very few studies on the status of women and sexual norms between the

years of 1945 and the 1980s. Serpil Sancar (2012), who conducted research on four

newspapers articles/sections on women and family between the years of 1945 and 1965,

defines these years as the silent years for women and she argues that the policies during

this period can be defined as “conservative modernization”. It was “conservative” because

women’s freedom was limited to family and traditional gender and sexual norms;; and it

was modern because the modernization principles that began in the early Republican

years continued to exist. The goal of this process was to disperse the principles of a family

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focused modernization of the early Republic to the everyday lives of urban middle class

families. In this context, femininity and womanhood were defined as the duties and

responsibilities of women in the family, and the discourse on women’s emancipation was

forgotten (Sancar 2012). As a result of the lack of debate on women’s rights and gender

inequality, these years can be defined as the quiet years for women. The puritan

sexualized morality materialized through the discourse on women constructed them as

modern mothers whose jobs were only to raise moral and education citizens.

On the other hand, recent studies in the field of women’s oral history demonstrate

women’s responses to Kemalist reforms and the identification that was imposed on them.

As Durakbasa argues (2001), post-­1980s feminist studies questioning “state feminism”

are mostly examinations of official or public discourses through the analysis of Atatürk’s

speeches, literature, newspapers, journals and articles of the time. Recent women’s oral

history studies, she argues, try to reveal women’s voices and their self-­identification based

on the analysis of their own life story accounts (p. 195). In her article outlining her study

for the “Women’s Oral History Pilot Project”, Durakbasa (2001) states that the interviews

she conducted with women who were the first targets of the Republican reforms

demonstrate the adaptation of this new ‘ideal’ femininity and the tension women lived with

through tradition and modernity. The Republican balls and tea parties were used to convey

this new look to modern women, and she states that the narratives of the participants

reveal that women had been affected by this new ideal of femininity expressed through

modern dress (Durakbasa 2001). The choice of dress and the presentation of the female

body in public within a new modern look with short and smart suits became the markers

of the new women. For instance, the narratives of the participants revealed that “long hair

was a sign of virtue for young women and the new women [with short hair] had to develop

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a new kind of morality, which would be more individualized, while they also adopted the

new possibilities of a modern feminine outlook.” (Durakbasa, 2011, p. 199).

While Durabasa’s (2001) study demonstrates a modality of agency for women who

benefitted from the reforms and enjoyed a modern identity and life in the cities, Hock’s

(2013) study reveals the discontent of women from the RRP’s reforms and policies. As

Hock’s (2013) research on women’s journals in the 1950s and 1960s demonstrates, even

as women benefited from the Kemalist gender reforms, they did not stay quiet and began

to criticize the CHP’s single party regime, as Sancar (2012) also argues. The articles

written by women for the women’s journal (Kadin Gazetesi – Women’s Newspaper) at the

time questioned the CHP’s reforms. For instance in one of the articles Iffet Halim Oruz,

the owner and editor of Kadin Gazetesi, claimed that the reforms had indeed brought

neither complete equality nor liberation and during the period under Ataturk’s rule,

“Woman’s duty toward’s [sic] the country at that time, was more of a social kind, i.e. she

was called upon to use her rights merely by joining the election. This does not mean that

any other party would not have recognized women’s rights.” (Quoted in Hock, p. 22).

Even though women gained socio-­political rights, they were still very much absent

in politics as a result of the “modern conservative discourse” (Sancar 2012). However, this

began to change in the late 1960s and 1970s with the emergence of leftist movements,

where women became more visible in the political realm. This period was marked by the

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polarization of right and leftist groups.8 Student uprisings and the leftist movement created

a space for women to challenge the patriarchal structure. Women who engaged in the

leftist movement challenged class inequality and capitalism, which they argued was

reinforced by the patriarchal structure (Gulendam 2001). However, to the leftist movement,

feminist concerns still did not have a place within its discourse. Women in the leftist

movement were expected to fight against capitalism without questioning women’s status

in society. Therefore, feminist ideas did not have a chance to develop until the 1980s in

Turkey (Gulendam 2001, Tekeli 1992).

During the polarization between the left and the right, clothing styles were also

highly politicized. Different hairstyles, beards and moustaches all had associations with

different political and religious associations (Yumul 2010). For example, the droop of the

moustache would indicate the Maoist or nationalist tendencies and while the parka was

worn by leftists, the şalvar (baggy trousers) was preferred by militant Islamists (Yumul

2010). Like their western counterparts, Turkish leftist women in the 1970s began to

challenge the capitalist discourse, which objectified and sexualized the female body;; thus,

they chose to wear shabby clothes, which hid their sexualities (Cinar 2005). On the one

8 As a consequence of the growing violent clashes of leftist and right movements, the military issued an ultimatum in 1971 resulting in the forcing of the Adalet Partisi (Justice Party), the successor of the AP government, to resign. (Lombardi 1997). After the ultimatum came from the army, the interim coalition cabinet governed the country with the consultation and support from the army. However, the political turmoil did not end, and the army overthrew the government in 1980. The Turkish military saw it as their duty to save democracy from the politicians (Zurchler, 2004), and claimed that the coup was a response to the unstable political situation and domestic political anarchy (Lombardi, 1997). The Turkish Army General Staff, Kenan Evren, took control of the state, and the political parties were dissolved and politicians who came before 1980 were banned from politics for 10 years (Zurcher). All power was in the hands of the military, particularly the National Security Council8. A new constitution written by the army was introduced in 1982 replacing the more libertarian 1961 constitution, and the military rule continued until 1983 (Lombardi). Although there was a civilian government after 1983, the military continued to exercise its power in politics through Kenan Evren who was appointed as President based on the new constitution.

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hand, I agree with Cinar’s observation that “This style was not so different from the Islamic

veiling in that they have both been products of the attempt to conceal the sexuality of the

female body, so they have both served to reproduce and reaffirm the power and authority

of the male gaze, which, it has been assumed, has the natural capacity to define and

constitute female bodies as sexual and desirable” (Cinar, 2005, p.77). On the other hand,

it also needs to be noted that these women involved in the leftist movements criticized the

capitalist discourse that objectify the female body. Hence, shabby clothing could easily

also be seen as a tool they used against the objectifying male gaze of the capitalist

normative system.

While women in leftist movements questioned the capitalist discourse and

objectification of female body in the consumerist society, neither the question of women’s

rights nor Islamic veiling had been an issue in the leftist agenda in spite of the increasing

number of women wearing headscarves due to the massive rural to urban migration, which

began in the 1950s. While the headscarf was associated with rural peasant life during the

early years of the Republic, this association started to change when the visibility of women

wearing headscarves increased in the universities and civil services in the late 1970s and

1980s.

The Invisible Becomes Visible: The Rise of Islamist Movements and the Headscarf ‘Question’

From the 1960s to the military coup in 1980, Islam was manipulated by center-­

right political parties (Sakallioglu 1996;; Kongar 1998). The first political pro-­Islamist party

of the period, Milli Selamet Partisi (National Salvation Party), was established in 1969

during the liberalization and democratization process within the scope of the 1961

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Constitution. Even though pro-­religious political parties had begun to emerge before the

1980s, the structure of the Islamic movement changed radically in the post-­1980s years

of the Republic. While previous political parties had been affiliating themselves to religion

since the transition to a multi-­party system, Islam was carried out as a cultural symbolic

reference only for moral values and communal identity formation (Keyman 2003).

However, since the 1980s, it has become the most salient challenge against secularism

as an emerging alternative socio-­political discourse. On the reactions coming from the left

and right wing political parties against the rise of Islamist movements in the late 1980s

and early 1990s, Sakallioglu states,

The secular left and right are alarmed by the increasing manifestations of Islam as a radical religiopolitical movement claiming to be a political alternative to Kemalism, socialism, and capitalism, and the end of the historical tradition of Islam's identifying itself with the status quo… It [the new Islamic stance] also crystallizes new Islamic answers to issues of Westernization, independence, sovereignty, women's rights, and the distribution of power within the state. (Sakallioglu 1996, p. 243).

In the post-­1980 period, the political sphere became more liberal politically for

Islamist movements because “the army had been conditioned to see socialism and

communism as Turkey’s most deadly foes […] it saw indoctrination with a mixture of fierce

nationalism and a version of Islam friendly to the state as an effective antidote” (Zurcher,

2004, p. 288). As a result, the public sphere became open to Islam in the 1980s and this

created new opening for Islamist economics, politics and culture (Gokariksel and Mitchell,

2005;; Navaro-­Yashin, 2002;; White 1999). In this political environment, pro-­Islamic parties

gained power in politics and it was only later that the politicization of Islam began to be

perceived as a threat against the secular state (White, 2003).

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The 1990s were a significant period for Islamist movements in two ways. One is

that in 1994, for the first time an Islamist political party, the Refah Partisi – RP (Welfare

Party), which was an anti-­American and anti-­European party against Westernization

(Lombardi 1997), won its first significant electoral victory in local elections in several major

cities, including Istanbul and Ankara (Cinar, 2005). The 1995 general elections proved

RP’s increased support from the voters, and it emerged as the top party in the elections

(Cinar 2005;; Lombardi 1997). While the Islamic political discourse began to appear

strongly in the political sphere, as Lombordi (1997) states, the polarization between pro-­

Islamic and secularist political discourses became clear during these years. The success

of RP in the elections was quite significant in the political history of Turkey as it

represented the first challenge to secularism.

Secondly, Muslim businessmen began to participate in the global economy, giving

rise to a new class: ‘Islamist capitalists’ (Atasoy, 2005, p.58). The Islamists started to

contribute to economic production, political activism and civil society, giving rise to an

Islamist media (Islamist radios and television stations), and new patterns of consumption

(in particular the fashion of tesettür, the ‘new’ Islamic dressing code). Islamist people

created their own middle class, which was composed of urbanized, educated

professionals (Gole, 2000), and an increasing number of people with Islamic identities and

values began to gain visibility in the socio-­political life (Cinar, 2005).

As a result of increased participation in the global economy, education, politics and

consumption culture – in brief, participation in the ‘modern’ public sphere – a ‘new’ Islamist

social group emerged in Turkey that challenged the secularist Kemalist group that had

dominated the public sphere for six decades. Due to the changes in Islamists’ positions in

what Bourdieu called the ‘fields’ (i.e. economy and politics), the habitus of this Islamist

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group also changed and turned out to be neither ‘modern’ nor ‘anti-­modern’;; rather, it

constructed its own subject and bodies. The new Islamist women are educated and visible,

active participants in the public sphere, suggesting that sex segregation and seclusion –

the taboos of Islam – have been broken. Islamists have opened new Islamist television

channels, newspapers, and alcohol-­free restaurants, and formed new specialized

businesses for ‘Islamic goods’, such as textile companies that produce ‘fashionable’

Islamist style attire (Navaro-­Yashin, 2002).

Like the Kemalist secularist discourse, the Islamist discourse views the image of

women and the female body in the public sphere as an important site of contestation.

Through re-­veiling the female body, the Islamist discourse undermines the authority of

secular norms of public space. The Islamist discourse attempts to regulate and monitor

the visibility of female bodies in the public sphere, and they also use the female body to

construct a ‘new’ Islamist subject. The Islamist discourse claims that “...the secularist state

had used and abused the female body as a symbol of its Westernization and

modernization efforts to such an extent that it had come to represent everything but the

Turkish woman, alienated from her own body and her own home, where she naturally

belongs” (Cinar, 2005, p. 86). In the 1980s, the ‘woman question’ was introduced into the

Islamist movements’ discourse on the headscarf issue. As explained below, in the late

1980s and early 1990s, women wearing headscarves became visible in the public sphere.

Monitored by the secularist gaze, the headscarf came to be one of the main sites of

struggle between secularist and Islamist discourses (Cinar, 2005).

Through the analysis of interviews with young Turkish women the early 1990s,

Gole (1997) claims that women who wear the headscarf have, in a certain sense, taken

advantage of the opportunities that were afforded them by modernity, the result of which

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is that they became urbanized and educated participants of modern society. As a result,

a ‘new’ Muslim woman has come into the picture: she is urbanized, educated and wears

a headscarf. The Islamist women’s lifestyle can be juxtaposed not only with those of

Kemalists, but also with the traditional image of the Muslim woman. Although, as Bordo

(1993) argues, the ‘ideal’ femininity that is constructed in the dominant discourse is always

homogenizing, eliminating class, ethnic and other differences, the new Muslim women

have resisted the femininity of the Kemalist discourse and the traditional Islamist

discourse. Instead, they have asserted their differences from both the ‘ideal’ Turkish

woman and the ‘traditional/anti-­modern’ women through both their different life-­style and

attire. Hence, the new persona of the Muslim Turkish woman has almost nothing in

common with the image of traditional women who were uneducated, rural and devoted to

their family (Gole, 1997). On the contrary, young Muslim Turkish women are educated,

urban, and politically and socially active. Moreover, the way they choose to wear their

Islamic attire is different from the way women dressed traditionally (Gole, 1997). These

women have adopted a new form of headscarf called a tesettür, which positions them

between ‘modern’ and traditional Muslim (Navaro-­Yashin 2002;; Arat, 1998). Tesettür style

headscarves are beautifully patterned, usually made of silk and in varying colors that

change according to the fashion (Navaro-­Yashin, 2002, White, 1999;; Secor, 2002). These

women, especially those who have attended universities or have a professional career,

wear stylish models of headscarves and coats, and even occasionally tight-­fitting

garments and make-­up, in clear defiance of the Islamic code (Cinar, 2005).

Tesettür fashion not only reflects the changes in the traditional style of the

headscarf, but also the challenge to the construction of sexuality in Islam, which forbids

the beautification of the female body. Although some scholars have explored the tesettür

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fashion, they have focused on the headscarf as a site of commodification of an Islamic

symbol (Navaro-­Yashin, 2002), while disregarding how wearing it changes the bodily

experience of women. Since the body is the site for the construction of the self, wearing

the tesettür may well engender a different subjectivity, one that is different from the

traditional one and the 'modern' one. In the next chapter, I will explore the subjectivity of

contemporary women wearing the headscarf.

State Surveillance: The Secular Gaze of State over Women’s Bodies

The literature exploring the relationship between law and women’s bodies has

been growing in recent decades. Most of these studies examine how and why women’s

bodies become a concern of the law and how law exercises power over female bodies.

As Smart (1989) argues the relationship between law and bodies are crucial since law has

become a central mechanisms of surveillance to regulate women’s bodies and sexualities.

For example, even though the appearance of the ‘new’ Muslim Turkish woman is

considerably ‘modern’, the secularist state implemented new surveillance mechanisms to

stand against the so-­called Islamist threat.

As has already been explored in the relevant literature, even though the headscarf

was not banned during the early Republican period, women’s bodies became a “discursive

instrument” of the modernity discourse (Cinar, 2005). During the early years of the

Republic, the female body became the subject of the secular public gaze rather than the

state surveillance. Along the line of Foucault, Cinar (2005) argues that even though public

gaze and state surveillance overlaps at times, their regulative and constitutive power is

different on bodies. While the public gaze marks the bodies into hierarchical categories,

the state surveillance constitutes the bodies as citizens. “The public gaze draws its power

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from an ability to name and categorize, whereas surveillance mechanisms administered

by the state always involve punishment and penalization” (Cinar, 2005, p. 50). In the case

of Turkey, the public gaze functioned through its categorization of female bodies as

“modern” and “anti-­modern” based on how they were dressed. As I noted above, the only

bodies that were subjected to state surveillance were the bodies representing the state

itself. Consequently, the Hat Law (1925) was implemented for men working as public and

state officials.

Similar to the Hat Law, the dress of women working for the state was also regulated

when laicism was included in the Constitution. In 1937, laicism9 was enshrined in the

Constitution, along with republicanism, nationalism, populism, statism, and reformism,

which are considered as the “six arrows” of the CHP (Peres, 2012). Based on the principle

of laicism, the Turkish State banned wearing the headscarf for women working in public

and civil services. From then on, women who were working on state premises – such as

teachers, lawyers, parliamentarians and state officials-­ were not allowed to veil at the

workplace. Both the Hat law and the ban on the headscarf on state premises functioned

as surveillance mechanisms to institutionalize the legality of the codes of modern dress

within the body of state itself.

Until the 1980s, the Republican state did not require state surveillance to target

women in public spaces because of the absence of a salient challenge to its secularist

discourse. Due to the increasing power of Islamist political discourses however, the

9 “Article 2 of the constitution of the Republic of Turkey states the characteristics of the Republic as a democratic, secular and social state governed by the rule of law;; bearing in mind the concepts of public peace, national solidarity and justice;; respecting human rights;; loyal to the nationalism of Atatürk, and based on the fundamental tenets set forth in the Preamble (quoted in Demirel, 2008)

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Turkish state (in the hands of the military) enhanced its legal regulations over the female

body. After the military coup in 1980, the military ruled the country for the following two

years, and during these years, a new constitution was written by the army and introduced

in 1982 (Zurcher 2004). Article 410 was added into the new Constitution to prevent any

government to amend or remove the principle of laicism as the principle of the Republic.

Following the strengthening of the laicism principle in the Constitution, the military

regime officially implemented a new dress code for public and civil servants of the state

(Barras, 2014). Kamu Kurum ve Kuruluşlarında Çalışan Personelin Kılık ve Kıyafetine Dair

Yönetmelik (by-­law on the Garments of the Public Personnel)11, released in 1982, details

the dress code for women working as public and civil servants. The dress code dictates

what a woman can wear and cannot wear at work including a ban on the headscarf.

According to this official dress code, women are not allowed to wear headscarves, stretch-­

pants, jeans, sleeveless as well as revealing shirts, blouses and dresses. Dresses and

skirts that are shorter than knee-­length and skirts with vent and flip-­flops are also

forbidden. The official dress code mandated by the state for its employees reflects the

“ideal” Turkish woman who is ‘modern’, ‘asexual’ and ‘modest’. In other words, dress is

utilized by the state as one of the technologies of the body to form ‘acceptable’ and

‘respectable’ moral bodies at the work place.

Along the line of Butler, Puwar (2004) argues that dress enables the repetitious

10 “ARTICLE 4-­ The provision of Article 1 regarding the form of the State being a Republic, the characteristics of the Republic in Article 2, and the provisions of Article 3 shall not be amended, nor shall their amendment be proposed.” http://global.tbmm.gov.tr/docs/constitution_en.pdf

11 “Madde 5 – 2 nci maddede sözü edilen personelin kılık ve kıyafette uyacakları hususlar: a. Kadınlar;; Kolsuz ve çok açık yakalı gömlek, bluz veya elbise ile strech, kot ve benzeri pantolonlar giyilmez. Etek boyu dizden yukarı ve yırtmaçlı olamaz. Terlik tipi (sandalet) ayakkabı giyilmez” http://www.mevzuat.gov.tr/MevzuatMetin/3.5.85105.pdf

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production of gendered bodies in particular spaces through socio-­political regulatory

discourse. Considering her analysis, I argue that the dress code enacted at the workplace

by the state served not only to construct moral sexual bodies at the workplace, but also

served as surveillance mechanism which enforces the internalization of modern norms.

As Cinar (2005) claims “…the surveillance of the state interpellates the “citizen” as defined

by the Code…[and]…bodies that are subjected to the gaze of the state are legally

constituted as citizens.” (50). In this context, I argue that this legal regulation of dress

functioned as a state gaze to confirm and reproduce the modern sexual body in the face

of the threat coming from the Islamist discourse which is construed as ‘backward’ and

‘anti-­modern’.

The image of the secular woman was threatened not only at the workplace but

also at the universities. As discussed above, women wearing headscarves had increased

at university campuses in the post-­1980s, and this had caused a heated debate around

the headscarf in tandem with modernity. Education was seen as a means to modernize

Turkish women, and the Kemalist discourse believed that through education, women

would internalize modern values and get rid of the headscarf. However, the Kemalist

project failed in its assumption and as a result of the increasing number of women wearing

headscarves on university campuses, the state implemented regulations against the threat

of Islamic dress norms on university campuses.

The Yükseköğretim Kurulu – YÖK (Higher Education Council) was formed in 1983,

based on the 1982 Constitution to regulate higher education in Turkey. YÖK’s regulations

were structured around the principles of Kemalism. The increased visibility of Islam in the

universities was not welcomed by YÖK. YÖK therefore began to function as a state

institution. Through the implementation of decrees, YÖK exercised disciplinary power to

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secularize the universities. Under the military regime of the 1980s, the legislation issued

regarding the dress code forbade certain types of clothing, such as headscarves and

beards on public university premises. Seeing that this regulation was causing major

problems for students wearing headscarves, “whose numbers were not higher than 5

percent of the total student body at the time” (Cinar 2005, p. 78), YÖK came up with a new

regulation. In 1985, when the headscarf became a matter of public debate, YÖK issued a

decree in which the türban was stipulated as a modern clothing item, and students were

allowed to wear it in universities. With this decree, YÖK thought that they could remove

the political connotations of the Islamic headscarf by calling it a türban and defining it as

a modern clothing item (Cinar, 2005, pp.77-­78). The türban was described in a way that

could be differentiated from the traditional headscarf, which did not cover all of the hair in

the front and in the back, and the ear lobes. Cinar observes that, “By 1987, it was obvious

that this rhetorical strategy had failed miserably. Even though the secularist media were

now using the word türban to refer to the Islamic headscarf, the result was not the

anticipated de-­Islamization of the headscarf, but rather an Islamization of the word türban.”

(2005, p. 79).

Whether it was called a türban, başörtüsü (headscarf), çarşaf, or sıkmabaş, the

headscarf had increasingly become visible in the public space by the end of the 1980s,

generating belligerent, anti-­Islamist responses from secularist groups. YÖK responded by

passing another decree in which they stipulated that the türban had replaced the

headscarf, and it became to symbolize the Islamist ideological orientations. “The new

decree stated that students should wear ‘modern clothing’ at all times in universities and

that the interpretation of what ‘modern clothing’ meant was for university administrations

to decide” (Cinar, 2005, p. 81). Just after this decree, the head of YÖK explained that to

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understand what ‘modern clothing meant’ one merely had to look at European clothes.

From that point forward, students were increasingly forbidden to enter universities with

their headscarves (Cinar, 2005). However, female students refused to take off their

headscarves, which became a form of resistance. In 1987, the number of demonstrations

and protests grew (Cinar, 2005). Keyman (2003) argues that the resistance coming from

the pro-­Islamic female students was not against the object of secularization, which is the

separation of state and religious affairs;; rather, it was the resistance against the state

control over Islamic identity and women’s bodies (Keyman 2003).

Foucault’s (1977) theory of technologies of power and governmentality informs my

analysis of YÖK’s ban on the headscarf. Foucault discusses how power operates through

“governmentality” procedures to explore how bodies are regulated by state institutions and

law. From this perspective, the regulations and bans on the headscarf become a

technology that disciplines and administers the female body. In this regard, the pro-­Islamic

students’ contest was not against the principle of secularism;; rather, it was against state

‘policing’ over their bodies. As my previous study with religious Muslim women wearing

headscarves revealed, women were not protesting against secularism with the intention

of bringing the Islamic regime to the country;; rather they were protesting against the

regulation as a violation of human rights and the regulation of their bodies by the state

(Ozcetin 2009). As my analysis in the following chapter will further demonstrate, they were

also protesting against the power exercised over their bodies through state technology,

which restricted their access to education and university campuses by labeling their bodies

as ‘unfit’ and ‘inappropriate’.

With the emergence of the Islamist movement and its entrance into the political

domain in the 1990s, the image of a woman wearing a türban was used as a symbol of

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Islamist political parties, which was (and still is) perceived as an ‘Islamist threat’ to

secularism and modernity (Cinar, 2005;; Gole, 2000). The türban, which was invented by

YÖK to avoid political Islamic connotations, ironically turned into an Islamist symbol.

Moreover, in the mass media of the last two decades, there has appeared a differentiation

between the headscarf and the türban: while the türban was defined as a political symbol

by the proponents of the Sharia, the headscarf was defined as a traditional way of covering

the head (but not all of one’s hair), which was mostly worn by rural women (Cinar, 2005;;

Gole, 2000). As a result, in 1989 the Constitutional Court declared that YÖK’s decree,

which had liberated the headscarf, was contradictory to the Articles 212, 2413, 17414 in the

Constitution, which defined the fundamental features of the Republic of Turkey and the

secular nature of the “Form of State”.

The Constitutional Court repealed the decree, and, as a result of the increased

visibility of Islamists in the political domain and in public life, the ban on the headscarf was

12 Article 2 in the Turkish Constitution reads : “The Republic of Turkey is a democratic, secular and social state governed by the rule of law;; bearing in mind the concepts of public peace, national solidarity and justice;; respecting human rights;; loyal to the nationalism of Atatürk, and based on the fundamental tenets set forth in the Preamble.”, http://www.hri.org/docs/turkey/part_i.html#article_1

13 Article 24: “Everyone has the right to freedom of conscience, religious belief and conviction… No one shall be allowed to exploit or abuse religion or religious feelings, or things held sacred by religion, in any manner whatsoever, for the purpose of personal or political influence, or for even partially basing the fundamental, social, economic, political, and legal order of the state on religious tenets.” http://www.hri.org/docs/turkey/part_i.html#article_24

14 Article 174: “No provision of the Constitution shall be construed or interpreted as rendering unconstitutional the Reform Laws indicated below, which aim to raise Turkish society above the level of contemporary civilisation and to safeguard the secular character of the Republic, and which were in force on the date of the adoption by referendum of the Constitution of Turkey.” http://www.hri.org/docs/turkey/part_i.html#article_174

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tightened in 1998. This ban was implemented after the 28 February military intervention15

-­ the so-­called postmodern/soft coup that ended with the closure of the Welfare Party.

However, the intervention and the ban on the headscarf could not put an end either to the

formation of new Islamist political parties nor the debate over the headscarf;; on the

contrary, it gave rise to an increase in the numbers of demonstrations and debates.

Overall, every decree and regulation on the headscarf reveals the secularist

discourse of the state and its attempt to transform the female body into a socially/politically

acceptable modern one. In cases of not meeting this dress code within a particular space

– namely university campuses –, the ‘unfit’ bodies were subject to disciplinary techniques

by the university administration and faculty members (such, as being ridiculed in the class,

asked to leave the class, being given official warnings) and could even be expelled from

the university. That is to say, the gaze of the state on bodies at the university campuses

functioned effectively in institutionalizing the norms of gendered modernity through

administering punishment.

Since the foundation of the Republic, the state has been implementing legal

regulations around dress as a form of surveillance. In the face of an Islamist threat to the

secular order, the state enhanced its surveillance and issued decrees to ban the

headscarf. Recently however, surveillance from the state has been changing as a result

of a shift of power from secularist discourse to an Islamist one. The victory of the Islamist

15 The military intervened in politics on the 28th of February 1997. It was called a ‘Postmodern’ or ‘Soft’ Military Coup, when a column of tanks passed through Sincan in Ankara as a kind of a symbolic procession. [Mention that no one was killed so that one understands why it was soft / po-­mo]

<http://www.qantara.de/webcom/show_article.php/_c-­476/_nr-­404/i.html > (June, 6, 2006)

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party Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi – AKP (Justice and Development Party) in the three

national elections in 2002, 2007 and 201116 has proved that an Islamist discourse has

moved beyond being a threat to the secularist state discourse to indeed becoming the

new state discourse.

In 2008, the AKP and its government presented a proposal to amend the

Constitution in order to abolish the ban on the headscarf at the universities. However, after

long discussions of the proposal in the assembly, the Supreme Court rejected the proposal

on the basis of the secularist and laic features of the Turkish Republic of June 5, 2008.

The AKP managed to gain more power and control in and over YÖK, particularly with the

support of the President of the Republic of Turkey, Abdullah Gül, who was one of the

founders of AKP. In 2010, YÖK issued a memo lifting the ban at the universities. Three

years later, the AKP government also lifted the over 70-­year-­old ban on the headscarf for

public and civil servants. These changes not only reveal that conservative and religious

norms that have been challenging secularist modern discourses have been inserted into

the state policies administered by the AKP government;; but also, that the surveillance

mechanisms employed by the state have been altered.

Conclusion

The female body has been a significant site of contestation since the

foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923. In the Kemalist discourse of Turkey’s

16 In the national elections of 2002, AKP won around 34% percentage of the votes and stood alone in the government even though in the current national assembly at that time was composed of both AKP and CHP (People’s Republican Party). In 2007 elections, AKP won around the half of the votes (47%), and in 2011, it won 49% of the votes, and they have been standing in the government alone since 2007.

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modernizing elites, the secluded and veiled female bodies of Muslim societies were

conceived of as the signifier of the ‘inferiority’ of the East. In that context, the most direct

way of displaying the modern face of the nation to the West was to unveil the female body

and increase the visibility of women in the public sphere. In other words, Kemalist

discourse adopted an orientalist view and targeted female bodies as a means to break

with ‘backwardness’. In the context of such a dress code, adopting a European dress style

was characterized as progressive. This attitude created an oppositional—uncivilized—

‘other’ (Gole 1997).

Kemalist discourse did not exclude Islam completely however, it maintained

Islam as a basis for its own moral codes;; thus, it not only produced ‘modern gendered

bodies’ through its secular institutions, but also through its moral codes. Kemalist

discourse emphasized the modesty and virtue of women that resonated with the

construction of sexuality in Islam. Therefore, this unveiled modern body was differentiated

from that of European women, which had the potential for corruption and immorality.

Secularism as a disciplinary surveillance mechanism shaped and monitored female

bodies in the public sphere. In Bartky’s terms (1988), even though women and men were

subjected to secularism, in this specific context, secularism acted as a ‘disciplinary regime

of femininity’, and it engendered a distinct form of the female ‘docile body,’ one that should

be unveiled but moral. Although the Kemalist modernity project intended to abolish the

control of Islam over women and women’s bodies, particularly by removing the headscarf,

it also reasserted control over women’s bodies and sexuality by portraying the ‘ideal’

Turkish women. While early-­Republican reforms were dramatic and important for women

in terms of mobilizing them to become educated professionals and guaranteeing formal

equality at the institutional level, Cinar (2008) agues that women did not have agency in

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the construction of their identities. In fact, she argues their subjectivities and behaviours

were defined by the national sexual discourse:

As women’s bodies became sites from which national identity was forged and displayed to the public, the secular state constructed itself as the political agent that is able to dress and undress women’s bodies, to regulate and control their presence and visibility in the public sphere, hereby establishing its own identity as secular, modern, and Westernized (Cinar, 2008, p.67).

Even though the new national modern image was imposed on women, Cinar’s

(2008) argument on their agency falls into the trap of a humanist enlightenment

understanding of agency. Along the line of Mahmood’s argument, to comprehend the

different modalities of agency, the concept of agency needs to go beyond the liberal model

and expand itself to include not only operations of power that challenge and subvert the

norms but also those that aim to reproduce and maintain the presence of the norms. In

this context, I argue that the submission of women to the Kemalist discourse can be

perceived as a model of agency. As Durakbasa’s (2001) study reveals, the early

Republican women enjoyed the Kemalist reforms and freedom given to them.

Consequently, they worked towards maintaining and preserving the Kemalist discourse

that provided them with freedom and privileges as educated urban women.

The most prominent contest against Kemalist secularism eventually came in the

1990s with the re-­emergence of Islam as a political force. In this contest, the female bodies

became the site of conflict, where both the Islamist and secularist discourses compete to

impose their sexual moral norms. In this respect, the issue of the headscarf became a

particular point of conflict between the secularist Kemalist and Islamist circles. While the

Kemalist discourse had depicted the headscarf as a symbol of “backwardness”, the

Islamist discourse perceived Western dress style as decadent, and thus as a threat to

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Muslim morality. One of the goals of my exploration in this chapter was to demonstrate

the common ground that Islamist and secularist discourses share when it comes to the

issue of sexual morality. Kemalism utilized it as a basis for the generation of its own moral

codes, codes that labeled female sexuality as a threat to the social order. Instead of

secluding and veiling women however, Kemalist discourse chose to constitute ‘asexual’

female bodies through dress. On the other hand, the Islamist discourse maintained the

practice of veiling as a technique to impose its sexual norms on the female body. But it

progressively included a gender equality discourse that encouraged women to become

visible active participants in public spaces. In this chapter, I demonstrated how these

political discourses constructed women and their bodies in relation to a sexual morality,

one that imposed surveillance mechanisms on women. In the next chapter, I aim to reveal

the ways in which these socio-­political discourses on sexual morality produced ‘self-­

disciplined/docile bodies’ and how women fashioned their moral selves in that context.

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Chapter 4. The Socio-­Political Discourses of Sexual Morality: Disciplined Bodies

Introduction

In the previous chapter, I demonstrated the differences and similarities between

Kemalist and Islamist sexual morality discourses and how they impose control over female

bodies through dress, based on secondary sources. I argued that even though these two

discourses are portrayed as oppositional discourses, both interpret ahlaklı (moral) woman

through a patriarchal sexual morality, which dictates that women hide their sexual bodies

through modest dress. While in Islamist discourse, concealing the body through veiling is

a symbol of an ahlaklı (moral) woman, in the Kemalist discourse wearing modern but

modest clothing of the kind that transforms the female body into an “asexual” body is the

sign of an ahlaklı woman. In the next chapter, based on the data I collected during my field

research, I will explore how women experience their bodies in relation to the dress norms

and the public gaze produced by Islamist and secularist discourses of sexual morality.

In the first part of this chapter, I will examine one of the emerging themes in this

study, which is the concept of comfort together with a causal dress style. Rather than

accepting at face value the idea that women prefer comfortable/casual clothes because

they are physically at ease to move, I explain their choice in relation to the concept of

sexual morality. The accounts of participants suggest that casual dress is not only

preferred by women because they feel physically more comfortable;; but also because

dressing casually provides more space to move freely without deviating from sexual moral

norms which require women to hide their sexual bodies. In addition to casual dress style,

I explore hanım hanımcık (“lady” or “ladylike”), which define women who conform and

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follow sexual moral norms. The concept of hanım hanımcık dress style is significant in this

analysis since it reveals how the proper ahlaklı woman is materialized though dress and

how this construction of ahlaklı woman is shaping women’s experiences of their bodies.

Later, I explore another emerging concept, which is the hegemony of the beauty image

captured by the participants’ narrative of their choices of dress. I will discuss the

intersectionality of sexual morality with various normative systems, an intersectionality that

tells women what to wear and what not to wear based on their age, body shape and their

social role like being a mother. I particularly examine how the ‘appropriate’ feminine dress

is defined through the overlapping discourses of beauty and sexual morality. In this

context, I discuss how and why the discourse of beauty imposes different sexual

disciplinary regimes through dress norms on different types of female bodies, such as

young, mature, curved bodies, and the bodies of mothers. The narratives of participants

on their experiences of their bodies reveal that while the hegemony of European beauty

regime shapes their bodily experiences and choices of dress, it also suggests that the

definition of beauty/aesthetic is not free of sexual moral norms.

In the second part of the chapter, I will discuss the politics of dress. While I will be

showing that other powerful discourses, such as the leftist discourses of the 1960s and

1970s, were at play in disciplining women’s bodies and senses of self, I will mainly be

focusing on two conflicting discourses;; the secularist discourse and the Islamist discourse.

The participants’ narratives demonstrate that there has been an increase in cases of

sexual harassment, which points to a rising conservatism of the sexual morality since the

AKP gained power in Turkish politics. Therefore, in the last section of this chapter, while

analyzing the increasing dominance of the association of morality with the headscarf, I will

explore the link between sexual assaults and sexual morality in relation to dress norms.

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Choosing the Dress: The Emerging Themes

4.2.1. Casual Dress versus Hanım Hanımcık Dress

At the beginning of almost all the interviews, participants of this research

mentioned that they dress comfortably at home and do not pay attention to what they are

wearing. Just as bodies in public spaces are the subjects of the discourse of modernity,

bodies in the private sphere are not the objects of the disciplinary public gaze.

Consequently, women feel free to choose their clothes at home without any social

constraints, and they prefer comfortable and practical clothes in which they can move

freely. Loose and sportive clothes are identified as comfortable clothes, which allow them

to move without any bodily discomfort.

The only exceptional narrative came from women wearing headscarves. Even

though they also mentioned that they prefer comfortable clothes at home, they also

specified that they choose their attire according to their relation to people at home. If their

bodies become subjected to the gaze of the men who do not belong to their immediate

family, they conceal their bodies:

I do not wear the headscarf at home;; I was not born with it [she smiles]. I choose to wear comfortable clothes at home, but of course, it depends on who is at home, I mean it depends on my relation to a man based on mahrem and namahrem. For example, if there is a man who is not mahrem to me, I would wear my headscarf and I will not be that comfortable around him.

Another participant who is also wearing the headscarf states:

I do not wear a headscarf at home with my family. Whenever I go out, I always wear a pardesü (long coat), but my clothes underneath the pardesü will differ according to the occasion. For example, my sister had henna night for her wedding, and there were only women at home, so I removed my headscarf and I even wore a mini skirt.

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As I discussed in the theory chapter, mahrem literally means “privacy” and

“secrecy” (Gole, 1996, p.7) and as an Islamic term it determines the relationships between

men and women based on the degree of consanguinity. Islamic discourse defines the

female body as mahrem and where the female body is subjected to the gaze of male

strangers, it needs to be concealed and made invisible to the namahrem (stranger who is

not related to the woman). In this context, women wearing headscarves choose their attire

according to their relation to men in private spaces.

In participants’ accounts about their dress choices when participating in urban

public spaces, the concept of comfort is an emerging topic. Almost all of the participants

emphasized the importance of comfort in their choices of clothes. They stated that they

particularly prefer casual clothes (a combination of jeans and t-­shirts or sweaters) in their

everyday lives, mainly for reasons of comfort. This statement was sometimes followed by

remarks such as “I do not care what people think or say” or “I wear whatever I want, no

matter where” or “I always prioritize my comfort”. This discourse of comfort can be

associated with a feminist counter-­discourse, which challenges the sexual morality that

imposes particular dress styles on female bodies on particular occasions. For instance,

most of the young participants, except religious Muslim ones, claimed that they refused to

dress formally for formal and/or official occasions, and chose to wear casual clothes to be

comfortable despite social gender norms. In other words, they employed ‘comfortable

clothes’ as a tool to challenge the ‘proper’ and ‘ideal’ feminine appearance and dress

styles. While Deniz, a young feminist activist, talked about how she disregards the dress

codes for formal occasions as a form of feminist resistance, Yagmur, who recently

graduated from the university and is volunteering at a feminist organization, explained why

she does not pay attention to what people say about her and prefers to dress comfortably:

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There are some dress codes and expectations of me to follow these codes and being told how to dress is against my view, that’s why I do not follow these rules [...] I always dress comfortably in my daily life and I never change for people or the occasion because being comfortable is very important to me.

Yagmur also pointed out that she was warned a number of times at the meetings

she attended due to her causal attire. Indeed, both secular and religious participants’

narratives suggested that they often avoid the casual style at particular occasions (such

as formal and/or official occasions or at their workplaces) as causal dress style is not

deemed appropriate or feminine. For instance, Meryem cited one occasion when she was

warned by her boss for frequently wearing jeans and t-­shirts, and was told to dress “like a

woman.”

Even though casual dress is not often perceived appropriate, particularly at work,

some participants who have more flexibility at work in terms of dress code stated that they

chose to wear casual and comfortable clothes to focus on their responsibilities and/or jobs,

instead of their clothes. Sibel, who works at a feminist NGO, states, “I prefer to dress

casually because I do desk-­work mostly. I want to be comfortable, I do not want to think

about my dress, I want my mind at ease.” While wearing casual clothes is important

because of feeling physically comfortable, for some it is important because of being able

to move comfortably when they are working at their desks. When they wear short skirts or

revealing clothes, they feel uncomfortable because their bodily movements are restricted.

They cannot spread their legs or sit comfortably without showing their legs (calves) or they

have to be careful when they are wearing revealing shirts while they are working at their

desks not to show their cleavage or when wearing low waist jeans, they have to be careful

not to reveal their lower back. Sengul, a feminist academic, also articulates how the

clothes she wears shapes her bodily movements:

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Of course how you move is changing according to what you wear. I have to be more careful when I am wearing skirts. However, if I am wearing jeans, I am not paying attention... I prefer not to wear low-­necked shirts because I do not feel comfortable. I can be sloppy when I am moving and the [low-­necked] shirts can loosen up because their bottoms are lower down, so if I am wearing one, I am always careful.

Dress is a powerful tool which influences, guides, shapes the body of the wearer

and affects its movements, its stance and its gestures. As Andrewes (2005) states, dress

as a social practice shapes physical disposition of the body and moulds the body into the

‘appropriate’ shape and manner. Within sexual discourses, particular dress items carry

different sexual moral values and norms, which require women to move their bodies in

specific ways. For instance, this is what a young feminist activist answered when asked

whether different dress styles change how she behaves:

When I attend a formal meeting – which rarely happens – I have a different formal relation and communication with those people in the meeting and of course my cothes also play a role in this. For instance, I always sit very comfortably on a chair, I mostly sit cross-­legged [like a meditation cross-­legged posture] on the chair, but if I wear a dress or a skirt, I cannot. These kinds of clothes make me feel like I have to sit and move ‘ladylike’ (hanım hanımcık).

The construction of the proper ‘ideal’ woman (“ladylike”) in the discourse of morality

shapes women’s bodily disposition through dress norms. Even though the literal

translation of the Turkish term hanım hanımcık is “lady” or “ladylike”, the Turkish term does

not carry the Victorian meaning, which implies a class status. As the narratives of the

subjects reflect, the term hanım hanımcık – “ladylike” – is used to define women who

conform and follow sexual moral norms and appear feminine under the sexuality

discourse. By this definition, the participants indeed differentiated the casual clothing from

hanım hanımcık style. The hanım hanımcık woman must dress in a way that emphasizes

her femininity while hiding her sexual body. In this context, not only is sexual difference

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materialized through dress but it is also normalized through the construction of the proper

“ideal” woman (hanım hanımcık) by forming a physical disposition of the female body

through dress. Dresses and skirts shape the female body in a way that will make the body

embody certain female bodily gestures, postures and movements, such as sitting without

spreading her legs (read: occupying less space). Thus, as I argued in the chapter on

theory, dress becomes a tool of gender performativity, and bodies become gendered

bodies through “stylized repetition of acts” (Butler 1990, p. 191), such as dress styles.

Dress contributes to the construction of a “cultural fiction” of the moral woman, and

normalizes the particular manners and behaviours when she wears a particular type of

dress.

Within this “cultural fiction” of the hanım hanımcık woman, particular styles of

clothing mark the body to be recognized by the public gaze as ‘moral and respectable’ or

‘immoral and improper’. In other words, clothing gives a particular visibility to bodies and

transforms them into ‘moral and respectable’ or ‘immoral’ female bodies. The participants

defined “respectable” clothes as clean, non-­sexy, loose clothes without décolleté, which

veil the “sexuality”, but also inscribe the body as “feminine”. Dress norms are not detached

from the operations of power and they play a significant role in policing the boundaries of

sexual difference (feminine and masculine) and morality (moral and immoral) in Turkey.

A ‘ladylike’ image plays a central role in the struggle to be seen as an acceptable form of

‘woman’, which is feminine enough but unnoticeable/insignificant sexually.

Considering that the body is closely associated with women, dress is considered

a matter of female concern for demonstrating her morality and femininity. Therefore, as

Tseëlon (1996) argues, dress regimes that act upon female bodies are more visible and

rigid and women are more likely to be condemned morally for their dress choices on the

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grounds of being immodest or sexually alluring (Tseëlon, 1996). As most of my

participants also asserted, their bodily movements change according to the attire that they

wear, particularly when they wear revealing shirts and short skirts which accentuate the

sexual body:

Of course, when you are wearing a dress, skirt or décolleté, your bodily movements are changing. We actually begin to learn how to sit, stand and move at home when we are kids. You learn how to sit and not to show your arse and calf when you wear dresses, or skirts, and how to hide your breast when you are moving around.

A sexual moral discourse determines which parts of the bodies need to be

concealed/hidden from the public gaze. Based on the narratives of the subjects of the

study, I can easily argue that no matter which sexual discourse they refer to – either it is

secularist or Islamist – legs, hips and breasts are the parts of female bodies that need to

be concealed at all times. I argue that clothes give women a sense of comfort mainly

because these bodily parts are disguised by the loose t-­shirts and jeans/trousers which

are not very tight around the hips and long skirts. This style allows them to challenge the

sexual moral discourse, which constitutes them as hanım hanımcık. Even though this

causal dress style disguises the female sexual body, and it does not challenge the sexual

moral order completely, I claim that it reflects a ‘new’ woman’s agency. As I have

discussed in the theory chapter, following the theories of Abu-­Lughod (1990) and

Mahmood (2001), I do not equate agency with resistance. Drawing on Mahmood’s (2001)

theory of agency, which deconstructs the binary of resistance/subordination, I also detach

the notion of agency from the humanist “liberatory model of agency ”. In this context, even

though casual dress does not resist the sexual moral discourse and continues to hide

female sexual body, the way this norm is supposed to be lived and inhabited is subverted

by this style. Instead of choosing “appropriate” feminine dress, which transforms their

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bodies to less sexual bodies, the subjects preferred loose casual dress to appear asexual

in public. Namely, while they did not subvert the norm of modesty and sexual morality,

they subverted the way in which it is enacted.

4.2.2. Sexualized and Desexualized Bodies

The narratives of the participants suggested that the ‘appropriate’ feminine dress

is defined through the intersectionality of two contradicting normative systems, sexual

morality and beauty regime. Even though almost all of the participants emphasized that

they do not judge a woman based on her appearance and they did not think much about

how they appeared to others in public, their accounts nonetheless demonstrate the

hegemony of the beauty image and how it defines what is an ‘appropriate’ dress for which

female body.

The narrations of the subjects on how they choose to dress also reflect how they

came to learn how to dress according to their body shape. I heard statements such as

“…since I gained a bit of weight recently…” or “When I was thinner…” “Since I am not a

thin woman…” quite often when they were explaining how they decided what is a good fit

for their bodies. The unhappiness with their bodies and how they tried to hide the “faulty”

parts of their bodies through dress reflects the discomfort they have with their bodies

based on the western female beauty ideal of slenderness. For instance, Ruya, who is

working at a feminist NGO in Ankara, explained that she prefers not to wear dresses

anymore for reasons of comfort but then she added:

You know what, it is in fact not just because of comfort, now that I have a belly, I always try to hide it under loose clothes. It has been for years that I have been wearing loose clothes, and now whenever I wear a tight shirt around my belly, I feel uncomfortable. After a while I think I internalized it, and now I think my body looks better under loose clothes.

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Indeed, Ruya’s account on her discontent with her body echoes Barkty’s and

Bordo’s analysis on how women’s bodies are subjected to a Western ‘beauty regime’ that

shapes the bodily experience of women. As discussed in the history chapter, the Kemalist

discourse imposed by the European beauty ‘look’ of the slim body onto the ‘new’ and

‘modern’ Turkish women in the early years of the Republic. Participants’ attempts to cover

the “faulty” parts of their bodies through loose clothes to look “better” suggest that

European beauty norms have been normalized and internalized by women in Turkey.

Moreover, the accounts of the participants also reveal that not only have modern urban

secular women internalized the European norm of beauty but so have urban educated

headscarved women. For instance, Neslihan, who is also an educated religious women’s

activist, attended our meeting in a beautifully patterned long fashionable skirt with a nice

fitted long-­sleeved shirt, and she stated that she likes to dress up, and she puts effort into

matching her dress with her headscarf. Another urban headscarved woman Ayse also

explained how she also follows the European fashion and watches her weight and tries to

wear clothes that would hide her belly.

When I asked them whether there is any dress style that they do not like or approve

of, they mostly answered that they do not like women who wear tight clothes and short

skirts and clothes that are not good fit for overweight bodies. They added, “of course it is

my view and my aesthetic understanding”. Serpil, who is a professor in her late 50s in

Ankara, replied to the question by explaining why she does not like seeing tight clothes on

women who are overweight:

For example, I do not like to see very fat friends in mini skirts but this is all about aesthetics and it is not like I am condemning them. But seeing them with tight décolleté shirts and in very short mini skirts disturbs me aesthetically. I think those bodies need to be hidden under loose clothes. You would see in the advice column in the newspapers saying if you are

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fat, do not wear two pieces, do not wear very bright colors. If she does not follow these things then it would get my attention but of course you cannot go up to your friend and say you look fat in that dress.

One of the younger participants also pointed out that “people usually do not want

to see a curved woman in short revealing dress because they would argue that it looks

cheap (ucuz duruyor)”. When I asked her to explain what she means, she added that the

presumption is that overweight women are not sexy and through wearing sexually alluring

dress, overweight women would seek male attention, and she would more likely to be

labeled as “immoral”. She adds that there is surely always a risk for a thin woman to be

labelled as “available” if she reveals her sexual body “more than necessary (gereğinden

fazla)”. Some other participants also made similar accounts about how some revealing

short clothes seem unaesthetic to them or they do not like revealing clothes “screaming

‘look at me (bana bak diye bağıran)’”. For instance, Melike said, “The other day, I was

sitting at a park, and I saw a young girl wearing a shirt with décolleté that shows most of

her breast. I do not think that it looks good.” The accounts of the participants suggest that

the definition of beauty/aesthetic is not free of sexual moral norms. Indeed, another

participant, Sule’s explanations of feminine ‘proper’ beautiful dress style as neither very

revealing nor very conservative highlights the relation between the normative system of

beauty and sexual morality.

Ageing body was also one of the emerging topics related to the beauty regime,

which played a role in shaping experiences of their bodies. For instance, Serpil also

mentioned that she had been watching her weight as she aged and sometimes she goes

on a diet. The narrative of the subjects of their discontent with their bodies as they grow

older and their attempts to lose weight (going on a diet) indicate the disciplinary regime

imposed on their bodies. Participants’ discontent with their aging bodies points to the

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fashionable slender body of Westernized culture. Bartky examines “disciplinary regimes

of femininity” that reproduce ‘feminine’ bodies in a certain size and shape (Bartky, 1988).

In this context, dieting and exercise as well as the selection of clothing and the application

of cosmetics are the disciplines imposed on female bodies used to attain a fashionable

slender body. Nehir, who is in her forties, mentioned that as she grew older, her body

changed and now her body is not as thin as before. She stated that she sometimes goes

on diet or exercise, and nowadays she prefers to wear loose clothes rather than the tight

and short ones to “cover the faults of her body”. Her statement not only reflects the

conceptualization of a self-­disciplined body, but also demonstrates the alienation

generated between women and their aging bodies.

Participants also noted that as they get older, their dressing styles have changed.

Sibel who is 35 years old pointed out that even though she still likes to wear bright color,

it is very difficult to find the clothes for middle-­aged women in various colors:

As you age, your body is changing and of course your dress style too. I am 35 years old and women my age and the women older than me mostly wear conservative and boring clothes. Clothes we wear are mostly dark blue, black or brown, boring styles. All the stores are selling the same clothes for middle-­aged and older women.

Their narratives on “dressing according to age” and “dressing up like a mother”

point to the de-­sexualization of aging female bodies and the bodies of mothers. For

instance, Nilufer, a mother of two children, told me that “I was dressing up more freely

when I was younger, but as I aged and became a mother, my clothes became more

conservative”. Considering that “society tends to connect notions of eroticism with sexual

activity and reproduction” (Gonzolez 2007, p. 34) and the beauty discourse constitutes

sexually appealing bodies as young slender bodies, it can be argued that aging bodies as

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well as the bodies of mothers are not constituted as the objects of male desire. Therefore,

instead of using dress as a way to enhance sexual attraction by revealing more skin, older

women wear clothes that are more conservative to hide most of their bodies. It also needs

to be noted that in the Kemalist modernity discourse, mothers are defined as the carriers

of modernity and morality and the ones who would rear children with the necessary

morality. In this context, virtuous modern Turkish mothers are expected to dress

particularly modestly, as discussed in the previous chapter. For instance, Yasemin,

feminist writer, pointed out that she was expected to dress up more conservatively when

she became a mother, and because she did not follow this dress norm, she was judged

by her husband’s family often. And she adds:

One day, my son came up to me after school and asked “mom, why do not you dress up like a mom?” [she smiles]. Well, he sees other mothers picking up their kids from school and he noticed the difference. They wear dull coloured more conservative clothes and that is what is expected from you. And there I was, wearing mini skirts, revealing shirts as a mom.

As discussed before mothers are seen as the carriers of the morality in the nation.

Therefore, their bodies become the site where the sexual morality norms are imposed

more conservatively. Based on Butler’s argument, dress enables the repetitious

production of gender in particular settings through regulatory conventions. By dressing up

as mothers, sexually moral bodies are reproduced, renewed and consolidated through

time. Through performance over time, women’s bodies become ‘cultural fictions’ of what

is a ‘mother’. Within this ‘cultural fiction’ of the mother, particular styles of clothing

(conservative dull coloured clothing) mark the body to be recognized by the public.

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The Politics of Dress

4.3.1. Dressed Bodies in the 1960s and 1970s

Foucault’s (1977) concepts of power and the body arise from his ideas of

genealogical analysis. “Genealogy as an analysis of descent is thus situated within the

articulation of the body and history. Its task is to expose a body totally imprinted by history

and the process of histories’ destruction of the body” (Foucault, 1977, p.148). Bodies are

thus sites of conflict, shaped by battling forces acting upon them, and history is articulated

through the body. The body thereby becomes both the site of corporeal traces of historical

conflicts, as well as serving to define its social context through its very articulation.

Along the line of Foucault’s theory of the body, participants’ narratives on their

bodily experiences reveal how bodies are imprinted by the contesting discourses. Their

accounts of their socialization and their choices of dress demonstrate how their bodies

were formed and shaped by the discourses they were subjected to in their lives. Their

stories about how their dress styles were shaped reveal the dominant discourses of their

time, which shaped their bodily experiences. Even though the topic of dress and the

female body has become the center of discussion in the conflict between secularist and

Islamist discourses in the last decades, clothing styles were also highly politicized before

the rise of Islamist movements in the 1990s. As discussed in the previous chapter, a

person’s political position in the left or in right political spectrum could be understood from

how s/he dressed. While talking about these years, Nehir asserted that it was easy to

categorize people politically based on their appearance, such as from the shape of their

beard, moustache and the clothes they wore. For instance, a leftist person could be

recognized with his/her “parka”. Meryem, who was actively involved in the leftist

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movement in the 1970s, described her experience of being a young woman in the

movement as:

My dress style was mainly shaped during my youth in the 1970s and those were good times to be young. Men and women were dressed the same with the same motivation. There was leftist fashion and we could wear trousers (pantolon) like men. Those were the years when girls began to wear trousers and boots… I spent my youth years thinking that girls should not be something boys like [sexualize]. In those times, we thought smart girls and women should not dress up and beautify themselves. That’s why I was not putting make-­up on or dressing up chic.

As discussed in the history chapter, the leftist ideology was criticizing the

sexualization of the female body along the line of capitalization, and women in the

movement questioned the image of beauty. Moreover, in the leftist movement, as Rukiye

mentioned, men and women were working together closely as comrades and their clothes

were alike. As Muftuler-­Bac (1999) and Cinar (2005) claims, the leftist ideology in Turkey,

not unlike the Kemalist and Islamist discourses, stripped women of their sexuality. Baggy

clothes and the parka disguised female sexuality like with Islamist dressing style, which

also aims to hide the physical shape. Based on the interviews with women involved in the

leftist movement in the 1970s, Berktay (1995) also asserts that women comrades were

referred to as bacı (sister), which desexualized them. Berktay (1995) claims that due to

the perception that female sexuality was a threat against the social moral order in both

Islamist and leftist discourses, both aimed at concealing the female sexual body through

means of dressing in public.

The participants’ comparisons about dress styles in the 1960s and 1970s indicate

the presence of conflicting sexual discourses at the time. Three of the participants who

were young women in the 1970s noted that while during the time of leftist movements,

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trousers, jeans and checkered shirts were the symbol of the leftist revolutionist identity,

mini skirts and high heels were the signs of femininity:

[As a revolutionist] I was always wearing checkered shirts, jeans and a dark green coat – parka. I was wearing skirts -­ short skirts were very fashionable at the time – only when I was running away from the police, because short skirts were associated with being girly. Thus, when I did not want to be identified as a revolutionist, I wore skirts, and I am sure that every woman who was a member of a communist or revolutionist organization has a memory of this kind.

This participant’s experience implies a change in the construction of the femininity

in the 1970s. Sancar (2012), who defines the years between late 1950s to 1970s as

“conservative modernism” due to women’s limited participation in politics and professional

life, contends that women’s beauty and sexuality began to be unveiled and made public

in social life, despite the asexualized ideal woman image in the early republican discourse.

In this “conservative modernist” discourse, the beauty and attractiveness of women was

not to be hidden from the gaze of the public (particularly, male gaze);; rather, it was to be

displayed in the public, such as at beauty pageant contests (Sancar, 2012). The leftist

discourse as a counter discourse questioned this objectification of female body and

sexuality and consequently, women who were involved in the movement refused to wear

make-­up or tight and/or revealing clothes, which exposed their sexuality. For instance,

while Meryem was actively involved in the leftist movement, she explains that as a

revolutionist she thought that smart women did not wear makeup and adorn/beautify

themselves. Serpil’s narrative also highlights the two conflicting discourses:

In the 60s and 70s, of course there was the leftist fashion, you know dark green parka, etc. But there was also the mini skirt fashion. In the 70s, I wore mini, midi and maxi skirts, they were quite fashionable.

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Serpil’s experience not only demonstrates how female bodies became a site of

conflict between the leftist and the modernist discourses, but it also evidently implies a

change in the sexual morality. As mentioned above, Sancar (2012) claims that the

women’s sexual bodies became to be more public than before. During this time period,

even though women’s morality was not the point of judgment as Sancar (2012) argues,

their sexuality was mainly constructed to be limited to the private sphere. That is, even

though they were encouraged to display themselves as sexual beings in accord with

European beauty regimes in public, they were allowed to do so only to find ‘proper’ men

to marry and to become ‘ideal’ wives and mothers (Sancar 2012). Sancar asserts that

“conservative modernist” discourse of the time left the women’s emancipation discourse

and began to define women based on the duties and responsibilities of women in the

family as wives and mothers. Despite the fact that women were still warned not to imitate

the Western sexualized ‘immorality’, this “conservative modernist discourse” enabled

women to reveal more skin in the public as long as it helped them to become mothers of

the nation.

Until the 1980s, the leftist and the “conservative modernist discourse” were the

visible conflicting two discourses in the socio-­political sphere. Islamist discourse had not

yet emerged as a strong alternative to the modernist discourse (as also discussed in the

previous chapter), and Islamist women were not visible in urban public spaces as active

political subjects. Therefore, my participants’ narratives on their bodily experiences

revealed only two conflicting sexual moral discourses – conservative modern and leftist.

Their bodies were imprinted and shaped by those contesting norms of dress and morality

in the 1960s and 1970s.

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My participants’ accounts also point to the change in the political economy of the

time and how it affected class structure. The participants, who were children, teenagers

or young adults before the 1980s, stated that there were not many clothing stores around

and their clothes were mainly tailored. The lack of a large textile industry meant clothing

was expensive compared to today’s market. The apparel industry emerged in the 1970s

as a result of the growth of the textile sector, and it became a crucial sector in Turkey as

a result of the liberalization of the Turkish economy and export-­oriented state policies in

the 1980s (Gokariksel and Secor, 2010). Serpil, who was a teenager and a young woman

during the 1960s and 1970s, mentioned that ready-­made clothing was not readily available

and tailoring was not very cheap;; thus, lower class people were tailoring their own clothes

rather than going to a tailor. In this context, clothes were also symbols of class status.

The development of the textile industry in 1980s and 1990s changed this class

structure and the new expanded textile industry made fashion available and accessible to

even lower-­class families in the cities. My participants noted how this rapid change in the

textile industry was followed with changes in sexual moral norms. Serpil, a young woman

in the 1970s, explained the normalization of jeans culture in Turkey. She stated that even

though jeans are now a part of our everyday lives, it was not the case in the 1970s:

It was around 1974 or 1975, my boyfriend was doing his Ph.D. in the U.S.A. and he brought me blue jeans from there. At that time, there was not any jean in the Turkish market;; you could only get it from the black market. I was in graduate school at the university in Ankara, and one day I wore the jeans to school, and even a male professor verbally harassed me! It was the last time I wore jeans.

Prior to the heightened privatization and liberalization of the Turkish market in the

1980s, women wearing jeans, like Serpil, were considered ‘unrespectable’ and ‘immoral’.

As she also stated, jeans were new to Turkish culture in the 1970s. She told me that they

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could only buy them abroad or in the bazaars selling smuggled goods. Her narrative,

together with others, highlights the transformation of jeans from ‘indecent’ type of clothing

to casual wear during the development of consumerist culture. The development of the

textile industry not only gave rise to consumerist culture and increase in the dominance of

European fashion in Turkey, but it also changed the definition of ‘decent’ bodies in relation

to dress and morality through normalizing the wearing of jeans.

Almost all participants who were young women in the 1960s and 1970s stated that

they were “the lucky ones” compared to the later generation in terms of the freedom they

had. The year 1980 is a milestone for socio-­political structure of Turkey. As a consequence

of the growing violent clashes of leftist and rightist movements, the Turkish military

overthrew the government in 1980 and dissolved political parties, banning all politicians

from politics for 10 years (Zurcher 2004). Military rule continued until 1983. The army

replaced the more libertarian 1960 constitution with the 1982 Constitution, which assigned

the military and institutions like the National Security Council and the Council of Higher

Education as the main guardians of secularism (Lombardi 1997). The post-­1980 period

was not only marked by the new Constitution, which restricts civil liberties and gives power

to the military to be involved in civil affairs, but the era was also marked by the emergence

of a counter-­discourse –Islamism.

4.3.2. Moral Muslim Bodies

The Islamist discourse began to shape the lives of women in urban spaces during

the 1980s when it gained visibility. The number of women wearing headscarves began to

increase in the cities due to the religious liberalization of the state discourse, and during

the early 1980s, the number of Imam Hatip Lisesi (Prayer Leader Schools) increased with

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the change in the state’s discourse. Melek, who was raised in a religious conservative

family in Ankara, describes how and when she began to wear the headscarf and reflects

on the changes in the political arena, and the time when Islamist discourse was rising in

the big urban cities:

My family was conservative;; my father was retired from the directorate of religious affairs. I started wearing the headscarf when I was in my 4th grade, and in 80s, I started Imam Hatip Lisesi (Prayer Leaders and Preachers Schools)17 and I began to wear the pardösü [long loose coat] when I was 11 years old. I wear the headscarf because I believe in Islam and that’s why I prefer loose clothes, which veils my bodily contours. It was like that when I was a child and when I was a teenager.

As I discussed in the previous chapter, Islamic identities began to gain visibility in

the urban socio-­political life in the 1980s and 1990s (Cinar, 2005). This was the time when

the Kemalist secularist and Islamist discourses began to be portrayed as binary

oppositional in the socio-­political scene. Indeed, the accounts of secular participants, who

were young in the 1980s and 1990s, mirror the separation of “us” as the secular and/or

non-­religious families from “them” the religious families. For instance, while participants

were articulating their dressing habits and experiences during childhood, they particularly

stated that they came from secular/non-­religious modern families, even though I had not

asked them a particular question in regard to their families’ political or religious standpoint.

While talking about their dressing habits during their childhood and teenage years, some

of them remarked that since their families were “modern” families, they did not constrain

their dressing styles and exercise power over their choices of dress.

17Prayer Leaders and Preachers’ Schools are offering religious education and the main aim those schools are to train imams, but they were brought under the control of the state since the foundation of the Republic. To this day, Prayer Leader Schools remain under the control of the state.

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The narrative I encountered implies a strong polarization between the secularist

and Islamist discourses. Moreover, the secularist discourse appeared in opposition to an

‘oppressive’ Islamist discourse – “the other” – that was perceived as exercising power over

women’s bodies. By specifying that their families were “modern”, my secular participants

disassociated themselves from the conservative Islamists families – “the other” – who

“supposedly” forced their daughters to veil. For instance, when I asked Yasemin -­ who is

a businesswomen and a writer – about her dressing habits in her childhood and youth,

she says, “I was never forced to do anything or to wear the headscarf. My family was

modern, I was raised free and I was also a rebellious kid and a teenager”. Her narrative

assumes the binary opposition between modern families that raised their daughters free

from constraints and religious and/or Islamist families that forced their daughters to wear

the headscarves. In this regard, many of my secular participants basically deny the

capacity for agency of women who wear headscarves.

However, the Kemalist secular discourse also imposes restrictions and controls on

the female body in terms of dress and sexual moral norms, as discussed in the previous

chapter. The modernization process in Turkey did not eliminate the preoccupation with

modesty and honour (Parla 2001);; rather, the Kemalist discourse attributed a new

significance to honour and morality, which was gained through appearing ‘modern’ but

also ‘modest’ in public space (Arat, 1997;; Durakbaşa 1998;; Atasoy 2009;; Cinar 2005). For

instance, Deniz’s narrative on her childhood reflects the secularist sexual moral discourse.

She stated that even though her father was a very secular ‘modern’ man, he specifically

monitored the way she dressed rather than her brother’s ways of dressing:

I could not wear tank tops when I was a child, because I was not allowed. Of course it was because I was a girl. For example, until the end of elementary school, we [girls] were wearing leggings when we were playing

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at the park. I was wearing the short ones and mom told me not to wear them anymore.

While Deniz thought that her father’s “modern secular” worldview was in contradiction with

the way he treated her, the secularist discourse he embodied did not conflict with the

control he imposed on his daughter’s body in terms of dress choices.

Even though the secular participants talked about the control mechanisms

imposed on female bodies, only a few of them directly linked their experiences with the

secularist morality discourse. There were only a few statements in the interviews that

mentioned that the Kemalist discourse was not freeing women from patriarchal morality.

Most statements pointed out that there is an increasing oppression of women’s bodies

today and some of them directly mentioned that this is the result of political Islam. As I

also discuss in the next chapters, almost all of the interviewees were in support of the

elimination of the ban on the headscarf at the universities on the basis of human rights.

They claimed that even though they see the headscarf as a tool of patriarchal oppression,

they stated that the ban was a violation of women’s rights to education and work;; hence,

they were against the ban. They also added that because the ban takes away a woman’s

right to education and work, it has the potential to reproduce an Islamist patriarchal system

and women’s dependency on their fathers and husbands.

Some participants insisted on a differentiation between the türban and/or tesettür

from the başörtüsü (headscarf). Some emphasized that the türban and/or tesettür only

emerged in the late 1980s with the Islamist movement, that it carried a political meaning

and signified the oppression of women. Therefore, while some participants are not against

the başörtüsü, which they perceived as a traditional headscarf worn by grandmothers and

villagers, they are against the tesettür and/or türban because it is a political Islamist

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symbol. I need to note that even though these participants did not support the ban on the

headscarf since it is seen as a violation of a human right, particularly headscarved

women’s right to education, they did not support the tesettür or türban either, since they

perceive it as an obstacle to women’s liberation. The tesettür is defined as the türban (a

veil), which tightly covers the head and the neck accompanied by a loose long overcoat

called pardesü. Participants also added that some Islamist women’s outfits are now more

stylish and fashionable which they saw as conflicting with Islamic modesty:

Sometimes I see Islamist women wearing knee-­long skirts together with the türban. I mean their legs are revealed in a very modern way but their heads together with their necks are covered. One day I saw a woman who covered her head in a very stylish beautiful way, and she was wearing very tight jeans with high heels.

Participant’s statement points to a change in the clothing style of Muslim women.

Like the participants of this study, many scholars (Navaro-­Yashin 2002;; Gokariksel 2012;;

Gokariksel and Secor 2010;; Saktanber and Corbacioglu 2010) also contend the Islamist

outfit has become stylish and fashionable. As Gokariksel and Secor (2012) states,

fashionable veiling styles have become popularized through advertisements, billboards

and shop windows and have become desirable commodities for religious Muslim women.

There is also a discussion on whether these styles conflict with Islamic sexual morality.

According to Islamic modesty, if a woman participates in public life, her sexual, alluring

body must not be subjected to the public gaze;; her body needs to be concealed through

the practice of veiling. Even though there is a debate about the way women cover their

bodies, according to many Islamic scholars zinat, which is everything used to enhance or

beautify one’s appearance, including make-­up and decoration of the body, is not allowed

for women (Afshar 1998;; Hajjaji-­Jarrah 2003). According to the Islamic morality discourse,

the female body must not be adorned in a way that would draw the attention of strangers

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who are not related to the woman, namahrem. Along the line of Islamist morality, Melek,

in her forties, who always wears a pardesü with a large dull-­coloured headscarf, also

criticized Islamist women wearing their veils in a fashionable style:

If the woman is wearing tight or short revealing things, it is not important cause it is her personal choice. But if she is wearing a headscarf, she needs to follow the rules. It is not only short-­sleeved t-­shirts or short skirts or shirts with décolleté, she should not wear anything that will show the bodily form.

On the other hand, the other three participants who wear headscarves, young women in

their twenties and early thirties, did not agree with this perception and described how they

always try to match the color and the fabric of their headscarf with their outfit and

accessories, such as their bags or shoes. For instance, Cemile, who completed her

education abroad because of the ban on the headscarf at the universities, noted how much

she liked to wear bright colourful stockings with colourful headscarves matching her outfit.

Ayse, a university educated housewife in her thirties, also emphasized that she likes to

match her headscarf color with her accessories, like her bag, or with her clothes and she

added that she tries to follow the fashion trends, and she excitedly talks about her favourite

pieces of clothing in her closet and where and how she wears those clothes. While she

was talking about her favourite leather coat, she began telling me how much other

religious Muslim women at the university criticized her because of her fashionable style.

Women wearing long large headscarves with loose long pardesü criticized her because

she was wearing knee-­length skirts with leather coats and colourful silk headscarves.

Ayse’s dressing style was questioned by other Islamist women because it was not in line

with the Islamic modesty norms.

The headscarved participants’ statements reflect that they conform to Islamic

modesty to varying degrees in relation to the different Islamist discourses they embody.

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While older women conform to a more strict Islamist discourse and dress in a way which

would make their sexual bodies ‘invisible’ in the public, younger ones embody a more

moderate Islamist discourse and they fashion a ‘modest modern Islamic self’ while

covering their heads and bodies.

Along the line of Mahmood’s (2005) conceptualization of agency, I should note that

I do not claim that this new Islamic self of younger women is an attempt to resist Islamist

sexual morality. I would rather argue that the multiple discursive systems that these

women are subjected to need to be explored to comprehend their different modality of

agency. Unlike the older generation of religious Muslim women, the younger generation

is not only subjected to the Islamist sexual morality discourse, but also the Islamist

consumerist culture, which emerged in the 1990s (as explained in Chapter III). While

veiling fashion (tesettür modası) might be perceived as a discrepancy in Islamist sexual

morality, it might also be seen as consistent with the beauty regime within the consumerist

culture. I believe these younger women’s narratives show how these two normative

systems – Islamist and consumerist – become entangled with each other. Their

experiences point to the complex ways they engage with multiple normative systems of

which require contradictory dress norms. While these women submit to the norms of Islam

they believed in through covering their sexual bodies, they also submit to the norms of the

beauty regime through adorning fashionable clothes. Thus, I argue that the way Islamic

modesty is lived and inhabited has been altered by this emerging veiling-­fashion. The

headscarf is still perceived as a necessary element of sexual morality in Islamist

discourses, but the way these ‘new’ urbanized Islamist women adorn the Islamic dress

style reveals their different modalities of agencies.

Although these younger Islamic women alter the ways that morality is lived and

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inhabited, the increasing dominance of Islamic morality is changing the sexual regime.

While almost all of the participants’ narratives indicated that society is becoming more

conservative, some directly pointed that the reason for the rising conservatism of sexual

norms in society is the current Islamist AKP government. Some of the participants

asserted that due to the increasing power of the AKP government, the government’s

Islamist discourse is imposing Islamist moral norms onto the bodies of women.

Consequently, women who are not wearing headscarves are labeled ‘immoral’ and

‘sexually available women’. Some of the participants argue that the rising conservatism of

the culture and society associated with the AKP and Islamist movements, as well as the

Islamic definition of moral woman as veiled, partly explained the increase in violence

against women in the last decade.

Violence against Women: “Provocative” Dress

Dress codes and norms provide a framework of reference for determining the

abstract processes of social control (Arthur, 1998). Dress serves as a daily discursive

practice of gender situated within the flow of time and gendered dress practices “… are

rooted in relational process that occur at the macrostructural level of history and nation

and at the micro world of social interaction and lived experience.” (Huisman and

Hondagneu-­Sotelo, 2005, 44). Even though choices of dress are regulated and monitored

through formal state policies regarding the public and civil institutions of Turkey, they are

also controlled through informal mechanisms, which determine what type of dressed body

is acceptable morally. In this context, how dress codes and norms are held in check by

the threat of punishment from society requires exploration. Foucault’s (1977) notions of

how bodies are controlled through self-­discipline and surveillance are relevant here too,

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particularly when dress norms are considered within a context of sexual morality

discourses.

The sexual morality discourse that can be seen through norms of dress imposes

particular ways of being in public space. While the male gaze disciplines women through

imposing the sexual moral norm;; in the case of failing to follow the norms, it also judges

and punishes women. One of the participants in her late thirties stated:

When I was at the university, I remember that I was harassed almost every day for

a while […] I noticed that especially during spring and summer, whenever I wore

tank tops and mini skirts or shorts, I was harassed more. When I say I was

harassed, it was not necessarily physically. They were just staring, but it is still

harassment.

Secular participants’ sexual harassment stories point to a particular type of clothing style

defined as “provocative” and “sexually alluring”. Almost all of these participants noted that

when they wear short skirts, décolleté and high heels, they are categorized as “sluts” or

“loose women” [read: ahlaksız (immoral)] who are sexually promiscuous. As Demet, in her

late twenties, noted:

For instance, if you wear a shirt with décolleté, men would stare at your boobs, and they would harass you verbally. What is more is that when you wear short skirts and shirts with décolleté, you are labeled as ‘available woman’, a woman to sleep with rather than wife material.

The differentiation between a “woman to marry” and a “woman to sleep with” came up

several times particularly in the interviews with women. This differentiation demonstrates

how dress is used to draw the boundary between ahlaklı (moral) and ahlaksız (immoral)

women in the discourse of sexuality. This identification of women as ahlaklı or ahlaksız

through dress not only forces them to internalize the moral values and discipline their

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bodies accordingly, but also justifies the sexual harassment of the ahlaksız women by

labeling this particular type of dressing style as consent for sexual advances.

This identification of women as ahlaksız is utilized to produce self-­controlled bodies. The

accounts of participants, like Demet, suggests that women discipline themselves to avoid

wearing revealing clothes in order to avoid becoming a target of sexual harassment:

If I am going out, especially at night, I do not wear short skirts in Ankara because I am tired of dealing with men and their gaze. In the past, I was wearing short skirts but men always say something or you feel their gaze on your legs. I do not dress up very conservatively but I try not to wear revealing shirts or short skirts, particularly if I am going to come home late.

If women do not discipline themselves according to the dress norms, sexual violence is

another disciplinary technique to turn them into ‘docile bodies.’ In cases of sexual assault

and/or rape, the link between discourses of morality and the way women dress and display

their body becomes explicit. In most cases, it is women who are morally condemned for

dressing up immodestly and/or seductively (Entwistle, 1997). In this respect, some of the

participants stated that even though they are not interested in their appearance or what

people would think/say about them, they follow the dress norms of public spaces to avoid

social threats, such as the gaze, or sexual harassment.

As mentioned above, some participants argued that due to the association of

morality with the headscarf, women who are not wearing one have been harassed more

often since the heightening of the Islamist discourse in Turkey. While some of the

participants claimed that the headscarf would not prevent sexual harassment, some

claimed that veiled women are harassed less comparably due to the labeling of unveiled

women as immoral (read: sexually available). Indeed, one of the participants wearing a

headscarf claimed that in Islam, one of the functions of the headscarf is to protect women

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from harassment. Islam constructs female sexuality as powerful and this powerful

sexuality has the potential to cause fitne (disorder), which can lead a man to commit

wrongful deeds (Mernissi 1987). Therefore, to maintain public moral order as well as to

protect women, women are required to veil their sexuality in public.

Women are not only accused of dressing immorally but also blamed for men’s

behaviour or “wrongful deeds”. If a man follows his sexual temptation, it is considered a

woman’s fault for having dressed provocatively. “In this way, dress is used discursively to

construct the woman as ‘asking for it’” (Entwistle 1996, p. 22) and to construct men as the

ones who are not in control of their sexual desire. When I consider the dominant

discourses in Turkey, I argue that this premise is dominant in both Islamist and secularist

discourses. Even though this Islamist sexual morality was quite often repeated and

criticized by the participants, only a few pointed out that the secularist discourse carries

the same sexual moral norms. Only two of the participants indicated that in Article 29 of

the Turkish Penal Code, particularly in cases of sexual violence, judges can reduce the

sentencing in accordance with the idea of “unjust provocations” (Ilkkaracan, 2008).

According to Article 29, dressing up in a “sexually alluring” manner can be interpreted as

provoking assault. Under the scope of this Article, “provocative” and/or “sexually alluring”

clothing can be interpreted as “consent” which could cause a reduction in the sentencing.

Moreover, three participants brought up Article 225 of Turkish Penal Code in their

discussion of the Gülcan Köse case on the regulation of dress by the state. On June 12,

2008, Gülcan Köse was taken into custody because she was dressed “inappropriately”

while she was fishing on the Galata Bridge in Istanbul. She was sentenced to 5 months of

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prison time for violating Article 225 of Turkish Penal Code (Gulbahar 2008). Article 22518

states that “Any person who openly enters in sexual intercourse or exposes one’s self is

punished with imprisonment from six months to one year.” The article also prohibits

“impudent/indecent (hayasız) manners” (Gulbahar 2008). In this particular lawsuit, Ms.

Köse’s leggings and long t-­shirt were labeled as “impudent/indecent”. While this Article

reflects the sexual moral norms of the foundational discourse of the Republic, which

shaped the Turkish Penal Code, my participants noted that this Article began to be used

more frequently against women since the AKP came to power. Even though I failed to

find any statistic related to this statement, the accounts of the participants indicate that

they felt the law was increasingly being used by the AKP government as a mechanism of

surveillance to regulate women’s bodies according to sexual moral norms.

Conclusion

The association of the body with women has been the reason why discourses on

dress have predominantly targeted women and their bodies. Understanding why women

dress the way they do requires an analysis of sexual moral discourses. In Turkey, it is

evident that the debate on dress norms is only focusing on religious Muslim women and

their headscarves and excluding the various forms of dress in relation to sexual morality.

As I endeavour to demonstrate in my analysis in this chapter, sexual moral norms have

been shaping and disciplining the bodies of all women since the foundation of the Republic

and it is not only an issue for Muslim women wearing headscarves.

18http://www.unodc.org/res/cld/document/tur/2004/criminal_code_law_no__5237_html/Turkey_Criminal_Code_Law_No._5237_2004.pdf

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The specific political discursive regimes that participants referenced as the most

significant players in the identification of ahlaklı (moral) and ahlaksız (immoral) women

were those associated with modernism and Islam. The increasing tension between these

two competing political discourses evidently manifested in conflicts over the headscarf

and the visibility of Muslim female bodies in public spaces. Even though both secularist

and Islamist discourses aim to hide female sexual bodies through dress in public space,

the increasing acceptance of the association of the headscarf with morality, which labels

unveiled women as ahlaksız, has created a concern for women who are not veiled. This

concern becomes more evident with the presence of female bodies on the street at night

and in particular neighbourhoods populated with Islamist people.

Women and men experience public spaces differently and the dress norms

imposed on female bodies determine how female bodies can exist in certain spaces.

Exploration of the construction of ahlaklı women in the public space is crucial to

understanding women’s agency. Particularly in Turkey, dress codes have been setting

the tone of what is “acceptable and respectable” and “unacceptable and unrespectable”

for female bodies in public institutions. Moreover, the definition of what an ‘acceptable’

body is has been changing with the increasing dominance of an Islamist discourse in

Turkey. Thus, in the next chapter, while I explore how the moral boundary between

respectable and an unrespectable woman is defined through spatial gendered norms. I

will also explore the shift in those definitions due to the power shift from the secularist

discourse to the Islamist one.

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Chapter 5. Space, Dress and Sexual Morality

Introduction

As Spain (1992, p.30) claims, “[t]hroughout history and across cultures,

architectural and geographic spatial arrangements have reinforced status differences

between women and men” and the seclusion of women has reduced women’s access to

knowledge for centuries. With the foundation of the Republic of Turkey, women gained

their right to enter public spaces from which they were previously excluded. However,

public spaces are not open to any female body to occupy undisputedly. In this chapter, I

will examine my participants’ experiences of public places. In the analysis of the

relationship between space and female body, I consider public spaces as the ones where

women’s bodies are subjected to public gaze. Their narratives reveal that while women

are free to exist in public spaces, their behaviour and how they dress are determined by

a spatial sexual morality that limits their movements.

Most of the participants I interviewed for this study stated that they dress up

according to “the space or the occasion” (yerine gore giyinmek)”. Their narratives on their

choice of dress based on space demonstrate the strong link between the female body and

dress, and how spaces are gendered based on sexual moral norms. In other words,

participants’ accounts reveal how women should cover their bodies in particular spaces to

be deemed as ‘acceptable’ and ‘moral’. Therefore, in this chapter, I aim to examine how

the boundary between the ‘moral/proper’ and ‘immoral/improper’ woman is defined

through gendered norms of space. Through an analysis of the narratives of the research

subjects, I will also show how socio-­political discourse shapes the ways in which the

female body can be identified as ‘moral’ and respectable in certain spaces.

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Even though a wide variety of spaces and occasions came up during the interviews

such as weddings, dating, art events, beach, etc., I will focus only on those spaces that

were most frequently mentioned, such as public transportation, mahalle (neighbourhood),

university campuses, and workplaces. These are crucial spaces to consider since the

visibility of women in these spaces has not been unquestioned. First, I will focus on public

transportation, particularly buses. Public transportation is very important for women’s

mobility in urban centers such as Ankara and Istanbul. Women’s discomfort on public

transportation limits their mobility in and to public spaces. Examining women’s mobility in

public spaces points to spatial moral norms, which construct sexuality in relation to space.

While I am exploring public transportation and how women experience buses, minibuses

and ferries, I also focus on the strategies that women have developed to deal with the

public gaze when they move from space to space. Secondly, based on the participants’

narratives, I compare how women experience rural spaces and various mahalle

(neighbourhood) in the cities, and how and why they change their dress styles and

appearances in rural areas and in particular mahalle. Some of the participants argued that

society is becoming more conservative due to the change in the dominant political

discourse from a secularist to a more Islamic one, and the effects of the change can be

seen from their experiences in mahalle and the city centers.

While the examination of the experiences of women in mahalles and public

transportation will reflect how women’s bodies are subjected to the public gaze, which

disciplines and punishes women if they transgress sexual morality, the examination of

state regulations on university campuses and on government premises will reveal how

women’s bodies are targeted by state surveillance and how these forms of state-­gaze

have shaped women’s experiences of these spaces. Hence, in the rest of the chapter, I

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will focus on the experiences of women in university campuses and the workplace. I will

explore how the ban on the headscarf aimed at regulating veiled bodies on campus

produced distinct modes of embodiment. Later, I will pay particular attention to the

experiences of women in the workplace, a space that acts as a technology of power to

produce a ‘docile body.’ I will also explore how women utilize dress as a strategy to

manage the male gaze and gender regime imposed by the patriarchal structure of public

space.

Women’s Mobility in Public Spaces

The narratives of the participants clearly revealed that of all the spaces women

can occupy, public transportation in Istanbul and Ankara is one of the spaces where they

felt most unwelcomed and unsafe. Most of the participants stated that how they chose

their dress was determined by whether they would be driving or taking a bus or a taxi.

Particularly in the urban areas, public transportation is very important for women’s mobility.

Demet, a young academic working at a university in Ankara, stated that if she takes the

bus to the university, she is more careful with what she wears than if she takes a taxi:

For instance, I love wearing tank tops with décolleté. I do not like wearing skirts, I prefer skinny jeans and I love crop tops and t-­shirts with back décolleté. Indeed, I want to dress up like this but when I am leaving the house, I think about whether I will be taking the bus to school or not.

The unwelcoming feature of public transportation limits the freedom of women in

Turkish cities. The narratives of the participants described how public transportation is a

gendered space that is accepting of women’s presence when they conceal their sexuality.

The bodies that are not properly covered deviate from hegemonic spatial norms and are

thus subjected to the public gaze, a gaze that judges women on the basis of sexual

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morality. The participants particularly noted that as a result of the gaze they are subjected

to, they prefer to take a shawl or a jacket on public transportation. Also they prefer to stand

up instead of sitting down if they are wearing short skirts on a bus. Sengul, who is a

professor at a public university in Ankara, pointed out that she is not only bothered by

men’s gaze but also women’s gaze on the bus and she added that if she wears a short

skirt, she always tries to conceal her legs with books or with her bag even if she is sitting

next to a woman. On the other hand, Derin, a young academic doing her graduate studies

in Ankara, stated that she is mostly bothered by men’s gaze on the bus, and that’s why

she prefers to sit next to a woman:

If I am wearing revealing clothes that could get attention from other people on the bus, I prefer to stand up instead of sitting down. Or I might sit next to a woman rather than a man to feel more comfortable and to avoid the gaze.

As Longhurts (2008) asserts, body and gender play a significant role in the ways in which

people experience space. The experiences of my research subjects demonstrate that the

disciplinary power of the public gaze on female bodies produces self-­controlled bodies on

public transportation. Their statements not only reveal the force of the male gaze on public

transportation, but also show how women develop strategies to manage the gaze. If they

wear revealing clothes, they cover their shoulders with a shawl or put their bags or books

on their laps or they prefer to stand up instead of sitting. The subjects’ experiences with

public transportation show they develop tools to assert their desire and right to wear what

they feel like, even if their clothes reveal their sexuality. Yet, their effort to alter their dress

style to preserve a degree of modesty shows their subjection to the dominant sexual

morality.

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Participants also stated that it is not only on public transportation that they need to

be careful with what they wear. As soon as they step outside of their home they have to

be more careful with their clothing and manners than men. Meryem, who is a feminist

writer and an activist in her late thirties, stated that women laughing loudly in public spaces

is condemned and stared at. She explains: “Especially, when a woman sitting cross-­

legged wearing a short skirt, and if she is also laughing loudly in a public space, then she

will for sure be labeled as a slut”. Like Meryem, other participants emphasized the

existence of more restrictions on women’s behaviour and their public appearance than for

men. They agreed that when women violate the norms of space, they fall into the danger

of being condemned and labeled as ‘immoral’.

The participants’ claims that women are pressured to appear and behave in a

moral manner were supported with the statement of Bülent Arınç, The Incumbent Deputy

of Prime Minister of Turkey. On July 28, 2014, while complaining about the moral

corruption in Turkey, Mr. Arınç said, “Woman should be modest/chaste. She needs to

know what is mahrem and namahrem. She should not laugh loudly in front of everyone.

She should not be inviting/alluring in her manners and should protect her chastity.” (Bulent

Arinc, 2011;; Turkish Deputy Prime Minister, 2011). He lamented that people today had

abandoned their values and claimed they needed to rediscover the Quran for society to

become moral again (Bulent Aric, 2011). Arınç’s statement demonstrates the gendered

nature of public spaces in Turkey and reveals that the new Islamist discourse, which

emerged in the 1990s, maintains the same sexual discourse in which women’s bodies

continue to draw the boundary between mahrem and namahrem. In this context, a woman

who occupies the public space without concealing her sexual body is labeled ‘immoral’,

while the one who veils her body and makes her sexual body invisible to the public gaze

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is ‘moral’. As a response to Arınç’s statement, women from all over Turkey and

internationally (for instance the English actor and activist Emma Watson shared a photo

of herself laughing on Twitter) shared their laughing photos on social media to protest the

sexual morality discourse that continues to constrain women’s experience of public

spaces.

Rural Spaces and Mahalle (Neighbourhood)

When I asked participants in which locations and on which occasions they usually

change their dress style, they answered that if they were going to a rural area they would

dress according to the traditional dress norms of the rural town or the village. When I

asked particularly what they would prefer to wear in rural areas, they stated that they would

dress more conservatively and avoid wearing sleeveless, tight and short clothes. The

regional differences in socio-­economic conditions continue to exist between Eastern and

Western Turkey. While the West was urbanized throughout the Republican years, most of

the population in the East continues to live in more impoverished rural conditions

(Ilkkaracan 1998). As I previously discussed in the history chapter, the early Republican

period which was marked by Kemalist reforms to modernize the lives of citizens did alter

the lives of urban women. Rural women, however, remained unaffected by these reforms.

After the early Republican period, the lives of citizens in the rural regions were changed

mainly through the state’s attempt to industrialize the region. The traditional sexual moral

norms largely remained intact. Ilkkaracan (1998), who conducted a study on sexuality in

the Eastern regions of Turkey, argues that current existing tribal social structures together

with religious and customary practices continue to produce social control over women’s

sexuality. Due to the dominance of customary practices in the East and Anatolian villages,

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some participants noted that they would be careful to dress according to the customs if

they visited these villages. Some claimed that if they did not dress like a local when they

visited rural towns or villages, they would certainly not wear revealing clothes. Participants

who altered their dress style while visiting rural regions stated that they would do so to

show their respect for the customs of the village and/or to avoid the public gaze. Muge,

who is a documentary filmmaker in her late thirties and often goes to rural areas in Anatolia

for movie or documentary shooting, indicated that she usually changes her clothing style

in rural regions:

I like to wear tank tops in summers. I mean this is my style. However, if I am going to Anatolia for a movie shoot, I immediately change my clothes or I wear something else, such as a jacket or a shawl, on top of the tank top. I try to fit in when I go there. It is showing respect but also I try to fit in not to get attention, so I feel more comfortable. I try to avoid the gaze in this way. For instance, I was in one of the towns of Erzurum [a city in Eastern Turkey] for a movie shoot for two months, and during those two months, I wore long sleeves shirts and long loose clothes.

The participants’ narratives revealed that dressing like a local is a sign of respect.

Challenging the dress norms of the regions would be disrespectful while they are visiting

the region. In other words, they present a different form of agency in rural regions by

conforming to the norms of the space to gain the respect of the locals. Moreover, they

often follow the norms of dress in that specific space to blend in and not to stand out in

the crowd. Based on their experiences, some participants further explained that women

are not very visible in public spaces in rural areas. As urban women, they are already

different – ‘outsiders’ – on the streets of small villages where women are associated with

the private sphere. Hence, as women, they prefer to dress according to the customary

norms of dress of rural areas not to draw attention. In other words, they opt to be ‘invisible’

in that space. Failing to follow the dress code would make them ‘visible’, an ‘outsider,’ and

as a result they would become vulnerable to social condemnation. For instance, Yagmur,

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a young woman in her early twenties, refused to dress according to the tradition of the

space she was visiting. She told me that during her trip to a rural Anatolian town she was

subjected to the gaze due to her “indecent” clothing. Sengul, in her early forties, also told

me her experience in Urfa – which is a southeastern city known to be conservative – where

she was invited as a lecturer:

I was invited as lecturer to give a speech on women and politics in Urfa. I am usually carefully about what I am wearing in these kinds of meetings in Anatolia but I do not know why but I decided to wear a short skirt. It was one of my favourite skirts with a unique style and it was not actually very short. Somebody from the audience asked me a question and I somehow began to talk about how women and men experience public transportation differently. And one of our feminist activist friends, who was also a speaker, said to me that ‘for example, you cannot take a bus like this – she was referring to my clothes –, you have to be careful about what you are wearing!’ At that moment, I felt completely naked and uncomfortable. I do not think that she had bad intentions in saying this to me. I guess I got so much attention because of my clothes in that meeting.

Rural spaces in Turkey are still shaped by traditional gender notions that identify

women with the private sphere. Due to a very conservative sexual morality, public spaces

in rural regions are not very welcoming of female bodies. In cases where female bodies

are visible in public, their bodies need to be hidden from the public gaze through the means

of loose and long clothing.

Participants also stated that they have to pay more attention to what they wear

when they are visiting different mahalles (neighbourhoods). Mills (2007) defines mahalle

as “… the Turkish cultural space of closeness and familiarity produced through practices

of neighbouring that create bonds of ‘knowing’ (tanımak)” (p. 349). Mahalle is the space

for the community, a space that creates a sense of belongingness for its residents;; in other

words, it carries the collectivistic feature of society in its traditional cultural form (Mills,

2007). It is a familiar space for residents, one that makes people’s private lives known to

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others. In other words, in traditional neighbourhoods, residents not only know each other

but also know each other’s lives. Mahalle life was more gendered in the past in urban

neighbourhoods when traditional gender roles placed women into the private sphere

(Mills, 2007). Even though women’s roles have been changing in urban life as a result of

the increasing participation of women in the labour market, the participants’ narratives

reveal that mahalle lives remain intact and transcend the privacy of the individual. Because

the traditional mahalle is more collectivist than individualistic, the morality of one person

extends to the community. Particularly because women are seen as the carriers of morality

in the nationalist discourse, as was discussed in the history chapter, women’s bodies are

the sites where the community’s moral values are imposed. Therefore, women experience

various social controls in their everyday lives in the mahalle:

I like wearing short skirts and shirts with décolleté but I walk to work from home every day. I am not driving and my home is very close to work. Every morning, I pass by our mahalle grocery store, florist, convenient store, etc., and men are staring at me if I wear revealing clothes, that’s why I always try to cover myself with a shawl or a jacket […] I have been living in the same mahalle for seven years, and I live alone and people know me. Thus, I try to dress up ‘decently’.

Like Sibel, other participants mentioned that because of the public gaze they feel on their

bodies in some mahalle, they avoid wearing revealing clothes. The public gaze in mahalle

functions as a control mechanism, which disciplines female bodies according to the sexual

morality discourse. In other words, the public gaze aims at producing docile bodies that

hide their sexualities.

Participants’ narratives revealed that particularly in mahalle inhabited mostly by

conservative and/or religious people, women feel a more intense gaze on their bodies, a

gaze that makes them feel uncomfortable. A few participants equated conservative

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mahalle with spaces that are shaped by Islamic values and inhabited solely by veiled

women. Other participants did not equate conservative mahalles with religion. They

defined mahalles as places where women are not seen on the streets because of the

dominance of the traditional division of labour. Participants understood that short skirts

and revealing clothes do not belong in the space of mahalle. Esin, a professor at the

university, who conducted research with women in a mahalle in Tuzlacayir (Mamak,

Akara) explains:

I was careful with what I was wearing there because it is a shantytown mostly inhabited by Alevis. Their conservatism is not like Sunnis, they do not veil. But they do not wear miniskirts, and I did not either.

People in Tuzluçayır are not Sunni religious people, but they are conservative in their

sexual norms. Therefore, to blend into the neighbourhood and not to stand out as an

outsider, Esin conformed to the sexual moral norms, which shaped the mahalle culture.

Esin, like other participants, also stated that she feels uncomfortable in Ulus (a mahalle

located in the center of the old downtown of Ankara) and Kızılay (current downtown of

Ankara). Even though Esin alters her dress depending on the neighbourhood she visits,

one day she went to Ulus in a sleeveless long dress and she felt very uncomfortable

because of the gaze she attracted. As a result of her discomfort, she went back home and

changed her clothes before returning to Ulus. Demet, who had a similar experience in

Kızılay, seems to think that harassment has increased over the years: “it was not like this

in the past. We were not getting harassed or stared at this much in Kızılay”. Another

woman I spoke to, a young feminist activist working at an NGO in Ankara, also claimed

that Turkish society has become more conservative and restrictive in their clothing

choices:

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I think society is more conservative today, but I do not know the reason. Now, it is quite possible to get harassed in Kızılay;; however, when I was at secondary school, Kızılay was a cultural meeting space [….] Sometimes I look at my mother’s youth photos and she was wearing short skirts in the 1970s but now I cannot wear those short skirts in Kızılay.

Even though some of participants from Istanbul insisted that women could wear

whatever they want without restriction in Taksim (downtown of Istanbul), they also

accepted that harassment has become part of women’s lives. The general consensus

among the participants is that society has become more conservative in terms of notions

of gender and sexuality in the last decade. While some did not provide any explanation

for the increasing conservatism, some linked this change to the rise of Islamist discourse

and the AKP governments. Pointing to the conservatism of the incumbent Prime Minister

and to current President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s public statements on women and

gender equality, – such as “there is no gender equality” and “every woman should have

at least three children”, they insisted that the AKP’s Islamist discourse has altered the

sexuality discourse which has made public spaces less welcoming of female bodies. Their

claim is that with the rise of the Islamist discourse, public spaces like mahalles as well as

the city centers have been re-­shaped to include the presence of ‘moral women.’ A moral

woman is no longer a secular asexual woman, but a veiled woman.

When discussing the rise of the Islamist discourse, my participants often brought

up the headscarf ban on campuses. It is to this ban and the changes associated with it

that I now turn to.

The Veiled Bodies on Campuses

As discussed in previous chapters, secularism has been one of the core norms of

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the modernity discourse of the Turkish nation since the foundation of the Republic. The

early Republican secularist discourse is very similar to the gender discourse of European

colonialism discussed by Nagel (2005). In a sense, both discourses regarded Islamic

culture as inferior and perceived Islam as the principle reason for the oppression of

women. Ahmed (1992) asserts that veiling was the most significant marker of the inferiority

of Muslim society in colonial discourse, and that it became a method to attack Muslim

societies. Nagel (2005) states that the European colonialist discourse is one where “… the

emancipation and revival of Muslim societies required the transformation of women’s roles

in society through education, legislative reform, and, perhaps more symbolically, the

abolition of the veil” (p.2). This same orientalist view of the headscarf/veil and Islam has

been present in Turkey because of the adoption of the secularist discourse of modernity,

and as a result, veiled female bodies on campuses have become the symbol of the

challenge against secularism and modernity.

Even though Islamist and secularist discourses are not binary oppositional

discourses in the context of sexual morality, as discussed in the previous chapters, when

the debates on the headscarf on university campuses are considered however, they

appear as opposing discourses fighting over the appearance of female bodies on

campuses. As discussed earlier, secularism and Islamism in Turkey share a similar view

of sexual morality, one that necessitates concealing female sexuality through dress. Both

discourses have made use of the female body as an important site of contestation in the

public sphere. Secularist and Islamist values and norms are made visible in public spaces

by inscribing them on female bodies. One could argue that the headscarf has become a

heated debate in Turkey mainly because it is women who wear it. As mentioned before,

with Atatürk the state saw education as an important tool to secularize its subjects. It is

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believed that as a result of education and development, women would internalize the new

image of the secular Turkish woman, and eventually the headscarf would disappear from

public space (Saktanber&Corbacioglu 2008). Therefore, the increasing visibility of veiled

students on campuses in the 1990s was a significant challenge to the state discourse. The

debate that occurred was not simply about what women were wearing at universities.

Women’s attire became a flashpoint in wider debates about the striking challenge coming

from the waxing Islamist discourse against the secularist discourse in the socio-­political

arena. As discussed in the history chapter, the ban on the headscarf in universities was

implemented in 1987 and was tightened in 1997 after the 28 February military intervention,

the so-­called postmodern or soft coup. The narratives of the participants who attended

university after 1997 with their headscarves suggest the presence of secularist

surveillance on veiled female bodies on campuses.

While participants who did not wear headscarves stated that they felt comfortable

with whatever they wore on university campuses, the veiled participants who attended

university around the time of the 1997 coup, or after 1997, expressed the problems they

faced on campuses. One of the veiled participants, who finished her bachelor’s degree

just before the coup, explained that it took her eight years to finish a four-­year degree

program because of the ban:

In general, I was going to school with my headscarf and that’s why I was punished several times. Once I was almost expelled, and had to unveil in a couple of professors’ classes. Even then, I did not take off my headscarf when I entered the campus;; they were letting us enter the campus at the time. However, I was taking it off when the professors came to the classroom. We were a bit luckier since it was before February 28th. We had the luxury to argue with the professors but now the students do not have that luxury since 1997.

As Cinar (2005) argues, “clothing marks bodies so as to allow for public recognition” (p.55)

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and “… inscribes bodies with gender, class, status, ethnicity, race, religion, and age.”

(p.55). On university campuses, the national discourse of the state used attire as a tool to

determine and label female bodies as “modern” or “Islamist”. The exclusion of

headscarved women from universities, clearly show that the female body was once again

a site where modern secular values could be inscribed. Thus the secular modern attire of

women has been very significant for the secularist state discourse since it became the

modern face of the Turkish Republic.

Foucault’s insights into the ways in which bodies are shaped and disciplined in and

through discourse can be utilized. For example, the experiences of the veiled participants

show that the state’s discourse of modernity acts upon the body and transforms it into an

‘acceptable’ modern body. By not meeting the dress code of a particular space, Islamic

bodies were marked as ‘unfit’ and were subject to disciplinary techniques by the university

administration and faculty members – such as, being asked to leave the class or face

expulsion.

One of the veiled participants (Cemile), who attended the university a couple of

years after 1998, stated that she had arguments with her family because she did not want

to enrol into the program due to the ban on the headscarf. As a result of the pressure

coming from her family, she decided to enrol into the classes, but she pointed out that she

was very discouraged. Cemile contended that like herself, many other students felt

discouraged and even if they attended classes, some were expelled from the university at

some point in their education because of their headscarves. Even though Sedef was not

expelled from school during her graduate studies, she was dismissed from her job at the

faculty for insisting on wearing a headscarf:

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I was expelled three years after receiving my doctorate title in sociology because of my Ph.D. thesis. But at the time my thesis was accepted and it was even published as a book [she laughs]. Of course the main reason was my headscarf but I was officially expelled after February 28th for the reason of the nature of my doctorate thesis […] My thesis topic was modernization and Islamist movements in the Middle East. First, they filed a criminal complaint against me at the State Security Court claiming that my thesis contained an element of a crime […] Of course, the main reason was my headscarf, they even included my veiled photo from a newspaper in the file even though it is irrelevant [...] The thesis involved some case studies of Islamist movements in the Middle East, and in the appendix, I included the photos of the leaders of these movements and this was presented as an element of a crime. As a result I was expelled.

As this statement suggests, the gaze of the state over female bodies on campuses aimed

at reducing the public visibility of Islamist bodies and to achieve this goal, the state

employed forms of surveillance mechanisms, which also involved forms of punishment.

Expelling veiled students as well as faculty members from the universities, and preventing

veiled students from entering the campuses were punishments utilized by the state to

reiterate the norms of secularism.

This situation was not limited to students and faculty members of the universities,

but involved any visible veiled female body on campus. Before 1998, when the ban was

implemented more arbitrarily throughout different campuses, Ayse finished her university

degree without experiencing any problems. However, in 2009, when she tried to enter a

university campus in Istanbul for her children’s extracurricular activities, she was not

allowed to enter the campus because of her headscarf. Even as a parent, her veiled body

was seen as a challenge against the secularist discourse, which still shaped the university

space.

Even though the ban was effective as a disciplinary technique in terms of forcing

students to take off their headscarves on campus or discouraging attendance, some

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students also developed strategies against the ban. Some began wearing a wig or a hat

over a headscarf. Cemile expressed that she is uncomfortable when she is not veiled, and

for this reason she decided to wear a hat to cover her hair and long turtleneck sweaters

and shirts to cover her neck instead of the headscarf. She noted that during the years at

school, she mostly wore a hat;; however, on the day of enrolment, she wore a wig. She

told me the story of the day when her photo had to be taken on campus to be enrolled in

a program. Her headscarf was not tolerated and she was not allowed to wear a hat in the

photo either;; thus, she wore a wig and covered her neck with her headscarf when her

photo was taken. While she was narrating her experience of that day, she expressed how

sad and uncomfortable she felt on that day.

State surveillance on campuses has changed with the elimination of the ban on

the headscarf in 2010. This change is a result of shift in the balance of power with the

victory of the Islamist AKP party in 2002. Even though none of the participants were

against the changes on university campuses, a few of them argued that the AKP

government’s success in lifting the ban is meaningless without a change in the official

dress code, which still prohibits women from wearing headscarves in civil and public

institutions. Participants argued that without this change, veiled women would go back to

their homes with university degrees, and they would not be able to work in the public

sector. However, three years after lifting the ban on the headscarf at the universities, the

AKP government also lifted the 70-­year-­old ban on the headscarf for public and civil

servants, which also changed the secular nature of the workplace.

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Workplace: Dress Like a Lady, Act Like a Man

The participants’ narratives reflect how the workplace shapes their choices of

attire. Even though they “try” to wear what they want, their choice of dress is regulated

and monitored through formal state policies as well as informal mechanisms, which

determine what type of dressed body is acceptable in which work spaces. While some

participants, who are/were working as public and civil servants, have/had to follow the

Kamu Kurum ve Kuruluşlarında Çalışan Personelin Kılık ve Kıyafetine Dair Yönetmelik

(By-­law on the Garments of Public Personnel)19, others stated that they have/had to pay

attention to their appearance at work to be taken seriously as a woman.

One of the participants, a retired public servant, stated that she could not wear

casual dresses due to the formal dress code implemented at her workplace during the

1990s. According to this official dress code, women were not allowed to wear

headscarves, stretch-­pants, jeans, sleeveless and revealing shirts and blouses as well as

shorts, miniskirts and dresses (above the knee length). This example illustrates how dress

is utilized by the state as one of the technologies of the body to form ‘acceptable’ and

‘respectable’ gendered moral bodies at the work place. This official dress code, mandated

by the state for employees of public institution, reflects the ‘ideal’ Turkish woman who is

‘asexual,’ ‘modest’ and secular. The narratives of the participants who are or who used to

work at public institutions indicate that women internalize and normalize the dress code in

their lives. When I asked the participants how they dressed generally, they mostly

answered that they prefer to dress casually. However, when I asked them whether they

19 “Madde 5 – 2 nci maddede sözü edilen personelin kılık ve kıyafette uyacakları hususlar: a. Kadınlar;; Kolsuz ve çok açık yakalı gömlek, bluz veya elbise ile strech, kot ve benzeri pantolonlar giyilmez. Etek boyu dizden yukarı ve yırtmaçlı olamaz. Terlik tipi (sandalet) ayakkabı giyilmez” http://www.mevzuat.gov.tr/MevzuatMetin/3.5.85105.pdf

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also dress casually at their workplace, they usually replied, “of course not, it is different”.

For instance, Pinar who used to work at a public institution, said “I mean of course when I

was going to work I was not wearing causal dress. It is a workplace, thus I preferred more

formal style”. Their response to my question demonstrates that the dress norms at work

have been normalized into the lives of women in Turkey.

Dress regulations have affected faculty members as well as teaching and research

assistants on university campuses. However, participants working on campuses

mentioned that the regulations have not been strictly implemented on campuses, except

for the ban on the headscarf in the past. The participants noted that they are mostly free

to wear whatever they want while they are teaching. They also pointed out that they do

pay attention to their clothes as a sign of respect to their students:

In my daily life and in the days when I am not teaching, I dress up in sporty style. For example, in the winter, I wear jeans/trousers, sweater and a jacket. But if I am teaching on that day, I try to dress up decent because I respect my students. I try to pay attention to the color coordination of my clothes and I avoid bright colors and tight jeans/trousers […] I also do not want them to pay attention to my clothes… Moreover, I dress up in a more formal way if I have a meeting at the university. I wear shirts with a jacket.

Dress is seen as a tool to show professionalism, and professional attire is also the

expectation from the members of the universities as being highly educated modern

women. For instance, one of the professors, Sevim who is an academic in her late thirties,

revealed to me that she thought about what to wear for our meeting for the interview. I met

her at a coffee house in Taksim (downtown of Istanbul) on a very hot summer day, and

she was wearing a tank top with jeans:

It is very hot so I decided to wear a tank top and then when I looked at myself in the mirror, I thought that I look like a student more than a professor. And then I thought, well this girl [she is referring to me] is coming

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from abroad, she is probably used to seeing professors dressed like me since professors dress up like this in the West.

Sevim’s narrative, together with other academic participants’ accounts of their dress

choices at work, reflect how gendered bodies are constituted through performance on

campus. During the early Republican years, female teachers were used as symbols of the

new modern nation to represent the modern educated professional woman. That same

secularist discourse continues to form and shape the professional identity of female

professors on campuses and dictate how they should dress in a modern (read: unveiled)

feminine way while hiding their sexualities. In other words, following Butler’s (1990)

premise on gender performance, I argue that dress enables the repetitious production of

modern professional gender on university campuses through “stylized repetition of acts”

(1990, p. 191) – which in this context are the dress norms. Here, I also need to note that

none of the narratives of the participants indicated a lack of agency. Indeed, I claim that

their accounts reflect a different modality of agency, which needs to be recognized. Even

though they are not resisting the dress code of their workplace, the women working on

campus inhabit spatial norms as a way to communicate their respect and value of their

jobs.

As a result of this gender performance on university campuses, both students and

faculty expect professors to dress in a formal way to show their respect to others. In cases

of a failure to conform to this expectation, they are condemned and excluded from the

space, as in the case of Sedef, who was dismissed from her job at the faculty. The

condemnation is not unique to veiled bodies, but also applies to any other body that does

not conform to the norm:

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When I began working as an assistant, I faced many problems because of my dress style. Everybody was wearing dark formal clothes […] I preferred mostly unique styles and colourful clothes which would get the attention of others. I was warned by professors, the head of the department and the Dean about my attire at work. One of the professors, whom I was close with, told me to pay more attention to my clothing and I told him that I spent one hour to choose this dress! [she laughs] And I was wearing a very colourful PJ like sweatpants and a tank top.

Professionalism requires a certain kind of gender performance at the work place

in Turkey. Like Entwistle (2007) and Puwar (2004) also argued in their studies, my

interviewees stated that dress and appearance are more important to women than men

because in male-­dominated workspace women have a need for credibility, recognition and

professionalism that dress can communicate. In Puwar’s (2004) terms, women are still

“insiders as outsiders” due to the patriarchal nature of workspaces. That is to say, even

though women have a right to exist in the workplace, it is a contested right as a result of

the masculine structure of the space, which does not welcome women.

When gendered bodies participate in places where they are not the ‘figurative

authority’, they become highly visible as the deviations from the norm in places where their

capabilities will be questioned (Puwar, 2004). Demet, a young academic narrated that she

pays attention to her attire particularly when there is an important meeting at the faculty.

Another participant, a woman working at a feminist NGO, mentioned that if she is going to

a meeting with male members of parliament, she dresses up “smart” to prove her

professionalism. In other words, dress is used as a technology to make gendered bodies

‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate’ at the male-­dominated work place.

Most of the participants – even the ones working at NGOs – stated that even when

the workspace is not regulated by the state formal dress code, they have to follow the

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formal dress code at meetings or in the space where there are male participants. One of

the participants stated:

Being taken seriously is quite difficult for women at work, so dress plays a significant role. Women usually try to make themselves accepted through their dress style and appearances, then they start talking. I usually try to make myself accepted through what I say.

Women’s ideas and voices are not given as much recognition as that of men as a

consequence of the mind/body binary opposition, which reduces women to their bodies.

As Entwistle (2001) notes, “power dressing” at work can be seen as a “technology of the

self” in the light of Foucault’s theory on the body. According to Entwistle (2001) power

dressing allows women to fashion themselves as career women, and this type of dressing

provides them with techniques and strategies to enter into career structures as ‘modern’

‘smart’ professionals capable of doing the job for which they were hired. Even when dress

codes are not enforced by state institutions – such as in public universities or the

organization/company –, women dress up formally. This demonstrates how dress norms

are imposed onto women and enforce them to fashion themselves as career women

through internal self-­management.

The narratives of participants show that they have to monitor their bodies and

appearances more closely than men and negotiate between unacceptable and acceptable

moral norms at the work place. Although women are expected to dress femininely, they

should not accentuate their sexuality. As participants claimed, when they dress up in a

way to reveal their sexuality, they will be objectified by men and will not be respected. For

instance, one of the participants stated that she does not want to reveal her body or

sexuality because she wants people to pay attention to her words rather than her body.

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Furthermore, they should not look masculine. As one of the participants pointed out, they

are expected to dress like a lady, but act like a man.

When I first started to get involved in the leftist movement, I was wearing jeans and one day my manager called me to his office – and our relationship was good at work – but he reprehended me;; ‘you are a woman but you are not wearing anything other than these black jeans!’

Dress regimes are not detached from the operations of power and play a significant

role in policing the boundaries of sexual difference and modesty. As Puwar (2004) states

“A ‘ladylike feminine’ image plays a central role in the struggle to be seen as an acceptable

form of ‘woman’ in a male outfit in a male space” (p.97). In the case of Turkey, as I

discussed in the previous chapter, the discourse of sexual morality identifies a hanım

hanımcık (ladylike) woman as the one who dresses up in a way which emphasizes her

femininity while it conceals her sexual body. In summary, women are trapped between the

norm of modesty, which requires them to veil their sexual body and the norm of femininity,

which dictates that women reveal their female sexuality without becoming sexual objects

of male sexual desire. In case of failing to conform to either of these norms, they might

be labeled as ‘masculine’, such as a ‘tomboy’ (erkek fatma) or boy (erkek çocuğu) or as

“immoral” or a “loose woman”. While it might look like my participants are falling into the

trap set by the norms of modesty and femininity, I argue that the claim to “dress like a lady,

act like a man” at the workplace shows a modality of agency rather than a passive

subjection to sexual morality. Women dress up like a lady and act like a man in order to

get the respect they deserve, be taken seriously and to be treated with equality. With this

strategy, they manage to avoid falling into the trap of the norms of modesty and femininity.

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Streets at Night: ‘Immoral’ Woman

The narratives of the participants demonstrate that as they move between public

spaces at different times of the day, they engage in a negotiation of the sexual norms

shaping their clothing. The participants, particularly the ones between the ages of 20 and

40, stated that they often dress up differently at night when they are going to a pub or a

nightclub. Deniz, a young feminist activist working for an NGO, stated that if she wants to

go to a nightclub to have fun, she wears a miniskirt and sometimes revealing shirts. And

then she adds, “[s]ometimes, I dress up sexy to flirt with men. But this does not mean that

every time I dress up sexy, I want to flirt.” Like Deniz, other young participants also made

the same statements about dressing up for men. Indeed, Sibel, a feminist activist working

for a feminist NGO in Ankara, indicated that she even pays attention to her underwear

when she has a boyfriend to seduce him. The experiences of women demonstrate that in

a patriarchal society where women are associated with their bodies, women learn to

prepare themselves as the objects of male desire.

Even though some women pointed out that they sometimes dress up to be sexually

alluring to get the attention of men, often they also do not want male attention. For

instance, Deniz stated that she sometimes dresses up just to feel good when she looks at

herself in the mirror, but she gets harassed at the pubs/bars by men, as if she dresses up

for them. As Entwistle (1996) and Lynch (2007) argue, women fall into a trap where

women’s sexually alluring appearance and ‘narcissistic’ inclinations to seduce men and

compete for sexual attention are viewed as “natural”. Under this patriarchal construction,

men have the right to make sexual advances and the license to reinforce sexual morality

through their gaze -­ a gaze that disciplines women and punishes them if they transgress.

As a result of this, ‘provocative’ and ‘sexually alluring’ clothes deliver consent for sexual

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advances and women get sexually harassed at nightclubs, as participants stated.

Furthermore, how women experience the street also changes at night. The street

at night is perceived to be a male space. Almost all of the interviewees emphasized the

risk of getting sexually harassed by men on the street at night. They stated that due to

their so-­called “provocative” dress, they are labeled as “asking for it” or “available women.”

They usually get sexually harassed at night.

The reason why I am living in the downtown is that it is easier to get home at night. I found a safe, short way to come home at night. This is the only reason why I am paying more rent. If I have to travel long distance, I have to pay attention to what I am wearing at night but now I am more flexible in my dress choices. Even being on the street as a woman at night is difficult and with revealing clothes, it is even more difficult. You will most probably get harassed. It is dangerous.

Participants noted that when they are going out at night and planning to return to their

homes alone, they choose loose and less revealing clothes or they take a shawl or a jacket

to cover their décolleté. Dress has been constructed as one of the signifiers of modesty

and morality. Failing to conform to dress norms can result in being labeled ‘sexually

promiscuous’, ‘available’, ‘loose’, and ‘immoral’ labels that encourage men’s sexual

advances.

If I am going out to drink and/or party, then I will wear something, which would make me feel comfortable. I mean for instance, I take a jacket or something with me to cover my décolleté, because I will be walking on the street at night […] I like wearing skirts and dresses in the summer. I would like to wear short ones but it bothers me – men’s gazes, verbal harassments, etc. I might prefer to ignore these things, but it is harassment and it bothers me so that’s why I prefer not to wear short ones.

Due to the concerns around safety on the streets at night, women either take taxis

or wear clothes that conceal their bodies in order to protect themselves. In other words,

on the street at night, women either do not exist or they make their bodies sexually invisible

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objects. As a result, the street at night remains dominated by men. As Lahsaeizadeh, and

Yousefinejad (2011) suggest, sexual harassment on the streets substantially limits

women’s liberty and spatial mobility in public spaces. However;; women are also held

responsible for the harassment they endure for portraying themselves as ‘available’

women on the streets. As the participants stated, when a woman gets harassed, it is

usually the woman who is blamed for the attack. Derin claims “when a woman is attacked,

the first question people ask is ‘what were you doing on the street at night?’ and then they

would ask ‘what were you wearing?’”. In other words, it is mostly women who are

condemned morally for dressing immodestly and/or seductively on the streets at night and

they are not only accused and held responsible for this action but also for men’s behaviour

too. In the interviews, sexual harassment was one of the most discussed issues on the

topic of sexual morality and dress. The participants claimed that as a result of increasing

conservatism in Turkish society, sexual harassment cases have increased significantly,

and they added that there are not enough precautions taken by the current government

against this issue.

On February 9th, 2011, three moths after I completed my research, a group of AKP

deputies presented a bill to Parliament calling for harsher punishment and longer jail

sentences for sex offenders. This proposed bill on sexual crimes generated a strong

reaction from the head of the theology faculty of Selçuk University, Professor Orhan

Çeker, who accused women of inviting rape by way of their behaviour (Dekolte Giyersen,

2011). He stated that women are at the center of the problem of sexual assault and

women's décolleté is the reason for men’s sexual arousal, and they should not be

surprised if they are attacked. Even though Professor Çeker received some support from

some Islamist writers, his comments caused a large uproar and opposition from different

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groups of women, including religious Muslim women activists. Women activists accused

Professor Çeker of legitimizing sexual assault by giving men the right to abuse women on

the basis of their clothing, which also means that women wearing a revealing dress

deserve sexual assault. In many cities in Turkey, women gathered to demonstrate against

Prof. Çeker and his supporters, and these recent demonstrations and debates placed the

issue of dress, sexuality and female body on top of the feminist/women's agenda to

construct a stronger counter-­discourse, which I will be discussing in the next chapter.

Conclusion

Sexual morality shapes women’s experiences in public spaces in Turkey.

Historically, women began to participate in public spaces with the foundation of the

Republic. Before the Republic, the Ottoman state attempted to maintain the sexual moral

order in public space through the veiling and seclusion of women. In spite of the formation

of mixed-­gender public spaces through Republican gender reforms, my participants’

experiences of space revealed that public spaces have continued to remain gendered.

They all asserted that their mobility was restricted in public.

Liberating women politically, as the Kemalists did, increased the visibility of

women, but not without restrictions. By defining public spaces in ways that only welcome

certain types of sexual bodies, Kemalism limited the freedom of women’s movements and

subjectivities. To exist in certain public spaces in Turkey– such as the workplace,

universities and on the streets at nights – women have to conform to the sexual moral

notions of space. This spatial limitation has reinforced traditional notions of women’s

domesticity. Female bodies that do not conform to sexual moral norms are not welcomed

in public spaces;; they are labeled “loose” or “immoral”. As the participants’ statements

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clearly demonstrated, women are not only discouraged to be on the streets at night, they

are threatened with sexual harassment.

To avoid sexual harassment and/or the stigma of being “immoral”, women conform

to the sexual moral discourse, which dictates that they hide their sexualities in public

spaces. Women develop strategies – such as taking a shawl or a jacket to cover their

décolleté and standing up rather than sitting down on the bus when wearing miniskirts –

to subvert the dress norms. However, these coping strategies are not sufficient to

reconstruct and reverse sexual morality discourse that limits their mobility in public spaces.

Still, they provide women with a sense of freedom and power over their lives. In the next

chapter, I will be looking more closely at emerging discourses from the women’s

movements and their attempts to challenge the morality discourses.

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Chapter 6. The Modes of Agencies: Women’s Movements and Sexual Morality

Introduction

Women are socio-­political actors who have the power to produce discourses that

can potentially subvert, resist or reinforce the dominant discourse. In this chapter, I draw

on my participants’ experience in various women’s movements to analyze the discussion

these movements have had on sexual morality and dress. The analysis aims to

demonstrate different modalities of agencies in the struggle against sexual morality, a

morality that reinforces sexual violence against women and limits the freedom of women

in public spaces throughout Turkey.

Firstly, I will focus on the narratives reflecting participants’ resistance against the

control the state has over their bodies. I will do so by exploring their challenge against

state-­sponsored virginity exams in the 1990s. I will look at their critique of laws regulating

“impudent/indecent (hayasız) manners” and of arguments justifying the “unjust

provocation” defence in sexual violence cases.

Secondly, I will examine their resistance against the disciplinary public gaze over

women’s bodies. I will examine women’s voices on the first campaign of Mor İğne

Kampanyası (Purple Needle Campaign) in 1989, where they questioned the judging gaze

used against them. That gaze labels women as ahlaksız or ‘available/loose women’ and

makes them the targets of sexual harassment. Then, I will focus on more recent

campaigns aimed to “take back the streets at night”, and how they contested the

disciplinary public gaze.

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Thirdly, my examination will focus on religious Muslim women activists and their

modalities of agency, based on their arguments about sexual and bodily rights, and the

ongoing debate about the headscarf. After a discussion of the headscarf and sexual

morality, I discuss the new agencies and voices of young feminists in associated

movements, voices that can potentially create a strong challenge against the sexual

morality discourse.

Challenging State Surveillance

In the late 1980s, women began to establish autonomous organizations dedicated

to women’s issues (Cosar and Gencoglu Onbasi 2008;; Tekeli 1986;; Yesilyurt Gunduz

2004). Until the 1980s, women could not find the grounds to start autonomous women’s

movements as a result of the state monopoly over women’s issues. Kandiyoti argues, “the

authoritarian nature of the single-­party state and its attempts to harness the ‘new woman’

to the creation and reproduction of a uniform citizenry aborted the possibility for

autonomous women’s movements.” (Quoted in Cinar 2005, p. 67).

Women involved in the student and working-­class movements of the 1960s and

1970s (Aldikacti Marshal 2013), together with intellectuals/academics (Koc 2006), led the

women’s movement in the late 1980s. The early years of the movements consisted of

informal meetings with women at their homes where they shared their thoughts and

experiences as women. One of the participants, who was active in the movements in the

1980s, emphasized the importance of these meetings for changing the way they looked

at their lives as women. She stated that through these consciousness-­raising groups, they

began to question their sexuality and their relationship with men. As a result of these

consciousness-­raising group meetings, women’s groups that first formed in Istanbul and

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Ankara (Timisi and Agduk Gevrek 2002) began to challenge the state’s gender discourse.

The questioning of female sexuality and the affirmation of a right to bodily integrity

were brought into the public forum with the critique of state sponsored virginity exams in

the late 1990s. As Parla (2001) states in her study on virginity exams, the exams were

performed on girls and women in public dormitories and hospitals and on sex workers to

expose ‘immoral’ behaviour and to protect ‘public morality’. According to Parla (2001), this

practice reflected the Turkish state’s preoccupation with women’s chastity and morality. It

also indicated the Turkish state’s perception of women’s sexual purity as the manifestation

of the honour of the family and the nation. Some women’s/feminist groups protested

against the virginity exams with the following slogan: “No to Virginity Tests! This is My

Body!” (“Bekaret kontrolüne hayır! Bedenimiz bizimdir!” (Miller, 2007). Esin, who protested

the virginity exams in the 1990s, spoke about her experience in campaigns about sexual

rights:

Having a discussion about [sexual freedom] was not easy at the time. In the consciousness-­raising groups, we had discussed virginity exams and we launched a campaign. However, when we started talking about it in public, we received threats in the early 1990s. People sent us threatening letters, they phoned us, and it was terrible.

Esin contends that questioning the virginity examinations was a crucial moment in the

course of women’s movements, though they could not discuss it in depth due to the

reactions they received from the public. She adds that despite the threats that the women

received, the protests continued and led to an amendment of the regulation. A woman’s

consent became necessary for virginity tests to proceed. The women’s movements’

protests against the virginity tests represented a challenge against the larger Kemalist

state project of portraying the modern woman as moral and chaste. As Sule also stated,

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virginity tests were portraying women’s sexuality as the property of the nation, which is in

need of protection. While the Kemalist discourse aims at liberating women, women and

their sexuality have been portrayed as the property of the nation, symbolizing morality and

honour. As Parla (2001) also argued, virginity tests done by state authorities can be

conceived as a form of state-­sponsored violence for reproducing the modern, moral

woman constituted in the Kemalist modernity discourse.

Participants’ narratives revealed that the challenge against the state and its moral

discourse has increased in the last decade. They claimed that since the AKP took hold of

power, the state’s discourse has become more conservative, which also made the sexual

morality more conservative. Deniz, a young activist who has been taking an active role in

the movement through several groups and NGOs, claimed that today the clothes revealing

only the shape of the legs (not the skin) can even be labeled as “provocative” by the state,

as it was in the criminal case against Gülcan Köse. Gülcan Köse was sentenced to five

months in prison based on the accusation that she was dressed “inappropriately” (long

loose t-­shirt and tights) while she was fishing on the Galata Bridge in Istanbul on June

12th, 2008. Women publicly protested the decision and in the press release pointed out

that the law had been applied to discriminate against women. They claimed that Article

225 of Turkish Penal Code on “impudent/indecent (hayasız) manners” needs to be

removed from the criminal code to prevent the use of the law to justify inequality and

discrimination, as well as the use of undue power on women’s bodies. They also argued

that the laws and rules regarding “public morality” have been used in sexual violence

cases in order to reduce sentencing. They underlined that men who murder women benefit

from the ‘unjust provocation’ reduction “[…] by referring to excuses such as how their

wives were wearing tights or tight clothes or how flirtatious they were in their relations with

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others.” (Women meet, 2008). For instance, Ruya and Derin, who are members of

Feministbiz and Ankara Women’s Platform, mentioned that in rape and sexual harassment

cases – that feminist groups have been following – the morality of women is being

questioned. Derin said that the questions asked during these trials are “were you flirting

with him?”, “what were you doing at night on the street?”, and “what were you wearing?”

at the time of the attack. Ruya, Derin and others, like Deniz, remarked that there are

cases where the sentencing was reduced based on Article 29 of Turkish Penal Code

regulating “unjust provocations”. Even though the actions considered ‘unjust

provocations’ and the attire considered ‘provocative dress’ or ‘sexually seductive’ are not

well-­defined in the Article or the court cases, the subjects’ accounts of sexual violence

cases reveal that the law has functioned as a surveillance mechanism to institutionalize

and reproduce the sexual morality discourse that labels women as ‘asking for it’ based on

their clothing.

I argue that Köse’s case and the rape cases mentioned above reveal how state

surveillance as a mechanism of power operates on women’s bodies through law.

Moreover, according to participants, Article 225 of the Turkish Penal Code20 which has

been in place for a long time and applied mainly in cases of “exhibitionism”, such as when

one exposes himself/herself or has sexual intercourse in public, has for the first time ever

in the Kose case been used to condemn a woman for wearing “inappropriate” clothing.

They see this case as a significant sign of the heightened conservatism of Turkey since

the rise to power of the AKP government.

20 As discussed in Chapter III, the Article states that “Any person who openly enters in sexual intercourse or exposes one’s self is punished with imprisonment from six months to one year” and it is an Article to regulate “impudent/indecent (hayasız) manners”

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Taking Back the Streets!: Contesting the Public Gaze

As discussed in the previous chapter, the narratives of the participants suggest

that public spaces – such as buses, ferries, and minibuses – are not accepting of women.

Women’s bodies on buses and ferries are subjected to the public gaze, which disciplines

women and punishes them if they transgress sexual morality. Participants’ accounts

suggest that the punishment varies from a judging gaze, which labels the women as

ahlaksız or ‘available/loose women’, to sexual harassment.

Sule, and other participants, explained that one of the first challenges against the

public gaze originated in 1989 with the campaign called Mor İğne Kampanyası (Purple

Needle Campaign). The campaign was launched in 1989 to challenge the disciplinary

public gaze that labels women as ‘available’ or ‘immoral,’ rendering them susceptible to

sexual harassment. The campaign aimed to raise awareness around the issue of violence

against women on public transportation (such as ferries, buses, etc.) as well as in the

workplace (Tekeli 1992). Meryem, who participated in the campaign in 1989, noted that it

was a challenge against the morality discourse, which dictates how women should dress

and behave in public spaces. To counteract and protest sexual harassment on public

transportation, women handed out purple needles on the ferries. The needles were

intended to be used to stab attackers.

Meryem explained that the slogans of the protest were obviously feminist ones:

“Our dress is not an invitation to harassment” and “our bodies our rights!” Through

claiming their rights on their bodies, women rejected the control imposed onto their bodies

by men. Muge, who participated the second Purple Needle Campaign in 2008, said:

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I did not participate in the first campaign in 1989, but I participated in the second campaign and I know that in the first one, they actually talked about dress and sexual violence. I think they began discussing it when a woman was kidnapped from the street at night and raped. People were asking why was she wearing a miniskirt at night on the street and what was she doing on the street at night? You know, there is an assumption that because she was walking on the street wearing a miniskirt at night, that, of course, “she was looking for it” […] In the campaign basically they were questioning this presumption.

Not all women supported the Purple Needle campaign. In one of her articles, Handan Koc

(2006) – whom I also interviewed for this research – argued that during the first Purple

Needle Campaign, some women were ill-­at-­ease. This uneasiness was a result of the

counter critique coming from anti-­feminist groups that labeled the feminists involved in the

campaign as women “who would like to wear revealing clothes and want to have sex all

the time” (Koc, 2006, p. 23). In other words, women who launched the campaign were

labeled as “immoral” due to their demand to control their bodies and to dress up freely

without the risk of sexual harassment.

A stronger women’s voice against sexual harassment as a disciplinary technique

to exclude women from the streets at night, came later in the 2000s. As discussed in the

previous chapters, women’s presence on the streets at night makes them appear as

ahlaksız/‘available’;; hence, it makes them vulnerable to sexual harassment. The

participants’ statements revealed that women began to challenge the public gaze they

were subjected to for being on the streets at night. For instance, Deniz, a young activist

working at Women for Women's Human Rights – New Ways (Istanbul) and a member of

various e-­mail groups and other women’s NGOs such as Socialist Feminist Collective

(Sosyalist Feminist Kollektif – SFK) and Amargi, stated that a couple of years ago, on

March 8th, some young feminists organized a late night street party on the streets of

downtown Istanbul to challenge the morality discourse, which dictates that women must

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stay at home at nights. She walked the streets in solidarity and shouted, “the nights are

ours, the streets are ours.” She explained that during their attempt to take back the night

they also questioned the dress norms that limit women’s mobility in the public space.

We are always concerned about what we wear when we are going out at night. We pay attention to what we are wearing while walking on the street at night, because we are always at risk of getting sexually harassed! So as feminists, we wanted to make our voice heard and to claim the streets at nights!

Derya, who is also involved in the feminist organizations of Amargi and SFK, also

talked about the March 8th night walk in 2010, and mentioned that during the walk, they

carried banners challenging the dress norms and expressing their freedom to wear

miniskirts. Indeed, in 2010 one of the slogans of the night walk was: “The decision about

the length of our skirt does not belong to men. We will dress however we like, and we will

beat the pavement at nights however we like!” (Cakir, 2010). In other words, participants’

accounts of the night events demonstrated that women activists preferred to challenge the

labeling of ahlaksız imposed on their bodies by the public gaze, rather than avoiding the

gaze by making themselves scarce on the streets at nights.

Women’s challenge against the sexual morality has grown stronger, as the morality

discourse has become stronger in cases of sex crimes. For instance, in 2011 Professor

Orhan Çeker, the chair of Religious Studies at Selcuk University, publicly stated that

revealing clothes provoke sexual harassment. He said: “If you wear clothes that reveal

your cleavage, it would not be a surprise for you to encounter such ugliness. It would not

be reasonable for you to complain about the result after your provocation.” (Hurriyet,

2011). Immediately after this statement, in various cities, women took this issue to the

streets wearing miniskirts and they cried out “the way we dress is not an invitation to

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harassment!” They have continued their challenge against the sexual morality and the

public gaze in every March 8th celebration, through the slogan “If I want I wear mini skirts,

if I want I walk on the street at night! Who cares!”

The Veiled Agencies: The Question of Bodily Rights

Since the beginning of independent women’s movements in Turkey in the late

1980s, women began to struggle against patriarchal control imposed on their bodies and

to assert their bodily rights. According to participants like Meryem and Muge, the

aforementioned Purple Needle Campaign was a crucial campaign on the account of being

the first feminist event affirming women have sexual and bodily rights. Koc (2006) explains

that during this campaign in 1989, no one denied women’s ownership of their bodies.

However, later with the growing Islamist discourse, feminists in women’s movements

began to hear a counter discourse: “Our bodies belong to Allah!”. Some participants like

Melek, Meryem, Demet and Yuksel questioned this religious Muslim women’s counter-­

discourse. Melek, who is a journalist and an active member of Amargi and Birbirimize

Sahip Çıkıyoruz (We Look Out for Each Other), points out that even though she has been

trying to understand the women wearing headscarves, she is still unable to comprehend

how they can challenge the patriarchal structures while denying ownership of their own

bodies. Yuksel, a member of Türk Kadınlar Birliği (The Association of Turkish Women),

stated that because religious Muslim women activists do not think that their bodies belong

to them, whenever they hear women shouting the slogan “our bodies belong to us!”, they

leave the events, as was the case in the last March 8th celebrations in Ankara. She claims

that religious Muslim women’s lack of support in the struggle for gaining bodily rights

weakens the resistance against patriarchy. Demet concurred that indeed religious Muslim

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women are self-­contradictory in their claims. While they claim their right to their bodies in

their struggles to remove the ban on the headscarf, they do not support unveiled women

in their fight for their rights to their bodies.

However, Sedef, a headscarved woman (and ex-­academic) and an activist

explained that the Muslim women activists’ standpoint does not support the patriarchal

discourse and its power on women’s bodies. She is adamant that through their claim that

their bodies belong to Allah, Muslim women refuse the patriarchal societal control over

their bodies:

We are against abortion of course because our bodies belong to Allah… Of course, if you ask whether our bodies belong to the society or men, of course we as women have rights over our bodies. However, if you look at it from an Islamic point of view, our bodies belong to Allah, our bodies are entrusted to us. It is the same for men too. This does not mean that women’s bodies can be controlled by men or male view in the society, this is not correct. Especially, defining all the morality problems through women’s bodies is not correct at all, we posses the right to our bodies.

Cemile, a headscarved young woman activist working at AKDER – which was formed to

struggle against the ban on the headscarf – also stated that she completely disagrees with

the slogan that ‘our bodies belong to us.’ She claims she joined the struggle against the

ban on the headscarf because of her belief that her body belongs to Allah. Indeed, Cemile

began the interview by stating that she is a Muslim woman and she chooses her clothes

to conceal not only her body but also its shape, in accordance with the requirement of

Islam and the order of Allah. She explains:

I think my body is Allah’s property, and that’s why I need to cover my body based on Allah’s rules since Allah owns my body. This is exactly why I fight for my right to wear the headscarf… In fact, I discussed this with friends who claim their bodies belong to them, but I do not think saying ‘my body belongs to me’ is in accord with dressing up fashionable, having a fashionable hairstyle and color and acting cool or modern. I mean every

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woman would accept that a bra is not comfortable but if you are saying ‘this body belongs to me’ while wear a bra? I think there is a conflict there you need to question.

In other words, Cemile claims, through the argument that her body belongs to

Allah, that she challenges the patriarchal control over her body that tells her to dress in a

particular way, such as wear a bra but not wear a headscarf.

I do not disregard the different modalities of agencies religious Muslim women

present in the women’s movements. I argue that even though they do not challenge the

patriarchal elements of the Islamist discourse, they in fact aim to subvert the patriarchal

power structure embedded in the Kemalist discourse. Through accepting Allah’s power as

the sole power on their bodies, they employ Islam as a tool to resist the power that society

and the state impose on their bodies and invest in men to discipline women. In other

words, even though wearing a headscarf might be understood as a sign of docility and

submission to the will of Allah by secularist feminists, it can also very well be perceived by

the state as a resistance to its power imposed on their bodies. When religious Muslim

women’s struggle against the ban on the headscarf is considered, it can be seen why they

did not accept the power of the state over their bodies. Therefore, I argue that Mahmood’s

conceptualization of agency provides an alternative perspective to explore the formation

of various modes of agencies where the line between what is submissive and resistant

blurs within the complex normative systems. As also argued by Shively (2014),

Mahmood’s theory on individual’s agentive capacity allows us to move beyond the limited

definition to see how “… acts of submission and resistance become entangled with each

other.” (463) In this context, I assert that the argument that “our bodies belong to Allah”

does not reflect their submissive and passive position, rather it reflects a different modality

of agency, particularly in their fights against the ban on the headscarf.

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“Does Moral Woman Mean Headscarved Woman?”: The Debate on the Headscarf and Islamic Sexual Morality

In the late 1990s, women’s movements flourished in Turkey and we witnessed

much diversification in the movements. The question of difference was brought onto the

agenda, and women began to question the homogenizing identification of women in the

modernist discourse, and acknowledged that gender inequality should be discussed in

relation to other differences, such as class, ethnicity, and religion. Bordo (1993) reminds

us that the ideological construction of femininity “...is always homogenizing and

normalizing, erasing racial, class and other differences and insisting that all women aspire

to coercive, standardized ideal” (Bordo, 1993, p. 169). From this point of view, the

homogenizing discourse of the Kemalist discourse was challenged mainly by two actors

during the early 1990s: the Kurdish women and Islamist women (Bodur 2005). While the

Kurdish women questioned the ethnic dimension of the gendered Kemalist discourse,

Islamist women problematized the understanding of modernity and secularism in the

Kemalist nationalist discourse.

In the 1990s, with the involvement of women in the emerging Islamist movement,

these “new” Islamist women became visible in the social and political spheres. Religious

Muslim women started to demand participation and not merely representation in the

Islamist movement. They founded their own organizations to voice their demands, fight

against the ban on the headscarf, and participate in the political sphere and women’s

movements in Turkey (Cayir 2000). Especially with the expansion and the

institutionalization of women’s movements in the 1990s, religious Muslim women activists

founded various NGOs. During the late 1990s and early 2000s, while some secular

women activists supported religious Muslim women activists’ struggle against the ban on

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the headscarf on the basis of expanding human rights, others refused to cooperate with

them in any campaign or events (Ozcetin, 2009).

The narrative of the participants in this study reflected that, in general, the ban on

the headscarf is considered a violation of human rights. As discussed in Chapter III, while

some participants stated they are against the ban on the basis of human rights, they still

perceive the headscarf as an oppressive Islamic practice or a tool of the political Islamist

movement. They thus reject the headscarf as a patriarchal Islamist practice. Meryem, a

feminist writer in Pazartesi, who has been involved in the movement since the late 1980s,

insisted that there is a difference between the headscarf and the türban/tesüttür, which is

mostly worn by urban Islamist women:

There are different styles of headscarf. The tesettür tightly covers every strand of your hair, and neck and nowadays Islamist women wear it with a pardesü (long loose coat), exactly like Emine Erdogan [the wife of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan]. We might not know whether the woman is wearing a tesettür because of the pressure coming from her family or whether it is her choice but you can be very religious and you might prefer not to wear a tesettür. It is the Islamist dressing style, which came after 1980s. It carries more of a political meaning.

During our conversation, in a couple of occasions, Meryem as well as Yasemin –

a feminist writer – stated that they sometimes feel that the Islamist women are forced to

cover their heads. Meryem and Yasemin’s accounts reflect the modernist discourse, which

identifies headscarved women as passive actors without agency. On the other hand,

Cemile, who has been wearing the headscarf since high school, explained that she

chooses to wear the headscarf because she comes from a religious family. She sees

women who were raised in “secular families” as choosing not to wear a headscarf. She

insists that the perception of the Muslim headscarved woman as passive is still dominant

in the secularist women’s movements due to the dominance of the Kemalist modernist

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view, and as a result of this perception, she sometimes feels the judging gaze of secularist

women. Melek, member of Başkent Kadın Platformu (Başkent Women’s Platform), made

a similar statement as she narrated her experience in the movements. She stated that

usually they were not welcomed in the events organized by the other feminist NGOs,

particularly Kemalist ones like Türk Kadınlar Birliği (The Association of Turkish Women).

She added that sometimes women’s groups change their view on religious women after

building communication:

From the name of our organization [Başkent Kadın Platformu], they cannot understand what kind of organization it is. Last year, I went to a meeting called ‘women’s lobby.’ At the door, they were all surprised to see me with my headscarf but I was on the invitation list, so they could not say anything. However, after having a conversation, their attitude towards us usually changes.

As I have also argued elsewhere (Ozcetin, 2009), religious Muslim women activists

have not been welcomed in the feminist movements due to the dominance of the

orientalist view which labels them as ‘backward’ and ‘oppressed’. As Melek and Cemile,

member of AKDER and Başkent Kadın Platformu, stated this attitude is changing in recent

years as a result of increasing communication among women’s groups. Religious Muslim

women activists noted the importance of communication to break the stereotype of

religious Muslim women as ‘passive backward oppressed’ women (Ozcetin 2009). In

contract to the general assumption that religious Muslim women’s organizations are only

fighting against the ban on the headscarf, they also conduct several projects on women’s

rights and to improve their social, political and economic conditions (Ozcetin, 2009). To

this reason, Melek pointed out that solidarity among women’s groups are important

because they are all fighting against inequality. She noted that some women’s

organizations have created more respectful arenas, which welcome women with their

differences to learn more about each other. As she pointed out, the recent example is the

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Birbirimize Sahip Çıkıyoruz (We Look Out for Each Other), which is composed of women

academics and activists from various religious, ethnic, and political orientations. This

initiative tried to bring the discussion into a new platform that is open to diversity and

differences (Ozcetin, 2009).

The participants’ accounts revealed that despite the increasing communication

between religious and secular women resulting in wider acceptance of headscarved

women, there seems to be a continuing division of “us” and “them”, “our rights”, and “their

rights” in the women’s movements. Some of the unveiled participants claimed that even

though they fought with “them” for “their right” to wear the headscarf at the universities,

religious Muslim women are not fighting for their bodily and sexual rights.

Participants like Meryem, Melek, Emel and Demet argued that the definition of

moral has shifted from “secular modern woman” to “headscarved woman”, and as a result,

while “secular women” are defined as iffetsiz/ahlaksız (unchaste/immoral), headscarved

women are increasingly defined as iffetli/ahlaklı (chaste/moral). Demet, a graduate student

involved in various women’s groups in Ankara, asserted that the increasing number of

headscarved women, particularly in Kızılay (downtown of Ankara), created a shift in what

is considered as the norm and the “other”. She argued that in the past while the

headscarved women were defined as the “other”, women without headscarves were

considered as “normal” bodies. However, as a result of the increasing number of

headscarved women in Kızılay, headscarved bodies today have become the ‘normal’

bodies in the public sphere. She added that the increasing visibility of headscarved women

in conjunction with the AKP’s conservative patriarchal sexuality discourse led to a change

in the definition of ahlaklı women from those wearing secular modest clothing to those

wearing headscarves. She also denoted that her problem is not about women wearing the

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headscarf, but with religious Muslim women’s reluctance to participate in the campaigns

and protests to fight for secular women’s rights to wear anything without the risk of being

labeled as ahlaksız. Emel, who was very actively involved in the fight to remove the ban

on the headscarf, also stated:

Of course we will fight for their rights to wear the headscarf or whatever they want to wear. If some are allowed to wear tight jeans, the others are also allowed to wear the headscarf. But currently there is an equation of headscarf with ahlak (morality). I am expecting help from my headscarved friends now to struggle against this equation. [The problem] now [is that] they are ahlaklı (moral) and iffetli (chaste) because they wear headscarves and I am not because I do not wear it!

Esin, a professor in Ankara, claims that it is currently not possible to critique the

dominant association of the headscarf with morality. The reason this is the case, she says,

is that religious Muslim women’s rights to education were violated for a very long time and

they were discriminated against due to the ban on the headscarf. The discrimination

women experienced due to the headscarf is still a sensitive issue for headscarved women,

thus, it is very difficult for feminists to start a conversation with them about the headscarf

and what it symbolizes. Melek, a journalist in Istanbul, frustratingly refers to an Islamist

female writer’s article to demonstrate how religious Muslim women accept the association

that is increasingly made today between morality and the headscarf:

Her article is titled something like “the miracle of the tesettür”. In the article, she says that in Beyoğlu [central district of Istanbul], I go to the movie theater alone at night, I drive alone at night, I walk on the streets at night without any trouble because my tesettür protects me from harassment. So what? Do we all need to wear a tesettür to avoid harassment?!

As these words make clear, nobody disturbs headscarved women on the streets at night,

because the tesettür is the symbol of ahlaklı woman. Women who are harassed are those

who make their bodies available. This assumption was shared by the secular participants

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and one religious Muslim woman activist, Melek. Melek – a member of Başkent Kadın

Platformu – claimed that Allah’s rule about covering the body is not just about the

headscarf but about the entire body, arguing that one of the reasons Allah orders women

to conceal their body is related to sexual harassment. According to Melek, Allah instructs

women to conceal their bodies through dress to avoid harassment. Thus, by hiding

women’s bodies from the public eye, the function of the tesettür is to protect women from

harassment. Even though Melek emphasized her objection to the labeling of women as

immoral based on their clothes, her narrative on dress and the male gaze reflects the

Islamist sexual morality:

I sometimes argue with my husband. He says that sometimes some women do not realize that every part of her body becomes visible under the sunlight. I say it is ok, it is her decision, and everyone can wear whatever she wants. But you do not have to look at her just because she is dressed in this way. And he says “ok but in Kızılay [Downtown of Ankara] wherever I look, I see these women I cannot help it;; then, I need to look down at my feet all the time”. I mean when I think, of course I understand him, on the other hand I tell him that if everyone dresses up like me [long loose coat and headscarf], where would be your testing by Allah [she smiles]. Of course, my husband is looking at it from a man’s point of view, and then tells me “should the test be this hard!” [she smiles].

Melek’s banter with her husband reveals the Islamist sexual morality discourse, which

defines female sexuality as a threat to public morality due to its power to seduce men. As

discussed before, while Islamist sexual morality identifies female sexuality as destructive,

it constructs male desire as a weakness in the presence of the seductive power of the

female body. It is as if men cannot control their sexual desire when confronted by this

powerful female sexuality. The Islamic practices of veiling and seclusion, therefore, aim at

making women’s bodies and sexualities invisible in the public (Mernissi 1995;; Afshar

1998). Indeed, this was a discourse criticized by the secular participants, in that such a

discourse could lead not only to the labeling of women who deviate from the Islamic dress

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norms as ‘immoral’, but also situate these women as the targets of harassment. Thus, if a

man harasses a woman who does not conceal her ‘tempting’ sexual body, the blame is

placed on the woman.

Even though the aforementioned secular participants’ accounts demonstrate their

disappointment in headscarved women activists for not challenging the Islamist discourse

that marks the headscarf as a symbol of morality, another interpretation is possible

considering their agencies. Based on her study of the women’s mosque movement in

Egypt, Mahmood (2005) argues that veiling is not a symbolic marker of the body or the

self as pious, but veiling is a “… conscious act of self cultivation in which the body is an

instrument utilised towards piety.” (quoted in Bautista 2008, p.79). I also argue that the

headscarved participants’ statements on headscarf and morality reflect they followed the

dress norm that they believed in accord with Islam to become religious/pious Muslim

women. As I mentioned in the previous chapters, the participants who are wearing

headscarves stated that they dress according to Islamic rules because they are “religious”

people. By submitting to the Islamist normative system, they are making themselves into

what they considered to be moral Muslim women.

The Agencies of Younger Generation: “New Blood, New Challenges!”

It must be noted that women who launched the first independent women’s

movements were products of the Kemalist modernization process: highly educated,

professional women living in major urban cities such as Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir

(Aldikacti Marshal 2013). Women in these movements questioned the Kemalist gender

discourse and its paternalistic features, which defined them as transmitters and carriers

of the nation’s morality. However, the narratives of the participants indicated that the

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Kemalist modernist sexual morality is still visible to some extent, due to the internalization

and normalization of its norms. For instance, Deniz, who participated in the protest against

the aforementioned sentencing of Köse due to her ‘improper’ clothing, said:

We, as feminists, were there to protest and to say “we wear whatever we want!” but I noticed that women there ended up dressing up modestly and this is what they tell us to wear! I wore a mini short and a tank top since we are demonstrating against [the dress code], but I looked around and I realized that everybody was dressed up modestly. They wore jeans and loose t-­shirts!

Deniz’s complaint about the movements was also echoed by the other participants’

statements. Indeed, some also confessed that, at times, they found themselves judging

or labeling other women for their so-­called provocative dressing style, while emphasizing

that they felt ashamed of these thoughts. From a Foucauldian point of view, I argue that

as a result of state surveillance mechanisms together with the disciplinary public gaze,

women learn to survey what they wear and administer self-­discipline. Some even revealed

that in feminist gatherings and forums, women judge women who wear revealing clothes.

Nehir, an academic in Istanbul, told her experience in the first Purple Needle Campaign:

I guess it was in 1989 during the first Purple Needle Campaign. There was a closed-­door meeting where women were sharing their sexual harassment experiences… I cannot forget the woman who shared her story in the meeting. It was a very heavy harassment story. She was raped two times;; one time in Germany and one time in Turkey. The feminist women in the meeting began to question her. They asked, “Did you scream?” “When did it happen?” “Where did it happen?” “What were you wearing?” This line of questioning bothered me a lot because the woman was questioned and judged as if she was a convict.

Nehir also acknowledged that expressions of disapproval happened in the early years of

the women’s movements when they had just begun to discuss the patriarchal discourse

on sexuality and the body. Esin, who is an academic, also stated that such discussions

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about the female body and morality was one of the reasons why she left the online feminist

discussion groups Birbirimize Sahip Çıkıyoruz:

One of the women in the group made this statement and said if you do not want them to look at you, you should not reveal your cleavage. Of course, others challenged her and said “I wear whatever I want”. If I want to feel desirable, I will dress accordingly, who cares […] Who is to say I should not dress in one way or another!

While Esin was explaining her disappointment in the feminist discussion group

Birbirimize Sahip Çıkıyoruz, younger participants, like Demet and Deniz pointed to a

different tension in the women’s movements, one based on a generational gap. Women

coming from the Kemalist tradition as well as women from the 1970s leftist movement

continue to dominate the women’s movements in Turkey. These women are now in their

late 50s and early 60s and are not open to questioning the discourse of sexuality and the

dress codes imposed on women. In fact, younger participants argue that the older

generation disregards the voice of young women who challenges hegemonic sexuality.

Ruya, a woman in her twenties, involved in both feminist and LGBTTQ movements,

pointed out the continuing dominance of the Kemalist tradition in the movements and said:

The Kemalist women identified womanhood for us, but we should fight against it. For instance, do not tell me that I am fat or I have body hair or how to dress. Do not control my body. However, they do not confront the regulation of their bodies. They do not take this issue as a political matter and ignore that this is body politics.

The young participants’ narratives suggest that the older generation of women conform to

the Kemalist sexual morality, which tells women what to wear or what not to wear in public.

While the younger ones perceive the women from the older generation as passive subjects

without agency, they portray their own agency through their resistance against the

Kemalist discourse and the feminist discourse of past generations. For instance, Yagmur

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argued that even though some feminists who embrace Kemalist ideology expect her to

dress “properly” according to the modern standards in feminist meetings, she would

continue to resist their power on her body and continue to wear jeans and t-­shirts to

meetings.

The young participants not only criticized the enduring Kemalist tradition, but also

the discourse of leftist women, who participated in students’ movements in the late 1960s

and 1970s. As discussed in previous chapters, the women of the 1960s and 1970s leftist

movements mainly criticized the link between capitalism and patriarchy. They chose to

hide their sexualities by wearing shabby clothing and refusing to put on make-­up as a

strategy to protest the objectification of the female body in the capitalist system (Cinar

2005). Deniz expressed her unhappiness with this “old-­fashioned” feminist perspective,

which constitutes the female body as ‘asexual’:

Because these women come from the leftist movements, they are still under the influence of the 1970s leftist discourse, and you can see that from their dress styles. They dress up in a masculine way as if they already gave up on their bodies […] They do not relate to their bodies, even if they are talking about bodies, it is not their bodies but other women’s bodies. They do not question the body politics through their bodies. However, young feminists are women who are at peace with their sexualities and bodies. We need to break this hierarchy to create a space for freedom, to talk about our bodies and sexualities. For instance, yesterday there was a demonstration, and I wanted to dress up. Because I am sick of this ‘mustached feminist’ image! I want to dress up in a sexual feminine way to deconstruct this image.

Deniz’s narrative indicates that women must begin to question the sexuality discourse,

and to exist in public spaces as sexual beings, rather than as ‘asexual’ beings that conceal

their bodies through shabby, loose, masculine-­style dress. Demet, who is a young

academic and feminist, complained about reactions she receives for dying her hair blonde

and showing a preference for dressing up and wearing make-­up:

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In feminist circles, you might get reactions like “hmmm you are wearing high heels today” or in a very sarcastic way they would say “you are beautiful today” in an insinuating way. I would like to dress up in a way I like when I am going into the feminist circles but usually people would just wear a t-­shirt and jeans with sneakers, so I would be the one who likes to wear make-­up and look good. For instance, I dye my hair blonde, and I like it. But, I feel that I am harassed sometimes. It is not like dying your hair dark red;; being blonde still carries a stereotype and is made ridicule of. Sometimes I get reactions like “are you trying to be beautiful and ostentatious?” and “are you trying to get attention?”. But when I dyed my hair to bright red, I did not get any reaction.

Demet also added that the old generation feminist discourse ignores the

importance of fashion and how it can serve as a tool for liberation. For instance, when

miniskirts or tights are in fashion, and more people wear them, different clothing items

together with different bodily appearances are normalized in the public space. In addition

to being a liberating force, fashion is seen as capable of challenging the kind of sexual

discourse that aims to hide the female body and sexuality. It needs to be noted that Deniz

and Demet’s narratives are also ignoring the agency of feminist women involved in the

1970s leftist movements. Those women strongly criticized the objectification of female

sexual bodies in the consumerist discourse. Therefore, their shabby clothes as well as

their questioning of the beauty image and fashion can easily be seen as a modality of

agency challenging the consumerist culture that is highly sexualizing and objectifying the

female body for male desire.

Demet also claimed that due to the age and seniority hierarchy that exists in the

movement, the voice of young feminists resisting the sexual morality discourse is not being

heard. Talking about the March 8th celebrations in Istanbul, Defne, like Deniz and Demet,

also complained about the hierarchical structure of these movements. She said that the

younger generation of women organized night protests to claim back the streets but that

the older generation found these events unnecessary and redundant. Defne claims that

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the older generation does not see the issue of sexuality as political, and, as a result there

is little discussion about the way sexual morality limits the mobility of women.

Even though young women might feel that their voices are being ignored, the older

participants who initiated the first organized women’s movements in the late 1980s and

1990s expressed their hope in younger generations. For instance, Nehir, an older

generation feminist, stated that during the first Purple Needle campaign, when some

women began to blame the rape victim, she could not stand up and challenge them

because she felt they were unable to question the status quo on sexuality. However, she

believes that the younger women in the movements today are more open-­minded, more

willing to question sexuality and claim their sexual freedom, and that this new fresh blood

in the movements is necessary to break the taboo and to question patriarchal sexuality.

Conclusion

Lila Abu-­Lughod (2001) reminds scholars working on women’s issues in the Middle

East that they have a duty to challenge the negative depiction of Middle Eastern women

in the orientalist perspective through unveiling the complexity of their subjectivities.

Scholars, such as Lila Abu-­Lughod (2001), Leila Ahmed (2011) and Saba Mahmood

(2005) have challenged the stereotype of Middle Eastern and Muslim women as the

passive victims of patriarchy and revealed instead their various modalities of agencies.

For instance, Najmabadi (1993) looks at the Iranian modernity discourse and women’s

entry into the public spaces in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In her analysis, she

challenges the equation of modernity with women’s liberation by arguing that even though

women’s bodies were unveiled during the modernization process of Iran, their bodies and

languages were disciplined and ‘desexed’. Mahmood (2005) also questioned the

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modernist conceptualization of agency through her analysis of pious women involved in

the mosque movement in Egypt in 1990s in order to challenge the stereotype of

‘passive/oppressed’ Muslim woman, as discussed earlier.

In the context of Turkey, I also strongly believe that the exploration of women’s

movements and the complex subjectivities of women are important to challenge the

orientalist perception of women. There has been a wide range of studies conducted on

women’s movements in Turkey lately (Aldikacti Marshall 2005;; Arat 1994;; Cosar, S. and

Gencoglu Onbasi 2008;; Gole 1997;; Yesilyurt Gunduz 2004;; Tekeli 1986;; 1992;; Yuksel

2006;; Diner and Toktas 2010). These studies challenge the Eurocentric image of the

passive woman and demonstrate women’s resistances against the patriarchal normative

systems. These studies also reveal women’s multiple subjectivities at the intersection of

gender, sexuality, race and religion. However, none of these studies has focused on

women’s agencies in the context of the intersectionality of sexuality and morality.

My participants’ responses to sexual morality as well as their experience in the

women’s movements in Turkey indicate there are several modalities of agencies, including

many that are not necessarily liberating. Even though both religious and secular women

activists share a common goal to challenge the patriarchal regime, their narratives pointed

to a divide among themselves, a sort of “us” and “them” division. I believe this division

prevents women from developing solidarity in their struggles against the patriarchal power

on their bodies, be it Islamist or secularist and/or religious or non-­religious/secular.

The analysis of the interviews reveals that women would like the women’s

movements to be more active in challenging sexual morality in relation to dress norms.

There is some agreement that the debate relating to the ban on headscarves has occupied

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the feminist agenda too long, and that it is now time to move beyond the headscarf and

focus more on the connection between dress norms and sexual morality in a wider context

in order to explore the control imposed on women’s bodies. To do so, interviewees also

noted that the taboo many women share around sexuality need to be broken. One way to

weaken the taboo is to give more space to the voice of young women in the movements,

women who have the potential to counter the patriarchal sexuality discourse.

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Chapter 7. Conclusion

This dissertation analyzed the sexual morality shaped by Kemalist and Islamist

discourses through the reading of dressed female bodies in Turkey. Drawing on secondary

sources on the history of Turkey, as well as 31 interviews with women involved in women’s

movements in Turkey, this study aimed to reveal how sexual morality affects women,

particularly how they relate to their bodies and to what extent they resist or conform to the

dress norms. The main argument of this study is that even though the secularist and

Islamist discourses have been perceived as contradictory, both these discourses embody

a sexual morality that identifies female sexuality as a threat to the public order. I also

claimed that while sexual morality has been utilized to control women’s bodies though

dress norms, it has also structured public spaces in a way that does not welcome or accept

the presence of sexual female bodies.

During the nation-­building process of the Turkish Republic, the modernizing elite

aimed at detaching and differentiating the new nation from the Ottomans through

accentuating the ‘civilized’, ‘modern’ and secular face of the nation. The Kemalist

modernity project carried out various reforms to fashion its ‘modern’ secular subjects, and

women were at the center of this project as the symbol of the break from the religious

‘backward’ Ottoman State. The gender reforms implemented during the early years of the

Republic avowed to save women from the oppressive Islamist regime and to make them

equal participants of the public space. Indeed, the Kemalist discourse claimed to rescue

women from the Islamist regime by opening the public space to them.

Gole argues that with the elimination of Islamic practices of segregation and veiling

and women’s increased participation in the public space during the Kemalist modernity

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project, the Islamist conceptualization of women’s bodies as mahrem (private or belonging

behind the walls of the private sphere) began to deconstruct. In other words, the idea that

women’s bodies are to be “forbidden to a foreigner’s gaze,” (mahrem), and thus in need

of seclusion, began to wane (Gole, 1996, p. 7). Consequently, the boundary the Islamic

order created between mahrem (private) and namahrem (public) began to disintegrate

with the Kemalist modernity project. Gole claims, however, that with the emergence of

Islamist movements in 1990s and the increased presence of ‘modern’ educated veiled

women in public spaces, Turkey is now confronted with a “modern mahrem” (Gole 1996).

I agree with Gole’s claim about a significant transformation that has appeared in

the public sphere since the 1990s in Turkey. However, I have argued in this dissertation

that the Islamist sexual morality (ahlak), which defines a woman’s body as a threat to

public order – hence, in need of hiding from namahrem (public gaze) – has been preserved

in the modernist secular discourse. While the Kemalist secular discourse celebrated the

ideal woman as unveiled, it insisted that she not be allowed to display publicly her

sexuality. Liberated from the veil, the modern Kemalist woman could take her place in the

public sphere as long as she remained mahrem by hiding her sexual body with modern

clothing.

I have demonstrated that that even though secularist and Islamist discourses are

conceived as dualistic, the sexual morality norms they impose on the bodies of women

come from the same patriarchal roots that define their bodies as tempting and dangerous.

Through the analysis of the data I collected during my field research, my findings suggest

that both discourses have serious concerns with female sexuality. Both utilize dress as a

technology of the body to conceal the female sexual body and regulate the visibility of

women in public spaces. On the one hand, the headscarf together with the long loose

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dresses and/or pardesü (long coat) hide the body and its contours, thus ensuring the ahlak

(morality) of women is protected from the gaze of namahrem (strangers). On the other

hand, hanım hanımcık (ladylike) dress style marks the secular female body as “moral and

respectable” through the concealing of its sexuality from the judgmental public gaze. As

such, both the hanım hanımcık dress style and the headscarf have been setting the tone

for what is ‘acceptable and respectable’ for female bodies.

By employing various technologies of discipline, the state and the people in

Turkey use sexual morality to constrain the freedom and mobility of women in public

spaces. Even though women participate in public spaces, this study suggests that their

existence in public spaces remains disputed as a result of sexual morality, which only

opens spaces to ahlaklı (moral) bodies (the bodies that conceal their sexualities). The

examination of the experiences of women in mahalles (neighbourhoods), rural and urban

spaces, and public transportation in Turkey indicated that women’s bodies are subjected

to a public gaze that draws a clear boundary between ahlaklı (moral) and ahlaksız

(immoral) women. In case of failure to conform to the dress norms, women become targets

of the public gaze, which disciplines and punishes them. While the punishment can be a

disapproving gaze that marks the body as ahlaksız, it can also be in the form of explicit

sexual violence used to discipline the woman who, by revealing her sexuality, has made

herself ‘loose’ and ‘available’. By failing to confirm the sexual moral order through their

modest modern or religious attire, Turkish women are labeled ‘loose’, ‘available’, ‘immoral’

and ‘sexually promiscuous’ by the public gaze, a gaze that legitimizes also men’s sexual

advances. Women discipline themselves and follow the dress norms of public spaces in

order to avoid the gaze, social threats, and, ultimately, sexual harassment and violence.

While the identification of women as ahlaklı (moral) or ahlaksız (immoral) through dress

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encourages them to internalize moral values and then discipline their bodies, it also

justifies sexual harassment of the ahlaksız women by labeling this particular type of

dressing style as consent for sexual advances. Needless to say, women are discouraged

to participate in public spaces, particularly at night. In other words, through sexual violence

as a technology of discipline, the public gaze of sexual morality constitutes the streets at

night as male spaces. Women are far from being welcome in the streets at night.

Despite the disciplinary gaze of sexual morality, women are not passive, ‘docile’

subjects when they move in public spaces. My research demonstrated that women

develop strategies to manage and subvert the disciplinary gaze, such as taking shawls or

jackets to cover their décolleté or standing up rather than sitting down on the bus when

wearing miniskirts. Even though these strategies are not sufficient to reconstruct or

reverse the dominant sexual morality discourse limiting the mobility of women in public

spaces, they reflect different modalities of agencies that women use to observe sexual

norms but also create more freedom for themselves in public spaces.

While women’s bodies are subjected to a disciplinary public gaze of sexual

morality, state surveillance mechanisms also target women and impose sexual moral

norms on their bodies through dress. The by-­law regulating the Garments of Public

Personnel, Kamu Kurum ve Kuruluşlarında Çalışan Personelin Kılık ve Kıyafetine Dair

Yönetmelik, released in 1982, has been utilized as one of the technologies of the body to

fashion ‘acceptable’ and ‘respectable’ gendered moral bodies. Even in the cases where

the official dress code is not applied, women follow the code in order to gain respectability

and recognition in the male-­dominated workplace. Women ‘dress like a lady and act like

a man’ in order to validate and defend their presence in the workplace as equals of men.

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Hence, they use dress as a strategy to manage the norms of the male-­dominated

workplace.

The power of state surveillance was especially visible on moral Muslim bodies on

university campuses particularly during the years of the ban on the headscarf (1985-­2010).

While the ban on the headscarf in public universities reflected the attempt of the state to

resist the rise of Islamist movements by transforming ‘unfit’ bodies into ‘acceptable’

secular bodies, the resistance coming from veiled Muslim bodies reflected their opposition

to have their bodies controlled by the state. However, with the shift from a secularist to an

Islamist government, the headscarf ban at the universities was abolished in 2008 and the

headscarf ban for public and civil servants at the workplace was lifted in 2011 by the AKP

government. The narratives of the subjects of this study suggested that with the rise to

power of the AKP government, the meaning of an ahlaklı (moral) woman has become

increasing conservative and, unfortunately, responsible for an increase in cases of

violence against women.

The analysis of the narratives of the participants suggests that there is an

increasing concern about the shift in attire associated with the definition of ahlaklı woman:

a shift from the hanım hanımcık (ladylike) dress style to the tesettür (new Islamist dress

code). Their narratives convey that while secular women are increasingly defined as

iffetsiz/ahlaksız (unchaste/immoral), headscarved women have begun to be defined as

iffetli/ahlaklı (chaste/moral). Therefore, women who deviate from Islamist sexual morality

– which defines female sexuality as a threat to public morality due to its power to seduce

men – are not only marked as ‘immoral’, but, unfortunately, become targets of harassment.

The evidence provided by the participants for the shifting definition of ahlaklı (moral)

women was not limited to their experiences in Turkish society before and after the rise of

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the Islamist discourse. The increasing amount of sexual violence against women, the

increasing recourse to the Penal Law articles on “impudent/indecent (hayasız) manners”

and “unjust provocations”, as well as the AKP’s gender discourse, which associates

women with motherhood and the private sphere were presented as evidence of the

increasing conservatism of sexual morality in Turkey.

One of the goals of this study was to reveal the complexity of the participants’

subjectivities in spite of the disciplinary sexual morality discourse;; hence, the analysis

unveiled different modalities of agencies, including non-­liberating ones. Mahmood’s

conceptualization of agency as “capacity for action” enabled me to explore both religious

and secular women activists’ agencies without limiting their agency to resistance. For

instance, even though the headscarf is still perceived as a sign of submission, the

narratives of the religious Muslim women activists suggest that by following the

requirements of Islam and its dress code, they actively submit to a set of norms they

believe in. When these norms were disrespected by the secular state, these women

fought for their right to determine their public appearance. Their subjectivities and actions

reveal the complexity of normative systems and how “acts of submission to one set of

norms may entail resistance to another set” (Shively, 2014, p. 462). Thus, while their

headscarf is self-­understood as an active form of submission to Islam, it is also an act of

resistance to the secularist state discourse, and, by the same token, an affirmation of a

right to self-­determination.

Mahmood’s conceptualization of agency does not attenuate the importance of

resistance;; rather it allows us to deconstruct the Eurocentric image of women as passive

subjects of the patriarchal regime. The participants’ responses to the sexual morality as

well as their experiences in women’s movements in Turkey show that women are not just

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the passive objects of patriarchal sexual discourses;; rather, they challenge the sexual

morality that shapes their bodily experiences and monitors and limits their mobility in public

spaces. However, this study also suggested that by giving more space to the voices of

young women in women’s movements, Turkish women could develop a a stronger

solidarity to challenge patriarchal sexual morality.

The Significance and Contribution of the Study

Fashion studies explore the role of dress and its cultural inscriptions over sexual

bodies and reveal how the body is controlled through dress (Entwistle 1996, 2000;;

Entwistle and Wilson, 2001;; Andrewes 2005). Even though these studies discuss how

bodies are made ‘acceptable’ and ‘proper’ through dress, they often lack a sociological

lens that explores the role morality discourses play in imposing power on female bodies

through dress. The study of dress norms in relation to sexual morality is a widely neglected

area in feminist and gender studies. In this context, I believe this study makes a

contribution to the theories of fashion studies by revealing how dress has been utilized in

the materialization of a Turkish sexual moral female body.

While studies on dress and sexuality have also been conducted in Middle Eastern

societies, they focus on the relationship between the veil and Islamic sexuality, and the

role of the veil in the construction of sexuality in Islamic texts and socio-­political discourses

(e.g. orientalist and colonial discourses) (Mernissi 1995;; Afshar 1998;; El Gundi, 1999).

Other studies examine the agencies of veiled women in Muslim societies (Ahmed 1992,

2011;; Abu-­Lughod 1990;; Mahmood 2005;; Najmabadi 1993). None of these studies pay

attention to the way sexual morality utilizes dress as a form of disciplinary technology to

regulate and control female bodies, as well as shape the bodily experiences of women.

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The literature on Turkish society and dress is mainly limited to the discussion on

the headscarf and secularism. Some examined the construction of the secular unveiled

modern citizen in the modernization process of the early Republic (Arat 1997, 1998;;

Kandiyoti 1987, 1997;; White 2003);; others focused on the ban of the headscarf and the

image of the ‘new’ Islamist urban educated woman that emerged in the 1990s and the

challenge it posed against secularism (Gole 1996, 2000;; Ozdalga 1998;; Secor 2002);; still,

others explore the tesettür fashion and the headscarf as the commodification of an Islamic

symbol (Navaro-­Yashin, 2002;; Gokariksel and Secor 2010;; Gokariksel 2012). While all

these studies have enabled a discussion on how the dress code of the headscarf regulates

and shapes women’s bodily experiences, this limited focus on the headscarf left out

numerous dress norms that apply to women’s appearances and that produce control

mechanisms over women’s bodies. Through a reading of dressed female bodies in

Turkey, this research demonstrated how both the state and the public gaze of sexual

morality regulate and shape the bodily experiences of both secular and religious women

and how they produce different modalities of agencies.

In terms of gender and sexual morality, studies conducted on Turkey are limited to

the issues of virginity and crimes of honour, which include sexual violence. These studies

unveiled the traditional notions of female sexuality and how moral claims are made

through women’s bodies in the name of protecting the honour of the family or the nation.

However, these studies have failed to see how dress norms are appropriated to maintain

the patriarchal sexual moral order, which constrains the mobility and freedom of women

in public spaces in Turkey. This study reveals how sexual morality structures public space

around patriarchal norms, norms that do not welcome or accept the presence of sexual

female bodies. It also sheds light on the link between dress, morality and sexual violence,

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by revealing how sexual violence acts as a technology of discipline to reinforce a dress

code that hides female sexuality.

Limitations and Future Directions

In this study, I chose to interview women involved in women’s movements in

Istanbul and Ankara in order to reveal the different modalities of agencies of women

activists already engaged in bringing about change for women. Since women’s

movements in Turkey are mostly composed of urbanized, educated women from middle

or upper-­class environments, the participant’s socioeconomic status did not vary

significantly in this study. Women who do not participate in women’s movements and

women who come from various class backgrounds would not only diversify the voices and

modalities of agencies I presented, but would also reveal the role socio-­economic status

play in shaping the morality discourse and women’s bodily experiences.

Moreover, the fieldwork made it clear that the inclusion of men’s voices would

make a significant contribution to the findings of a study on sexual morality. The

participants of this study mainly pointed out how their dressed bodies have been perceived

and labeled by the male gaze. Thus, including men’s voices in the study would help

understand how men use the gaze of the sexual moral order to mark women’s bodies as

moral.

Even though the participants came from a variety of cities, they were all living in

Ankara and Istanbul during the time of this field research. Due to the limited time I had for

my field research, I was unable to visit other cities and/or rural towns in Turkey to conduct

interviews with more women activists. To the degree that my participants experienced

186

public spaces in rural regions, my study barely touched upon the way rural space enforces

different dress norms of sexual morality. A study that includes the narratives of rural

women would likely reveal more nuanced differences in sexual morality than I have not

been able to address.

Dress is not only appropriated as a disciplinary tool in sexual morality discourses

in Turkey. Studies have revealed that women are more likely than men to be condemned

morally for their dress choices on the grounds of being immodest or promiscuous, and this

condemnation is used to justify sexual assault cases (Entwistle, 1997;; Wolf 1991;; Moor

2010). While studies have shed light on the varying definitions of ‘provocative’ dress in

different cultures and how these definitions are appropriated into law to reinforce sexism

by the justice system, studies on Turkey have overlooked the significant relationship

between patriarchal sexual moralities and sexual violence, and how it shapes the daily

lives of women. It is my hope that future feminist studies on sexual morality will reveal how

dress is utilized differently in various cultures to control women’s bodies and how women

find creative means to resist this control.

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Appendix A. Research Participants

Every woman I interviewed with – in the scope of this research – was involved in

women's movements either as members of feminist and/or women's non-­governmental

organizations (NGOs) or they actively participate in the campaigns, discussion groups,

meetings, workshops on women's issues/gender equality, organized by the feminist

groups or women's rights activists. All interviewees were members of one or multiple of e-­

mail groups on women's issues. It also needs to be noted that even though labeling all of

the women participated in this research as feminist would be incorrect, identifying them

as women’s rights activists would not be a mistake since they were all involved in the

women’s movement in one way or another.

Thirty-­one interviews were conducted with women involved in women’s

movements in Istanbul (15 participants) and Ankara (16 participants) in 2010.

To sustain anonymity, all the names used in this research are pseudonyms.

Education: Except one of the participants (she had a high school degree), they all

had at least a bachelor degree.

Occupation: One of the participants had never worked after completing her

university degree. Rest of the participants were either graduate students, retired or

working professionals.

Age: 7 participants were in their 20s;; 11 participants were in their 30s;; 9

participants were in their 40s;; 4 participants were in their 50s.

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E-­mail Groups

All interviewees were members of one or multiple of e-­mail groups on women's

issues. The online groups are Birbirimize Sahip Çıkıyoruz (We Look Out for Each Other),

Henüz Özgür Olmadık (We Are Not Yet Free), Kadın Kurultayı (Women's Convention),

Feministbiz (We are Feminists), and Feministler Uyumuyor (Feminists are not Sleeping).

These email groups are not only important cyber platforms to generate discussions on

gender and sexual issues, but also crucial cyber platforms to organize and announce the

protests nation-­wide.

Birbirimize Sahip Çıkıyoruz (We Look Out for Each Other), which is composed of

women academics and activists from various religious, ethnic and political orientations.

This initiative tried to bring the discussion into a new platform that is open to the diversity

and differences, claiming that “they were against the stereotypes that discriminate against

women as ‘Islamist robots’ and immoral ‘sexual objects’ and announced that ‘they reject

a public sphere where every woman cannot walk arm in arm’” (Saktanber and

Corbacioglu, 2008: 516). This initiative does not aim only bringing religious Muslim women

and secular women together, but rather create solidarity among women from different

political, religious and sexual orientations to stand against any kind of discrimination

against women. Even though as participants noted this feminist initiative’s effectiveness

has diminished since 2012, it has been a very good example of solidarity between

women’s groups and religious Muslim women.

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Henüz Özgür Olmadık (We Are Not Yet Free) is mainly composed of women

from various political orientations who are against the ban on the headscarf. It is an

email group started by Genç Siviller (Young Civilians). Three young women of Genç

Siviller, each of who wears a headscarf and suffered from the ban during her university

education, prepared a manifestation, which criticizes the YÖK (Higher Education

Council), the ban on the headscarf, militarism, marginalization of Kurdish population and

minorities, and the current constitution (which was prepared during military coup that

limits rights and freedom of speech). Hundreds of people, including academics and

activists signed this document.

Kadın Kurultayı (Women's Convention) is an e-­mail group founded in 2000 and the

goal of the group is to gather women who want to struggle against violence against

women. This group brings over 300 women’s groups and this email group played a salient

role when women’s organizations pressured the government to make amendments to the

Turkish Penal Code in 2004 (Karakaya Polat and Cagli, 2014). FeministizBiz is a group

founded by feminist women from different socio-­political groups to struggle against

discrimination and violence in 2009. Feministler Uyumuyor was a short-­lived groups

founded in 2008, particularly to understand the difference among women and to

understand each other as women. It was initially a small group bringing religious, secular

and secular women to discuss women’s issues, such as increasing conservatism,

women’s labour, violence against women, women’s freedom.

Non-­Governmental Organizations (NGOs)

The NGOs that the interviewees involved in are Kadın Dayanışma Vakfı (Women's

Solidarity Foundation, Ankara), Sosyalist Feminist Kolektif (Socialist Feminist Collective,

Ankara and Istanbul), Amargi Kadin Akademisi (Amargi Women's Cooperative, Istanbul),

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Kadın Adayları Destekleme ve Eğitme Derneği -­ KADER (Association for Education and

Supporting Women Candidates, Ankara), Ankara Kadın Platformu (Ankara Women's

Platform, Ankara), Uçan Süpürge (Flying Broom, Ankara), Başkent Kadın Platformu

(Capital Women's Platform, Ankara), Ayrımcılığa Karşı Kadın Hakları Derneği – AKDER

(Women's Rights Organization Against Discrimination, Istanbul), Türk Kadınlar Birliği

(Turkish Women's Union, Ankara) and Kadının İnsan Hakları – Yeni Çözümler Derneği

(Women for Women's Human Rights – New Ways, Istanbul).

Some of the participants were also founders and/or writers in the feminist journals;;

Pazartesi (Istanbul), Kazate (Istanbul), and Amargi (Istanbul) which are the nation-­wide

journals where women share their ideas and campaigns.

Türk Kadınlar Birliği (The Association of Turkish Women) claims to be the heir of

the first women’s organization founded in 1924 “Türk Kadınlar Birliği”. In their website,

they state that the organization was closed in 1934 and then re-­opened in 1949 and since

then they have been working to protect and improve women’s rights. This organization is

well known as being Kemalist, which follows the modernist Kemalist perspective strictly.

Kadın Adayları Destekleme ve Eğitme Derneği – KA-­DER (Association for Support and

Train Woman Candidates) was founded in 1997 to increase women’s participation in

politics, and they are still supporting women both in local and national elections and aims

at reaching equal representation in every aspect of political life.

Kadın Dayanışma Vakfı (Women's Solidarity Foundation, Ankara), Ankara Kadın

Platformu (Ankara Women's Platform, Ankara), Amargi Kadın Akademisi (Amargi

Women's Cooperative), Sosyalist Feminist Kolektif (Socialist Feminist Collective, Ankara

and Istanbul), Uçan Süpürge (Flying Broom, Ankara), and Kadının İnsan Hakları – Yeni

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Çözümler Derneği (Women for Women's Human Rights – New Ways, Istanbul) are

women’s non-­governmental organizations who have been actively involved in the

women’s movements in the last two decades and they have been organizing events and

campaigns against gender inequality and discrimination and struggling for women’s rights

and equality. The NGOs are very diverse in terms of their campaigns and members. Their

members come from different ethnic, class, and religious backgrounds and their

campaigns vary from local to international projects. Particularly, these are the

organizations, which identify themselves as feminist organizations, which are seeking to

ensure gender equality in social, economic and political lives of women.

Başkent Kadın Platformu (Capital Women's Platform, Ankara), and Ayrımcılığa

Karşı Kadın Hakları Derneği – AKDER (Women's Rights Organization Against

Discrimination, Istanbul) are the organizations founded by women religious Muslim women

in the late 1990s. AKDER was founded after in 1999 to struggles against the ban on the

headscarf on university campuses. Although the starting point to establish AKDER was

the ban on the headscarf, the explanation of their activities in their journals shows that

they are also dealing with other issues, ranging from legal rights of women to the education

of women (Ozcetin, 2009). Like AKDER, Başkent Kadın Platformu was also struggling

against the ban on the headscarf, but their agenda has been wider than the issue of

headscarf. In their journal, the aims of the organization are stated as follows: “Determining

women’s problems and producing alternative perspectives, theoretical and practical

solutions to improve women's intellectual, psychological, social and economic situation;;

providing dialogue, communication and solidarity between women, and conducting

activities by gathering different women around common benefits.” (Quoted in Ozcetin

2009, p. 113).