(In)Visible Identity: Unfolding the narratives of women who struggle to take off the headscarf in Turkey

The Department of International Relations cordially invites you to Sümeyye Koca's talk titled "(In)Visible Identity: Unfolding the narratives of women who struggle to take off the headscarf in Turkey" The event will take place on the 21st of October between 14:30-16:00. 

The event will be Çekmeköy Campus’ Scola Building, Room 460. 

The event will be in English.

Abstract

Since the headscarf ban in universities and public institutions was lifted in 2013, the headscarf has been neither a controversial political question nor a contested social issue in Turkey. This research, however, scrutinizes the changing dynamics of the headscarf question based on the women’s struggle to take off the headscarf against their pious families’ wishes and the re-politicization of Islam in public life. The framework of the research is limited to the current political context of Turkey in which the ruling party (the Justice and Development Party) re-politicized Islam in an authoritarian way to regulate both the private and the public spheres and to redefine ideal social imagery in a religious-conservative way. Drawing on qualitative research data consisting of semi-structured in-depth interviews with eight women who are previously-veiled, urban, and university-educated, the research focuses on women’s experiences of the practice of un-veiling to analyze personal and social intricacies behind women’s decisions to take off the headscarf. The research mainly seeks to answer the following questions: Why do young, veiled women, who are raised in pious families and Islamist community circles, decide to take off their headscarves? How do symbolic meanings of the headscarf create complicated social expectations for veiled women? How do the current social and political conditions, if any, affect the women’s decisions to un-veil? The research concludes that i) the rejection of the headscarf, or a “stigma symbol” (Goffman 1963; Göle 2003), manifests that the headscarf become a social overburden of a group identity for these women, and they no longer want to represent the most visible part of pious identity; ii) un-veiling can be framed as a claim of individuality against a social expectation of consistency between a woman’s visible identity and her behaviours in the public life, and iii) as a claim of invisibility by dissociating themselves from the group identity in the politicized Islamic context of Turkey.

Sümeyye Koca

Sümeyye Koca received her undergraduate degree from Istanbul Şehir University, Department of Political Science and International Relations and Sociology in 2017. She completed the Political Science master's program at Sabancı University in 2020, with her thesis "The Changing Dynamics of the Headscarf Question in Turkey: The Women's Struggle to Take Off the Headscarf". She is currently a Ph.D. student of Political Science and International Relations at Boğazici University. Her academic interests focus on gender studies, political sociology, Turkish politics, secularism and Islam in the Middle East.