Abstract
2000’s Turkey has been undergoing a new turn in biopolitics in the interests of a neoconservative state and neoliberal global capitalism. Under the rule of AKP, neoconservative family values have been increasingly mobilized to further neoliberal agendas. Government policies and discourses target, regulate, and control citizens, especially women, in their reproductive capacities. From encouragement of marriage to the marginalization of non-marital, non-reproductive sexualities, from registration and intrusive follow-up of pregnancies to anti-abortion rhetoric, from calls for at least three children to new labor regulations seeking to channel working mothers to part-time employment and even full-time caretaking, a new family politics have been activated to intensify the extraction of women’s reproductive labors. In this presentation, I analyze this shift as it is articulated and contested in political discourse.
The government has been aggressively marketing its neoconservative family values-brand Turkey in an effort to legitimize the state’s new biopolitical agenda and the sexual and reproductive behaviors thus prescribed. Government representatives have declared that the purpose of their pro-natalist shift is to secure abundant cheap labor, explicitly expressing the interlocking of neoliberal and neoconservative imperatives. If the argument for higher birth rates and cheaper workers resonated well with local and global capitalist interests, feminist activists protested it vocally, declaring that women are not “incubation machines” and will not bear “cheap laborers for the capital” and that they will “have sex and not get married” and “get pregnant and not give birth.” Furthermore, for the millennial citizens of Turkey in whom neoliberal ethics of financial responsibility and self-sufficiency were successfully inculcated, serving a future of national prosperity could hardly justify having children they could not afford. For this reason, Prime Minister Erdogan have been repeatedly, personally testifying that “children are blessings (bereket)” and “come [to this world] with their livelihood (rizik),” implying that god provides for children through blessing their families with increased resources upon the addition of a new member. In other words, the new biopolitical regime is justified not simply on neoconservative grounds that the behaviors prescribed by it are morally good or religiously right, but also on neoliberal grounds that these behaviors attract celestial blessings in the form of material abundance. Thus, I argue, the neoconservative family values-brand Turkey is a biopolitical agenda that reflects not only the intensified appropriation of reproductive labor for neoliberal capitalist accumulation, but also the structural affinity of neoliberal accumulation with the occult .
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