Confronting gendered constructions of refugee deservingness and representations: Syrian refugee women strategising for humanitarian aid in Turkey

ABSTRACT

This study shows how Syrian refugee women living in Ankara cope with their systematically enforced dependency on humanitarian aid through individual and collective agency as they negotiate their inclusion into categories of deservingness and attempt to maintain this inclusion. We argue that the gendered discourses used to delineate deservingness categories in the humanitarian field clash heavily with the portrayal of Syrian refugees in Turkish public discourse. Our qualitative data demonstrate how notions in the humanitarian field about women’s role in the family as nurturing homemakers, assumptions about their innate docility as vulnerable refugees and the contrasting portrayals in Turkish society of Syrian refugee women as sexualised threats to the Turkish family shape their agentive negotiations and subsequently lead to multiple tensions. We also highlight how the centrality of gender in the discursive framing of refugees in Turkey produces the idealised refugee in the figure of the widowed refugee mother. By problematising how refugee women’s agency play out, we intervene in the discussion about the gendered terrains of refugeehood and provide empirical weight for the exploration of the paradoxes in the humanitarian field that refugee women struggle to resolve.

KEYWORDS:

• Syrian refugee women
• humanitarian aid
• refugee deservingness
• agency
• Turkey

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful input. Additionally, we thank Ahmet Emre Çepoğlu and Sena Önal for their invaluable assistance.

Geolocation information

The research was conducted in Ankara, Turkey.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Due to the nature of this research, participants of this study did not agree for their data to be shared publicly, so supporting data is unavailable.

Ethics approval

This study was approved by the ethics committee of Bilkent University (kurul karari/toplanti no: 2021_03_24_01, reference no: 143).

Notes

1 Pseudonym.

2 By 2020, only 62,369 work permit applications were granted to Syrian workers (Ministry of Labour and Social Security 2020).

3 As of August 2022, it provides 230 TL per person under temporary protection in a household.

4 Although the focus of the field study was refugee women, during data collection, a refugee man spontaneously invited himself into the research, adding significant depth to the insight provided by women.

5 The data were collected for a Ph.D. thesis (Zadhy 2022).

6 Widowed or divorced women with no children return to their parent’s household.

7 See Alpak et al. (2015).

8 Syrian women comprise the largest group of foreign brides, with 14.8% (Turkish Statistical Institute 2021). However, this figure does not account for the number of clandestine religious marriages between Turkish men and Syrian women, a practice significantly contributing to their vulnerability and marginalisation.

Additional information

Funding

This work was not supported by any funding agency.