The House Unbound – or, Decoupling the “Place” of Women and the Pace of Change
Abstract
In the modern Middle East, proponents of economic development often mobilize the “place” of women as an index of a country or region’s modernization. In contemporary southeastern Turkey, for instance, state-led urbanization is driven and justified by the claim that women in cities are free to participate in public life, whereas women in villages are “confined to the home.” This paper challenges that narrative by querying the figure of confinement to the home. I begin by exploring the under-examined social scientific convention that takes the boundary of the home (inside/outside, private/public, female/male) as a stable axis of comparison across time and space. Then, drawing on my fieldwork in southeastern Turkey, I track how the inside/outside boundary is phenomenally and differentially instantiated in three types of home—village, urban, and para-urban. I show how, during recent decades of urbanization, domestic boundaries have emerged as a point of uncertainty and contention, pointing to the ongoing reorganization of kinship and gender in the context of mass-migration. Ultimately, the paper inverts the developmentalist premise that urbanization entails greater freedom and mobility for women: I find that, as women move from village to urban contexts, they increasingly reside in a domestic “interior,” which is itself increasingly demarcated from an extra-domestic “public” understood to lie outside of the home. It thus urges ethnographic attention to the highly variable ways that gender is instantiated and transformed through material processes of dwelling and house-ing.
Bio
Bridget Purcell is a postdoctoral fellow at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. Her research interests include Islam, ritual place and ritual practice, and the ethical and experiential dimensions of state power. She is currently working on a book manuscript, The City that Hides Itself: Movement and Meaning in Urban Form, based on long-term fieldwork in the Turko-Syrian border region. The book explores the significance of place—the interpreted, inhabited environment—in the formation and re-formation of personal and collective identities in a rapidly changing, ethno-linguistically heterogeneous context. Her principal theoretical approaches include phenomenology, feminist cultural theory, and ecological approaches to urban space; geographical interests include Turkey, Syria, and the greater Levant.
[email protected]
In the modern Middle East, proponents of economic development often mobilize the “place” of women as an index of a country or region’s modernization. In contemporary southeastern Turkey, for instance, state-led urbanization is driven and justified by the claim that women in cities are free to participate in public life, whereas women in villages are “confined to the home.” This paper challenges that narrative by querying the figure of confinement to the home. I begin by exploring the under-examined social scientific convention that takes the boundary of the home (inside/outside, private/public, female/male) as a stable axis of comparison across time and space. Then, drawing on my fieldwork in southeastern Turkey, I track how the inside/outside boundary is phenomenally and differentially instantiated in three types of home—village, urban, and para-urban. I show how, during recent decades of urbanization, domestic boundaries have emerged as a point of uncertainty and contention, pointing to the ongoing reorganization of kinship and gender in the context of mass-migration. Ultimately, the paper inverts the developmentalist premise that urbanization entails greater freedom and mobility for women: I find that, as women move from village to urban contexts, they increasingly reside in a domestic “interior,” which is itself increasingly demarcated from an extra-domestic “public” understood to lie outside of the home. It thus urges ethnographic attention to the highly variable ways that gender is instantiated and transformed through material processes of dwelling and house-ing.
Bio
Bridget Purcell is a postdoctoral fellow at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. Her research interests include Islam, ritual place and ritual practice, and the ethical and experiential dimensions of state power. She is currently working on a book manuscript, The City that Hides Itself: Movement and Meaning in Urban Form, based on long-term fieldwork in the Turko-Syrian border region. The book explores the significance of place—the interpreted, inhabited environment—in the formation and re-formation of personal and collective identities in a rapidly changing, ethno-linguistically heterogeneous context. Her principal theoretical approaches include phenomenology, feminist cultural theory, and ecological approaches to urban space; geographical interests include Turkey, Syria, and the greater Levant.
[email protected]