Revisiting ‘honor’ through migrant vulnerabilities in Turkey

ABSTRACT

This essay revisits the trope of honour and takes stock of its critiques by foregrounding the elusive bodies of undocumented migrant women in Turkey. Specifically, I engage with the extent to which the legal normalization of the culture of honour results in routinized sexual violence against undocumented migrant women and in impunity for the perpetrators. On the one hand, I pursue the critique of honour as an essentalized, generalized and timeless notion about Middle Eastern and Mediterranean societies. On the other hand, I ponder whether our efforts to battle such stereotypical explanations may occasionally result in giving short shrift to the reality of sexual violence as experienced by those who bear the brunt of it. In avoiding culturalizing honour and yet recognizing its continuing cultural power, I take my inspiration from the concept of ethnographic refusal to navigate a potentially lethal terrain in which migrants, activists, and academics enact, with converging and discrepant stakes, deliberate or unwitting engagements with the demands of ‘honor’. I suggest that being cognizant of the kinds of ethnographic refusals we undertake to foreground or avoid the discomfiting aspects of honour as a gendered norm can aid us in our pursuit towards yet thicker ethnographies of exactly where and when honour continues to matter.

KEYWORDS:

• Honour
• undocumented migration
• ethnographic refusal
• Turkey
• migrant women

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 In 2006, a rapist in Manitoba, Canada, was given no jail time because, according the judge ruled that the victim met the rapist under ‘inviting circumstances’: https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/breakingnews/rape-victim-inviting-so-no-jail--rape-victim-inviting-so-no-jail-116801578.html.

2 See also the Carol McGranahan’s (2016) recently edited collection, ‘Theorizing Refusal’ in the Openings and Retrospectives section of Cultural Anthropology.

3 The following account has been compiled from widespread coverage of Narine’s suicide in the three major dailies from the tabloid to the mainstream to the more critical, Hürriyet, Milliyet and Taraf.

4 https://t24.com.tr/haber/once-hafiza-kartini-sonra-da-siyanur-yuttu,200072

5 http://www.radikal.com.tr/yazarlar/ezgi_basaran/iste_o_100_bin_ermeniden_biri-1083124. The columnist Ezgi Başaran uses the simple past here. In Turkish, the simple past has two versions that do not directly correspond to the simple past and past perfect distinction in English. In Turkish, the simple past is used only when the speaker has been a direct witness to the event and thus has immediate, personal knowledge of the case in question.

6 http://www.yg.yenicaggazetesi.com.tr/yazargoster.php?haber=2222.

7 ‘Gercekler bağırsağında çıktı!’ (http://gundem.milliyet.com.tr/gercekler-bagirsagindan-cikti/gundem/gundemdetay/16.06.2012/1554619/default.htm).

8 ‘During the first hearing of the lawsuit, the most important witness, the brother Zhora Mıkirciyan could not testify since he was deported’, Lilit Gasparyan’s coverage in the Armenian-Turkish weekly, Agos.

9 While some feminist collectives in Istanbul opt for the term ‘women murders’, Aslı Zengin (2016a) has recently used the apt term ‘gender killings’, a terminological switch that also enables her to include crimes against LGBTI individuals.

10 Payment that is not even be delivered but simply promised by a pimp constitutes evidence of consent.

11 There has been an increase in the violence and frequency of incidents of harassment and assault by men on young women on buses and minibuses especially: a violent beating on a public bus of a young woman for wearing shorts, a case of the bus company worker ejaculating on the face of a young woman traveling overnight on the bus. Of those cases that have come to court, the assailants have not been charged.

12 Birgün Daily Newspaper, September 24, 2004. https://www.birgun.net/haber/marjinal-gruplar-turk-kadinini-temsil-edemez-21725.