Empowering Housewives in Southeast Turkey

This open access book draws on ethnographic research conducted in empowerment programmes for marginalized women, in the Southeast Anatolia region, to understand how these projects operate and why they have failed. Based on interviews and observations, the book argues that everyday barriers in Turkeys gendered regime still impede womens potential, and that the programmes own feminist agendas are undermined through their capitalist ethos of personal growth and culturalist reasoning. Particularly revealing is the states large-scale regional development project, the Southeast Anatolia Project, which is the priortiy and ultimately facilitates womens structural exclusion. Situating the ongoing empowerment programmes within the larger social engineering project of the Republic of Turkey which is long associated with emancipating women through top-down measures this book highlights the repetition of failure in womens liberation in the history of the country. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.