The history of the Ottoman family is a subject of new attention. Ottomanists have studied the families of several groups living in various parts of the empire from various aspects, such as family relations or household types. Thus far the main focus has fallen on the Ottoman provinces and on the late nineteenth century Istanbul. Less attention, however, has been given to the families of palace- affiliated female slaves in the early modern era. The career of a female slave in the Ottoman imperial harem could have changed or ended in one of three ways: entry into the dynastic family as a consort, promotion to one of the administrative offices of the harem institution, or manumission after completing the service period. An examination of court registers reveals that even though a number of household staff were not married and eventually died in the harem, the great majority of female palace slaves were manumitted and married off to suitable persons. This paper will explore the family structure of palace affiliated women, especially those of the administrative staff and of the rank and file by dealing with several questions related to various aspects of the family such as the number of children, divorce, second marriage, polygamy and possession of domestic slaves. It demonstrates how palace affiliation had an impact on their family structure. This paper argues that palace affiliation resulted in the appearence of a different kind of family structure with unique characteristics such as absence of natal family, limited number of children and free-born askeri husbands with a natal family of their own. This study contributes to the idea that no single family model existed in the Ottoman Empire. It further argues that there was a large spectrum of family arrangements, determined by various factors such as region, religion, class, occupation and also affiliation to the imperial palace.

In the last few decades, mother organizations, such as the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina and the Mothers of the Association of Families of Detained-Disappeared in Chili, organized around the role of motherhood as a reaction to the authoritarian regimes which wounded their lives in irretrievable ways. They have tried to attract the attention of the national and international public to shed light on the hidden violence by attempting to share their hidden wounds and demonstrating the fact that what had been invisible before had to be visible through their transformation from domestic mothers into "subversives". Turkey also became the host of several mothers' organizations which emerged in the last two decades, including Baris Anneleri (The Peace Mothers) -composed of the mothers of Kurdish guerrillas and Cumartesi Anneleri (The Saturday Mothers)- composed of the mothers of the Disappeared. These two organizations transformed the Turkish public sphere through employing the politically-informed neutrality of motherhood and its emotive language. The Peace Mothers has aimed at gaining national and international recognition/support in order to force the Turkish state to effect an acceptable solution to the Kurdish Question, while the Saturday Mothers has aimed to make state authorities account for their relatives' disappearance and to denounce human rights violations in Turkey. This paper analyzes the construction of motherhood as a form of political agency in the Turkish public sphere, with particular reference to the Peace Mothers and the Saturday Mothers as well as the texts that they have produced during their campaigns. Building on the press releases, texts and interviews delivered by the Mothers and in considering their demonstrations as performative texts, the paper attempts to trace the role of this specific textuality in the transformation of the language of ethnic, political and masculinized suffering into a language of maternal suffering. Furthermore, the paper explores various other questions such as: the position of the Mothers as bearers of connotations of death and life; the failure of citizenship rights in Turkey; the rise of human rights discourse in the process of accession to the European Union; the in/visibility and il/legibility of the state in the narratives of the Mothers; the crucial role of the Turkish nation-state in shaping the survival strategies and oppositional agency of marginalized bodies, as well as the ways in which overlapping power structures of gender, class, ethnicity, and geographic location limit "free" argumentation in the public sphere.

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.