Margins and forgotten places: the Turkish national rhetoric on women from Atatürk to Erdoğan (original) (raw)
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Kemal Atatürk’s influence on the participation of Turkish women in public and political life
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The Headscarf Issue, Women and the Public Sphere in Turkey
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As Fairclough and Wodak state, one of the basic assumptions of Critical Discourse Analysis is that " discourse does ideological work " (1997, p. 275). The discourse of the media, and of women's magazines in particular, drew the attention of several critical discourse analysts such as Eggings) who emphasized the normative function of women's magazines in the establishment of the appropriate forms of behavior on the one hand, and their role in maintaining traditional womanhood roles on the other. This study focuses on the representations of motherhood and wifehood, two basic themes of the women's magazines in the early years of the Turkish Republic (1923-1950) from a critical perspective with the aim of revealing the role of discourse in the construction of the ideal woman image. The discourse-historical approach to CDA, represented by Wodak (2000; 2004) and Wodak, De Cillia, Reisigl and Liebhart (2000) is used as the primary method of analysis. However, it is complemented by the approach of the English school, which formed its critical discourse method on the basis of Halliday's grammar.). The database is composed of 10 articles written on motherhood and wifehood published in three women's magazines that had been in circulation during the years 1936-1950. The articles were selected according to purposive sampling. The findings suggest that women's magazines of the period function as sites where gender politics of the state is enacted. In fulfilling this function, the anti-feminist discourse in the wifehood and nationalist discourse in the motherhood are manipulatively used in the construction of the 'other-centered' mother and wife, in accordance with the needs of the newly founded Republic. As opposed to the variety of, and sometimes conflicting messages conveyed by modern women's magazines (Caldas-Coulthard, 1996; Eggins and Iedema, 1997), women's magazines of the early Republic create a one-dimensional, domestic world where women's identities are clearly delineated on domestic and national grounds. Öz Fairclough and Wodak'in de belirttiği gibi Eleştirel Söylem Çözümlemesinin temel varsayımla-rından biri de " söylemin ideolojik olduğu " dur (1997, s. 275). Basın söylemi ve özellikle de kadın dergilerinin söylemi bir yandan toplumda kabul gören davranış normlarının oluşturulmasındaki
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This article analyzes the speeches of Turkish female parliamentarians during the headscarf debate. We examine how deputies with different political and ideological predilections discursively construct women's rights and employ legitimation strategies to validate their policy position. The findings reveal that on the one hand, the female deputies use different legitimation strategies to justify arguments for or against the use of headscarves in the public sector. On the other hand, they embed the headscarf debate into the broader political goals they pursue in a polarized political setting. They deploy legitimation strategies around the headscarf debate to rationalize future policy on issues ranging from the expansion of human rights and democracy to the change of the type of political regime.