From home to city: gender segregation, homosociality and publicness in Istanbul

Abstract

This article examines the complex and tangled relationships between home, city, and gender in Bagcilar, a municipality in Istanbul governed by Islamist-oriented political parties since 1992. Focusing on women’s spatial experiences at the intersection of the private and the public, the traditional and the modern, the secular and the religious, this article argues that home provides a medium through which gendered forms of governance and publicness are produced in the city. Home as a domestic sphere confines women’s roles to those of motherhood and wifehood, but also functions as a place of sociability for women. The municipality’s Islamic political discourse, combined with secular urban practices, mobilizes women through familial norms, gender-segregated events, and women-only sites in Bagcilar, where home and urban space are mutually constructed, regulated, and legitimized. Thus, women’s publicness, which derives from but goes beyond domesticity, also enables intimate same-sex sociality in urban spaces. Although this creates only conditional access to the city for women, their agency and engagement with the city emanate from such publicness.

Keywords:

• Agency
• gender segregation
• home
• homosociality
• Istanbul
• publicness

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Deborah Stevenson, Donald McNeill and the Gender, Place and Culture anonymous reviewers and editors for their critical suggestions and constructive feedback. I am also grateful to the special issue editors Melissa Butcher and Kate Maclean for their valuable insights and encouragement.