The changing dynamics of the headscarf question in Turkey: The women's struggle to take off the headscarf

Official URL: https://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b2486545_ (Table of contents)

The thesis aims to question the changing dynamics of the headscarf question in Turkey. Based on in-depth interviews with women who took off their headscarves, the research primarily focuses on the women’s experiences of the practice of veiling and un-veiling to analyze personal and social intricacies behind women’s decisions to take off their headscarves. The narratives of un-veiled women is contextualized through an analysis of continuities and ruptures between their experiences of veiling and un-veiling practices. This thesis mainly seeks to answer the following questions: Why do young veiled women, who were grown up in religious families and socialized in Islamist community circles, decide to take off their headscarves? How do the symbolic meanings of the headscarf create the complicated social expectations for veiled women? How do the current social and political conditions, if any, affect the women’s decisions to un-veil? How do they narrate their veiling and un-veiling practices in relation to the normative understanding of Islam and secularism in Turkey? The thesis, therefore, concludes that the decision to take off the headscarf arises from mainly two motivations: First, an Islamic stigma symbol (Goffman 1963; Göle 2003), or the social aspects of veiling in terms of the representation of pious identity in a consistent way, has rejected by taking off the headscarf. Second, the fieldwork finds out another reason behind removing the headscarf as the rejection of religion itself and religious obligations as well