Abstract
Women's sexual and mental health in Turkey is fraught with difficulties ranging from the entrenched patriarchal formations that restrict women's sexualities to the structural poverty that disempowers women both individually and socially. Twenty years of armed conflict in eastern Turkey has dramatically exacerbated women's "social suffering" especially due to the loss of family and social support networks. Only recently, with the ebbing of the intensity of war, and thanks to international pressures to adapt to global standards of healthcare, access to health services has become a major policy concern. While programs are devoted to this end, less effort is given to understand the structure and organization of expert knowledge and their implications for broader power relations in the region. Given the absence of women's health movements in Turkey, health workers occupy central position in translating and communicating women's "social suffering" in legible and illegible ways to national and international aid agencies.
Drawing on an ethnographic research with gynecologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, and nurses, at state hospitals in Bingol and Tunceli, this paper examines how health workers understand the long-term effects of the conflict, and how such an understanding affects their medical involvements with their female patients. Kurdish and Alevi populations constitute the majority in these cities, whose basic health care provision has been overlooked by the state due to long years of state of emergency and political clashes. This paper focuses on health workers' encounters with women from the marginalized communities to shed light on how knowledge regarding domestic violence, sexual harassment, and rape is produced. It also assesses the highly politicized nature of health work in the war-torn region as it intimately shapes workers' practices. Doing so, this paper aims at investigating the possibilities and limitations of long-term recovery for women that are envisioned from within medical framework.
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