Gendered citizenship: Experiences and perceptions of the Bulgarian Turkish immigrant women

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Tezin Türü: Yüksek Lisans

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi, İktisadi ve İdari Bilimler Fakültesi, Siyaset Bilimi ve Kamu Yönetimi Bölümü, Türkiye

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2014

Öğrenci: ÖZGE KAYTAN

Danışman: CANAN ASLAN AKMAN

Özet:

The aim of this thesis is to analyze the citizenship experiences and perceptions of the Bulgarian Turkish immigrant women with specific reference to their participation to the public sphere, their engagements in the private sphere, different socialization processes they have been through and their daily lives. It is argued that the Bulgarian Turkish women’s citizenship practices were constructed through their ethnic minority identity in Bulgaria, in Turkey their citizenship has become a gendered construct due to the gender norms imposed on immigrant women. This thesis study is based on feminist perspective and research procedure, challenging the conventional definitions of citizenship by including the experiences, thoughts, sensations, and the narratives of the immigrant women, and it is contended that the notion of citizenship should include such subjectivities. The fieldwork was conducted in the form of semi-structured interview surveys with 19 immigrants who immigrated to İzmir, Turkey from Bulgaria in 1989 and in the 1990s. The experiences of the immigrant women about their socio-economic conditions, identity perceptions, and their participation to the public spheres and the changing gendered dynamics in the private spheres constitute the core subjects for the analysis to demonstrate how they have experienced gendered citizenship in Turkey.