Kübra Zeynep Sariaslan. Empowering Housewives in Southeast Turkey. Gender, State and Development. I.B. Tauris, London [etc.] 2023. xviii, 210 pp. £85.00. (Paper: £28.99; Open Access.)
Year: 2024
Type: book-review
Abstract: Empowering Housewives in Southeast Turkey by Kübra Zeynep Sarıaslan is a comprehensive ethnographic study that explores the workings of women's empowerment projects in the politically contested geographical area known as the "southeast" of Turkey.It is based on the Ph.D. research she conducted between 2013 and 2014 in a province named Tigris.Sarıaslan begins by describing the background to her interest in the issues surrounding the lives of women in the region vis-à-vis the historical development of the political response, including the impact of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its policies on women's lives.As the author demonstrates, the political solution to women's problems in the region, primarily the violence against women (including the killing of women), has been defined across a culture-specific framework.More specifically, an underlying "gendered racism" (p.xiv) has characterized gender-mainstreaming policies in the region.The concept of development dominates the book.It opens with the anthropology of development, starting with the initiation of the Southeast Anatolia Project (GAP) as an economic as well as human development project in 1989 as a result of cooperation between Turkish government and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).It moves on to address the workings of state-sponsored regional development initiatives in cooperation with the United Nations Development Fund.As the author notes, her research was itself funded by the Swedish Development Agency.Additionally, she provides a conceptual clarification of empowerment that is defined in terms of a capacity for critical understanding of power relations in society and an ability to make one's own decision to contest imposed structural inequalities.The introduction further discusses women as the subject of the development projects by crosscutting the impacts of feminist premises of gender-mainstreaming programmes in general with the historical trajectories of modernization politics in Turkey.Later, the author problematizes women's empowerment against the backdrop of the changing social political atmosphere in southeast Turkey in a period perceived as "the time of hope" as a result of the changing discourse towards the region and the people by the AKP government.This change fostered expectations of a peaceful solution to the armed conflict between the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and the Turkish army that had waged for thirty years since 1984 and to the claims of a distinct identity by the Kurdish population.Sarıaslan goes on to define the issue as the ethnography of women's praxis, referring not only to the impact of empowerment projects on women but also exploring how these women navigate power structures as well as the ambiguities of
Author: Pınar Melis Yelsalı Parmaksız
Institution: Bahçeşehir University
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4405010765