Constructing Female Subject: Narratives on Family and Life Security among the Urban Poor in Turkey

Abstract

This paper examines people’s everyday acts, decisions, and narratives about livelihood and poverty. By doing so, it elucidates the way that family norms produce these acts, decisions, and narratives, and how female subjects are constructed as the result of the effects of family norms, focusing on norms of sexual honor. It shows that people’s sense of belonging is deeply grounded on kinship and it does not just disappear, even if monetary exchange declines and/or conjugal love is idealized. In fact, the value of sexual honor seems to be embedded within the concept of love. Agreeing with the current argument for the necessity of reorganizing the social security system based on citizenship, in order to respond to the changing nature of poverty, this paper argues nonetheless that it would be misleading to suppose that these formal legal institutions would directly shape the citizen subject.Poverty, Sense of belonging, Kinship, Female subject, Turkey, Family, Women