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Exploring “Women” and “Gender”: Trajectories of Migration Research in Turkey

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Women, Migration and Asylum in Turkey

Part of the book series: Migration, Diasporas and Citizenship ((MDC))

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Abstract

Turkey has a long and rich history of migration flows; however, the acknowledgment of women migrants in Turkey’s migration context is a relatively recent feature in developing knowledge. Since the 1990s in Turkey, there have been important attempts by migration scholars, mostly women, to make the diversity of women’s migration visible and to develop and use a gendered perspective. This chapter reviews some of these attempts in literature on women/gender and migration in Turkey. For this review I tentatively offer to distinguish the literature on women/gender and migration studies in Turkey into five groups which reflect much of the diversity of the Turkish migration experience: the migration of ethnic Turks from Balkan countries or soydaş women; Turkish migrant women in Europe; the migrant women from the former socialist states; the migration experience of black women from sub-Saharan Africa; and women members of the recent waves of migration from Syria. I will briefly review the literature on the first four groups, while leaving the last one to Part 3 of this book. The literature cited in this review has been deliberately chosen to show the gendered approach used and to discuss the opportunities and challenges in analyzing the gendered migration in the Turkish context.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    After the last mass migration wave from Bulgaria in 1989, which is classified as “forced migration”, Turkey has continued to receive migrants from Bulgaria, but with a completely different character. It is now considered as “voluntary migration”. Danış and Parla state that the members of this new migration flow, mostly women employed as domestic workers, cannot take advantage of Turkish migration regimes as “soydaş” or “ethnic kin” people, but now come as undocumented migrants (Danış and Parla 2009: 144), and are thus the subjects of the third group in my classification in this chapter, namely, the migration from former socialist countries.

  2. 2.

    English version of this article was published in International Migration Review (1977), 11, pp. 31–57.

  3. 3.

    Almost four decades after the publication of Abadan-Unat’s article, an international symposium was organized on gender and migration with the aim of evaluating the impact of rapid change on Abadan-Unat’s findings and conceptualization. The debates at the symposium made it clear that the concepts and vocabularies of the 1970s were no longer appropriate and that in her presentation at this meeting Abadan-Unat asserted the need to “rethink and redefine” the main questions in the current, globalization context (Abadan-Unat and Mirdal 2015:xix, see also Kandiyoti 2015.

  4. 4.

    For the studies conducted by male researchers see Ünal’s work on Gagauz women in Istanbul employed as domestic workers (2011), and Köşk’s MA thesis on Moldovan, Georgian, Azerbaijani and Kyrgyz domestic workers in İzmir (Köşk 2018).

  5. 5.

    For detailed presentation of research findings see Dedeoğlu and Ekiz Gökmen (2011) in Turkish.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Marmara University, İstanbul, Turkey

    Selmin Kaşka

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  1. Selmin Kaşka
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Correspondence to Selmin Kaşka .

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  1. School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK

    Lucy Williams

  2. Düzce University, Düzce, Turkey

    Emel Coşkun

  3. Marmara University, İstanbul, Turkey

    Selmin Kaşka

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Kaşka, S. (2020). Exploring “Women” and “Gender”: Trajectories of Migration Research in Turkey. In: Williams, L., Coşkun, E., Kaşka, S. (eds) Women, Migration and Asylum in Turkey. Migration, Diasporas and Citizenship. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28887-7_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28887-7_2

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