Abstract
With its structural adjustments, development projects, and free-market economies, neoliberalism has had detrimental consequences for the so-called third world. The economic violence that the western capitalist class inflicts on third-world economies is paralleled by the increasing violence against women observed within such countries. In this paper, I explore how neoliberalization intensifies violence against women through patrilocal families where the constant devaluation of women’s labor meets the construction of the moral homo economicus. Turning to a non-western moral context, I focus on increasing violence against women in Islamist neoliberalism and take Turkey — a country that has undergone neoliberalization and reported an escalation in gendered violence — as my observation site. Recent incidents of police violence as the state response to the growing public presence of gender-nonconforming communities in Turkey and the grassroots reports of increasing femicide rates in the country indicate that neoliberalization goes hand-in-hand with the burgeoning gendered violence and culminates in masculinist restoration, a phenomenon that Deniz Kandiyoti identifies as a response to the crises of patriarchy. Masculinist restoration serves as not only a tool that attempts to enable (cishet) men to claim authority over women but also a bridge between neoliberalism and patriarchy that utilizes Islamist morals for capitalist ends. Drawing on Verónica Gago’s feminist economics of extraction, I explore the relationship between the devaluation of women’s labor and the disposability of dissident women’s bodies in what Sayak Valencia calls gore capitalism, a specific kind of neoliberalism where capitalism meets an episteme of violence. I argue that women who refuse to be constrained in patrilocal families provoke masculinist restoration reinforced by the violent conditions of gore capitalism. As neoliberalism in Turkey continues to devalue women’s labor, the bodies of women, translated into neoliberal market economics, become less valuable, too.
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