Editors: Coşku Çelik, Deniz Parlak, Ecehan Balta, Melda Yaman, Yasemin Özgün
Social Reproduction A Unified“Feminist” Theory? 
Melda Yaman
Social reproduction feminists associate the oppression of women in contemporary societies with their role in social reproduction processes. By rejecting the patriarchal system and subordinating social reproduction to capitalism, they advocate a unified theory that bases the source of gender inequality on capitalism. The authors of the feminist manifesto -Feminism for the 99 percent- have a similar understanding. I will discuss the social reproduction approach in two major problematic contexts: First, is social reproduction a convenient concept for constructing a total analysis of society and explaining the oppression of women? My answer is positive; I accept that social reproduction is a crucial moment of society. The second problematic is whether or not the oppression of women can be explained only by capital through social reproduction. My answer is negative. Against this, I argue that the analysis of capitalism alone cannot be sufficient to account for the oppression of women in today’s societies and that the patriarchal system needs to be taken into account.
Keywords: Social reproduction, Marxist feminism, socialist feminism, feminism for the 99 percent, dual system theories, unified capitalism.
Women’s Labor and Indebtedness in Turkey: A Focus on Everyday Experiences
Pelin Kılınçarslan
In the last decades, the use of credit cards and consumer loans has become a prominent phenomenon. Debt-based consumption is now such an ordinary practice that many households depend on credit to sustain basic needs. Lower-income groups in particular are forced into borrowing for the necessities of social reproduction, with credit operating as a neoliberal mode of inequality management. Easier availability of financial means,
weak schemes of social protection, commodification of welfare services, and growing socioeconomic inequalities have all played a role in making credit a substitute for services once included in welfare provisions. Household indebtedness is therefore a complex phenomenon which stands at the nexus of the capitalist relations of production and social reproduction intertwined with class and gender inequalities. Given the key role women play in these processes, it is essential to explore the following questions: What kind of impact does indebtedness have on women’s labor within and beyond households? How does this impact unfold at the level of everyday experiences? How do these experiences connect to the changes taking place in broader relations of power, production and social reproduction? This paper aims to explore these questions by drawing on in-depth interviews with women who are residents of indebted households in Istanbul. Turkey provides an important context for studying women’s experiences of debt. In Turkey where household indebtedness is relatively a new phenomenon, household debt has increased by six times since the early 2000s and significantly concentrated among lower income groups. This study shows that indebtedness shapes the ways in which women undertake reproductive work and participate in formal/informal employment, and these practices are mediated by labor market patterns, welfare and employment regimes, and hegemonic constructions of motherhood and “housewife”. This operates both ways. On the one hand, debt burden reinforces gender inequalities in the labor market and the household. On the other, women’s labor plays a key role in the management of debt burden.
Keywords: Household debt, gender, labor, social reproduction.
Tomatoes and Their Families: A Story of Interdependent Relationship
Emine Erdoğan
This study attempts to understand the mutual relationship between production relations and reproduction relations by focusing on tomato production and processing. Drawing on participant observation on tomato lands and in a tomato processing factory between 2013 and 2015, the article emphasises the transformative role of women’s paid and unpaid labour for the integration of Turkish food industry to the global food system. While doing so, it focuses on tomato planting, harvesting and processing respectively and explores how the landowners’ “horizontally joint extended family” structure, seasonal rural workers’ “traditional extended family” structure and factory workers’ “transforming family” structure shape and are shaped by the production relations. The article demonstrates how the concept of patriarchy and labour process theory can countribute on the
building a “feminist” commodity chain analysis and how this is important to emphasise the construction of gender identities on the intersection of production and reproduction relations. The article, therefore, offers the revisions of the concept of capitalist patriarchy.
Keywords: Production and Reproduction Relations, Women’s Labour, “Feminist” Commodity Chain Analysis, Gender Identities, Capitalist Patriarchy.
Gentrification, Crisis of Social Reproduction and Gender: Gentrification Experiences of Low-Income Women Living and Working in Tarlabaşı
Bahar Sakızlıoğlu
Gentrification involves changes in gender relations and production of gender inequalities. Despite the growing literature on gender-gentrification nexus, the literature presents a partial picture. This study focuses on 1) (re)construction of gender and space; 2) gendered and classed transfer of material and emotional labour during gentrification and displacement processes. It investigates the low-income women’s experiences of gentrification and displacement based on 26 semi-structured interviews and participant observations in Tarlabaşı, İstanbul. The study concludes that gentrification makes women’s lives difficult in social and economic terms; that it displaces trans-women from the neighborhood making them vulnerable to homophobic threats; that men’s control over women’s bodies and mobility increases as the streets get unsafe after demolitions. Another important conclusion is that the burden of material and emotional labour to ensure social reproduction in the neighborhood has increased for low-income women.
Keywords: Gender- gentrification nexus, crisis of social reproduction, emotional labour, Istanbul.
Forum
Feminist Case Pursuit: Women’s Solidarity Keeps Alive!
Yasemin Özgün (Praksis), Ayşe Zilan, Betül Çetin, Neriman Ersin,
Perihan Meşeli, Selmin Cansu Demir
Reserve Army of Labour and Its Different Forms in Turkey: Household Labour
Surveys, 2004-2013
Senem Oğuz
This paper focuses on exploring and observing reserve army of labour and its different forms in Turkey, using Household Labour Surveys. In order to explore and observe the stagnant, latent, floating and pauper reserve army forms, the questionnaires which constitute officia labour statistics are reconsidered. The aim of this paper is to contribute conceptualizing and observing reserve army of labour and its different forms and thus exploring the capitalist labour process in Turkey through the officia data. Although comparable annual microdata of the surveys narrows down the scope of this study to 2004-2013 period, it allows us to observe the effects of the 2008 crisis. Some of the main findings in this study are: The reserve army of labour in Turkey tends to grow; the stagnant reserve, which contains informal and atypical work, has the most contribution to this tendency; the stagnant reserve tends to expand while the latent reserve tends to shrink as more women in the latent reserve enter into labour force.
Keywords: Reserve army of labour in Turkey, relative surplus population, labour force surveys, capitalism, labour process.
Sevilay Kaygalak Urban Studies Article Award
Intergenerational Approach to Education in Squatters: Boundaries,
Expectations, Preferences
Leyla Bektaş Ata
In this research, which is based on studies concerning urban, poverty and everyday life, the role of education is analyzed in terms of its impact on the residents of the squatter of Izmir, Limontepe, who has migrated from various parts of Turkey, in the course of envisioning their children’s future. In the research, which is evaluating the meanings and expectations attributed to education by generations, the possibilities of the class mobility of the second generation who was educated through the physical and institutional opportunities of a squatter that is considered to be the periphery of the city, were questioned in terms of upbringing and educational status. The conditions and practices that the second generation dwellers, who envision for the next generation are addressed in terms of the establishment and continuation of the class situation in the space. The research seeks answers to two basic questions: What is the role of education in the everyday life of squatters? What kind of similarities and differences, do the meanings and expectations attributed to education have, between generations? This study is based on the data obtained from the field research conducted by the researcher, with the opportunities provided by the ethnographic method, between the dates of January-September 2017, in
Limontepe, which is the childhood neighborhood of the researcher.
Keywords: Squatter, education, class, poverty, ethnography.
Sevilay Kaygalak Urban Studies Selection Committee Special Award
Street Vending in Tehran in the Neoliberal Age
Mehrdad Emami
In Middle Eastern countries street vending has academically received less attention comparing with the other components of informal economic activities. The academic interest in analyzing street vending has increased after the events called Arab Spring in which, for example in the case of Tunis, a street vendor attempted suicide by selfimmolation after being harassed by municipal officials which set off protests over the country and other North African nations. The condition of street vendors as a major part of the urban poor in Middle Eastern countries has undeniable similarities. For instance, the street vendors in Tehran have always been harassed by municipal officers who not only confiscate their goods but also do not hesitate to use violence against them and
even kill them. In this regard, the privatization of the Tehran Municipality’s Unite of Struggle Against Pavement Occupation as a neoliberal urban policy has played a significant role in increasing violence against street vendors. In this article I aim at investigating the general condition of street vendors in Tehran as a significant part of the urban poor through a socio-political analysis. In doing so, I conducted 10 in-depth interviews with the street vendors in Tehran. Street vending as a job, the relations with storekeepers and municipal officials, the relations among the street vendors, political understanding/participation and the condition of the women street vendors are the main topics which have been drawn according to the interviews conducted. Moreover, I try to portray the Iranian government’s and Tehran Municipality’s struggles against street vending in terms of both legal-operative and socio-cultural dimensions by explaining different examples. In Tehran the application of “Urban Discipline Programs” has been put into practice not only for making a control mechanism over the street vending but also for providing a broader control over every part of social layers considered to be ‘inconvenient
elements’ in the urban life.
Keywords: Tehran, Street Vending, Neoliberalism, Struggle against street vending, Urban Policies.
Book Review
A Women’s Strike: Being a Woman Worker in a Free Zone
Fethiye Beşir-İletmiş
Saygılıgil, F. (2018) Bir Kadın Grevi: Serbest Bölgede Kadın İşçi Olmak, İstanbul: Güldünya Yayınları.
Movie Review
Women of “Rome”
Yasemin Özgün
