No abstract

This article discusses the gender‐specific effect of the changing economic structure of mountain villages in Turkey. Rural women, who are conventionally unpaid family workers, have begun entering into off‐farm work due to declining household incomes in recent years. The implications of this for gender relations are found to be contradictory in much recent research. In this study, we employed the concepts of the hybridity of rural communities and the multiplicity of social exclusion in a globalising countryside. We used a qualitative methodology employing multiple sources of data. In addition to in‐depth interviews with 27 village women, we conducted semi‐structured interviews with village headmen and structured interviews with 218 village women to understand the structural context behind the women’s narratives. We found that the dimension of social exclusion varies with gender and age within the community. While middle‐aged men are increasingly unemployed and have withdrawn into uncompetitive rural life, young women engage in wage work and challenge geographical disadvantages by spending their meagre earnings on transportation and communication technologies. The reconfiguration of marginality within the community, rather than the total marginalisation of villagers, is an ongoing process.

In this article, we examine how socioeconomically disadvantaged women are affected by health sector reform and family planning policy changes in Turkey through a case study of Kurdish women's struggles for birth control. In Turkey, a family planning program became relatively marginalized in primary health care services as a result of health sector reform as well as a shift of population policy toward a moderately pronatal approach. We argue that an emerging health care system would leave disadvantaged women unable to benefit from contraceptives and would perpetuate reproductive health inequalities between women in the country.

Rapana venosa (damarlı rapa deniz salyangozu) Türkiye'de tüketilmeyen ancak Japonya'ya son yirmi beş yıldır ihraç edilen deniz ürünüdür. Bu çalışma, daha önce Japonya'da da tüketilmeyen deniz salyangozunun metalaşma sürecini ve üretim zincirini sosyolojik açıdan incelemektedir. Araştırma keşifseldir; veriler, döküman incelemesi, Sinop ve Samsun'da bulunan balık işleme fabrikalarında katılımcı olmayan gözlem ve fabrika sahipleri ve Tokyo'daki firma yöneticileriyle yapılan mülakatlar yoluyla toplanmıştır. Çalışma, küresel bağlantılar ve eşitsizliklerin son derece karmaşık hale geldiği yenidünya düzeninde, deniz salyangozu ticaretinin Türkiye'deki yoksul üreticiyi Japonya'daki yoksul tüketiciye nasıl bağladığını irdelemektedir.

In this paper, we examine the process of feminisation of rural work in a case study of women’s employment at a seafood-processing factory in Western Black Sea Turkey. We explore the significance of women’s nonfarm employment to their household economy and how intra-household relations are affected when women participate in paid work. In order to understand the household characteristics and dynamics in relation to the work status of female household members, mixed methods were used for data collection – semi-structured interviews with 218 women and in-depth interviews with 27 women. The data indicate the significance of women’s paid work to rural household economy and also how the paid work has transformed the father-daughter relationship in particular. Recent rural transformation in the context of neoliberal agricultural policy, agricultural decline, and out-migration increased women’s workload. Today, rural household heavily depends on unmarried daughter’s labour regardless of her work status. Daughter’s participation in paid work however makes her labour visible and considerably undermines the authority of father who had already lost control over son’s labour. Yet we contend that daughter’s labour may be liberated from a traditional form of patriarchy; her participation into labour market results in an integration into not only market economy but also a modern form of patriarchy.