Üreme pratikleri : ataerkillik ile mücadele eden Kürt Kadını

This disseration is a case study of reproductive practice among Kurdish rural-urban migrant women in Van, Turkey. Van is one of the eastern provinces where high fertility persists despite the rapid fertility decline in the country. In Van and some other provinces where Kurdish population concentrates, however, fertility levels not only continue to be high but also increased in the period between 1980 and 2000. In order to explore the social dynamics behind the divergent fertility trend, this dissertation conducted interviewing with women in a Kurdish migrant neighbourhood and examined their reproductive experiences from the feminist political economic perspective that pays particular attention to reproduction’s embeddededness in patriarchal social relations which are contingent upon political economic contexts. This dissertation argues that Kurdish migrants in the studied neighbourhood experienced, and still experience, considerable socioeconomic insecurities resulted from the neoliberal economic policy since the 1980s and the destructive mass displacement in the 1990s. Migration to the city could offer women empowering opportunities. Yet, while the traditional rural form of patriarchal practices lingered until recently, a new form of patriarchy seeks to restore masculine confidence in the context of insecurities by tightly controlling the woman’s movement and considerably hinders her access to public spaces and hence reproductive healthcare. This dissertation proposes that enduring high fertility among the recent Kurdish migrants can be closely related to the form of patriarchy reconfigured in a way to work against the woman’s autonomy which is essential for the exercise of reproductive rights. .Ph.D. - Doctoral Progra