Exploring the intersections: subordination and resistance among Kurdish women in Aydınlı, Tuzla

Official URL: http://192.168.1.20/record=b1379291 (Table of Contents)

This study aims to explore the intersecting dynamics of social exclusion in low-class Kurdish women's lives in the Aydınlı neighborhood, Tuzla-Istanbul. Women's narratives show that Aydınlı is a setting of urban poverty and marginalization. This thesis argues that Kurdish women are ''urban outcasts'', who are subordinated by the intersecting dynamics of gender, class and ethnicity. Based on in-depth interviews and participant observation, this study argues that there are multiple agents consisting of class, ethnicity and gender, which lead to women's subordination. Women's narratives on language, identity, poverty and patriarchal oppression show that, these multiple agents should not be analyzed separately from one another. This thesis argues that, there are heterogeneous identities as well as differing factors of intersectionality, since women do not encounter the pressures of gender, ethnicity and class at the same time and in equal degrees. This study aims to contribute to the existing feminist literature in Turkey by posing these complex dynamics of intersectionality. Besides, aiming to provide an intersectional approach for poverty studies in Turkey, this research argues that women encounter constant threats which may approximate them to absolute poverty. These threats are determined and reproduced by the intersectionality of gender, ethnicity and class. The ways women manage to display particular resistances against these multiple agents constitute another focal point of this research. This study argues that women perform resistances against the dynamics of marginalization, which are reproduced at the neighborhood, as well as in households and workplaces with the intersecting dynamics of class, gender and ethnicity in Aydınlı.