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 .

This paper investigates how the mandate to preserve family unity shapes the institutionalization of women’s rights within the official governmental realm in Turkey. It draws on extensive fieldwork on human rights training programs for state officials, organized by the Turkish government to comply with the requirements for EU membership. I argue that the depiction of women as rights bearing subjects is closely tied to the governance of family and the “logic of masculinist protection” (Young 2003) that underlies the governmental rationality in Turkey. Drawing from my work alongside women’s rights training programs for police officers, judges and prosecutors, healthcare professionals, and religious officials, I show that the official recognition of women as rights deserving subjects is conditional upon their portrayal as passive victims of abuse that are in need of government protection and care. This portrayal at once prevents the recognition of certain kinds of discrimination and violence against women and it excludes certain women who do not fit into the picture of helpless victims from the officially guaranteed realm of rights. Furthermore, even their compliance with the image of passive victim does not always guarantee the protection of women by the state. The message that is given in women’s rights trainings goes hand in hand with government policies that emphasize the preservation of family unity and that consolidate women’s position as primarily located in the family. Tasked with the double duty to protect women and preserve families, government agents who participate in training programs often show reluctance to intervene in situations of violence against women, since intervening often means removing women from the family.

Violence against women has always been a key phenomenon for the feminist movements all around the world to expose the dark side of the family, supposedly the place of care and affection. In line with this process was the establishment of women’s shelters, which were designed to be in solidarity with women exposed to violence. The idea of women’s shelters from the activist/feminist perspective has been to replace hierarchical positioning of women in the family by establishing non-hierarchical relations in the shelters and by replacing the idiom of help with that of solidarity. In the meantime, parallel to the rising public awareness, several other ways of organizing women’s shelters have come up in different contexts, that do not necessarily share the original feminist perspective on shelters. In Turkey, partly because of the unwillingness of authorities to allocate funding to autonomous shelters, partly as feminists’ claim that they should not be treated as social workers of the state, the establishing and running of women’s shelters came to be considered as the duty of public authorities (i.e. municipalities and social services of the central state). As a consequence, of the 128 women’s shelters in Turkey today, only 3 belong to NGOs, whereas 33 operate under the municipalities and 92 under the social services. Therefore, it is possible to talk about a regime of public women’s shelters, which we can add as a category to usual classification of women’s shelters under philanthropic, organizational, therapeutic, or activist types. In this paper, based on my fieldwork in public (municipality) shelters, I argue that the familial norms constitute the main organizing principle in the context of public women’s shelters, where building non-hierarchical relationships is, expectedly, not a concern. Drawing on ethnographic data collected in the shelters, I demonstrate that both from the perspectives of the workers and the residents, the women’s shelters are considered as a replacement for natal their families: the state attends to women where their natal families do not. By considering shelters as a family-replacement, the workers and the residents alike create intimacies in an unaccustomed environment, whereas this also brings with it various ways of control that likens public women’s shelters to total institutions (in the sense Goffman uses the term). In this sense, public women’s shelters re-contextualize shelter work in a way that transforms women’s right to public services to a (familial) favor granted by the state.

Abandonment by the natal family is a common experience among numerous trans women in Turkey. This abandonment shows itself not only when trans people are alive, but also when they die. Disavowal of a deceased trans body and refusal to organize funerals or practice rituals of death are prevalent among the biological family members of trans people. There are, for example, stories about some biological families who claimed the property of their trans children, while denying them funeral rights, or those, who insisted on their trans child’s burial among anonymous people. In such occurrences, trans friends often take the initiative, re-claim the body and organize the funeral, replacing the functional and emotional role of the family and announcing themselves as the “real” family. However, this situation, at the same time, puts them in contestation with state regulations that legally ascribe the right of inheritance, as well as the right to the deceased body to the natal family members of the deceased. Hence, the state functions as the mediator and authorizer of particular forms of intimacies between trans people, their natal families and other social actors. During my fieldwork among trans people in Istanbul in 2009-10, the issue of death was a sore spot that not only trans people but also people from queer circles have loudly spoken about, regarding their relations with their biological families. In such stories, either trans or other openly queer people have instructed each other of their desire to be buried by their queer, or in another term that use, by their “real” families. In this paper, by drawing on ethnographic data collected from a trans woman’s, Sibel’s, death and funeral, I will discuss how trans people re-work and re-make the concept of family in their struggle and/or resilience against everyday familial violence of abandonment and disowning, and state governed familial intimacy. I will explore trans women’s practices and accounts of characterizing their trans friendships as their “real family,” and complicate their investments in this “real” family as an intimate survival strategy to cope with everyday violence.