Identities in Transition

The Enkidu Summer Conference 2007

June 1 - 5, 2007

Mexico City

in:

From Mothers to Daughters: Dynamic Definitions of Womanhood in Turkey

Ayla Samli

The mother-daughter relationship serves as an important site for cultural reproduction and cultural change. While psychoanalysis has extensively theorized the relationships between sons and both their fathers and mothers, the mother-daughter bond deserves further exploration. The mother daughter dynamic could be seen as one of identification and differentiation, thesis and antithesis. 

This paper will juxtapose theorizations of the relationships between mothers and daughters with their lived, culturally specific experiences, addressing within the dynamic context of urban Istanbul how mothers and daughters perceive women’s role as changing over time. In particular places, such as Turkey, enormous generational differences exist in terms of women’s experiences and access to the social sphere, however, longstanding expectations about women’s roles also pervade. So, how do women’s roles in transition interact with traditional idealizations of women’s roles? What has changed and where can we detect movement? What qualities continue to be important for women across generations? 

This paper will explore how Istanbul mothers and daughters articulate differences regarding their desires, experiences, and subject positions as women. I will rely on ethnographic data from fieldwork in Istanbul to illustrate these generational differences. Modernity, an inevitable contributor to these generational differences, figures strongly in daughters’ and mothers’ conceptions of womanhood; however, rather than addressing it overtly, it emerges through the ethnographic interviews in descriptions of the material differences between generations. A particularly complicated phenomenon, Turkish modernity simultaneously provides women with more and less freedom. Because women’s empowerment has been central to the Turkish modernization project since 1923 and rising Islamic conservatism has developed more recently, mothers may have grown up under different rhetoric, an certainly a different aesthetic, of womanhood than their daughters. Thus, focused questions about their beliefs and practices will reveal the changing force of modernity though grounded, ethnographic data. 

The possibility of European Union membership, forming one possible future for Turkey, may underlie these narratives, pointing to the connections between national and interfamilial subjectivities. Shifting the scope of analysis, this work addresses shifting notions of womanhood, nationhood, and modernity through personal narratives. A narrative issue encircles this study: the differences between the theoretical and ethnographic narrations of mother-daughter relations. While other studies may bracket these two representative forms and analyze them separately, this paper seeks to meld these representations, to show how the language may enrich both types of data. Since the literature on the mother-daughter roles deserves further development, the ethnographic accounts may provide perspectives for theorizing these roles against the backdrop of modernity.

About Ayla Samli

Ayla Samli is pursuing her PhD in anthropology and a certificate in the program for Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Rice University. She has worked as a fellow for the journal Feminist Economics, and is currently conducting fieldwork on weddings in Istanbul, Turkey.