Negotiating Sexual Modesty: Analysing Narrative Moments within the Microphysics of Education

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Negotiating Sexual Modesty Analysing Narrative
Moments within the Microphysics of Education

• Cigdem Esin
• Centre for Narrative Research

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Research

• Analysis of sexual narratives of educated young
  women within a wider network of disciplinary
  practices on womens sexuality within the context
  of Turkish modernity.
• Drawing on Foucaults analysis of bio-power and
  disciplinary practices
• Participants-with university education, aged
  between 18 and 25, living in Ankara, the capital.
  

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Research

• Foucauldian approach to narrative
  analysis-microanalysis of narratives around
  sexuality, always positioning them within
  specific historical, political and socio-cultural
  contexts, considering power as a productive force
  that saturates the construction of narratives.
• Focusing on the deployments of the regulatory
  discourses to explore the questions how do
  these discourses participate in the constitution
  of young womens sexualities? how are they
  deployed and contested in womens narratives.

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Research context

• Education of women has been a long-standing
  element of the Turkish modernisation.
• Educational institutions have been designed to
  construct women as well-educated so that they
  will internalise and carry on the secular,
  progressive, westernised processes in modern
  Turkey while simultaneously being shaped by
  traditional gender discourses.
• Sites of disciplinary practices surrounding young
  womens sexuality.
• Education has also created spaces for young women
  to move beyond the dominant discourses of Turkish
  modernisation while deconstructing their gendered
  configuration and re-constructing their
  relationship with these dominant discourses.

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stories

• narrative moments that reveal how educated young
  women of my research become effects and
  instruments of power through their discursive
  positions within the modern sex/gender system
  in contemporary Turkey.
• constitute a space where young women craft and
  perform positions in micro contexts where
  technologies of gender (de Lauretis,1987),
  interact with technologies of resistance
  (Tamboukou, 2003).
• In telling their stories, the participants
  negotiate contradictory and precarious ethical
  positions as subjects simultaneously escaping
  from and trapped within the regulations
  surrounding their sexuality.

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• Bulut
• My sister is three years older than me. She has
  always had boyfriends. She was hanging around
  with them. I was like the good girl, setting her
  in order. My dad was so strict about it. We
  had unspoken rules at home. We all knew that we
  could not have boyfriends .
• There were popular girls and boys at school. They
  were going out with each other. I wasnt one of
  them. I was a moderate girl with long socks, long
  skirt, wearing a boys shirt with short hair.
  There was no atmosphere to be otherwise. I was
  going home after school. My mum was working then.
  I was taking care of my younger brother, doing my
  homework in the evening and going back to school
  in the morning. There was nowhere I could meet
  boys ....
• Later, I started to go to classical music
  concerts at the weekends. It was like a
  blossoming for me ...
• I felt relieved outside home by these outings. I
  hadnt had any problems with my family until
  then. The problems started with these concerts.
  To that point, I was (errr), compared to my
  sister, more modest, more respectful to parents,
  more serious whereas she was loose, lazy, and
  unsuccessful .

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• Ladin
• I found myself in another world when I moved to
  Ankara for university. Besides, METU you know,
  youre a METU graduate as well, is a
  comfortable space in terms of these sexuality
  and relationships. First of all, I was away
  from my family. Nobody judges you. People in D
  the city she is from would find it (err)
  strange if you walked around with your boyfriend.
  But (err) you dont have this problem in METU
  campus. You can hug your boyfriend, kiss him.
  There I learned to be comfortable with my
  sexuality. But, when youre outside of that
  world, everything changes again.
• Cigdem Can you tell me more about this?
• Ladin Im still a postgraduate student in METU,
  but also working in a research company here
  Ankara. Colleagues at the office are
  open-minded and nice, but its not like being in
  METU. You need to respect their values. I cant
  be as comfortable as I was in METU. Im a
  grown-up dont have to explain everything about
  myself but
• Cigdem But?
• Ladin I mean (smiling) I mean, youre like
  acting showing your different faces in different
  places. My family or my colleagues at work dont
  need to know about the self that my friends at
  METU know .