Dewesternizing Precarity in Turkish TV Drama Production through the Body and the Law

Abstract

Beneath Turkish TV dramas’ global glamor lie workplace accidents, systemic injuries on workers’ bodies, and deaths. In response, workers seek to impose restraints on what can be done to their bodies by resorting to law and evoking ideals of equality as they struggle for workplace safety, healthcare, and dignity. Drawing on ethnographic research across production sets, industry summits, union meetings and more than fifty interviews since 2015, this article documents drama workers’ bodily vulnerabilities, arguing that precarity in this global media industry is a bodily phenomenon legally sanctioned by the state. I dewesternize the notion of precarity in creative industries by foregrounding the materiality of the body and the regulative power of law as centers of exploitation and resistance. Critical scholars of media production could learn from non-Western contexts in identifying how creative workers do not only demand stable incomes but also legal recognition and protection of their bodies.

Exploring local, experimenting with transnational: Producing Turkish television series

“…Such an environment increases censorship and self-censorship in the country and allows business practices to favour business concerns such as demanding more than two hours of content per episode. These working conditions heavily influence creative workers, and the result is systematic injuries, deaths and workplace accidents which increase their physical vulnerability (Bulut, 2022).…”