Gender and Sexuality in Muslim Cultures

Gul Ozyegin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317130505
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios islámicos

A must-read for anyone interested in Muslim cultures, this volume not only explores Muslim identities through the lens of sexuality and gender - their historical and contemporary transformations and local and global articulations - but also interrogates our understanding of what constitutes a 'Muslim' identity in selected Muslim-majority countries at this pivotal historical moment, characterized by transformative destabilizations in which national, ethnic, and religious boundaries are being re-imagined and re-made. Contributors take on the most fundamental questions at the intersections of gender, sexuality, and the body. Several overarching questions frame the volume: How does studying gender and sexuality expand and enrich our understanding of Muslim-majority countries, historically and at present? How does the embodiment of 'Muslim' identity get reconfigured in the context of twenty-first-century globalism? What analytical questions are raised about 'Islam' when its diverse meanings and multifaceted expressions are closely examined? What roles do gender and sexuality play in the construction of cultural, religious, nationalistic, communal, and militaristic identities? How have power struggles been signified in and on the bodies of women and sexuality? How have global dynamics, such as the intensification and spread of neoliberal ideologies and policies, affected changing dynamics of gender and sexuality in specific locales? Here global dynamics touch down in diverse contexts, from masculinity crises around war disabilities, transnational marriages, and fathering in Turkey, Egypt, and Pakistan; to Muslim femininity narratives around female genital cutting, sexuality in divorce proceedings, and spouse selection; to gender crossing practices as well as protesting bodies, queering voices, and claims of authenticity in literary and political discourse. This book brings exciting research on these and other topics together in one place, allowing the essa

PART 1
CHALLENGED MASCULINITIES

Chapter 1
In Vitro Nationalism: Masculinity, Disability, and Assisted Reproduction in War-Torn Turkey

Salih Can Açıksöz

Introduction

This chapter explores the ramifications of the decades-long Kurdish conflict for masculinity, male embodiment, sexuality, and politics of reproduction in Turkey. More specifically, it examines how the bodies, gendered subjectivities, sexualities, and reproductive capacities of Turkish veterans disabled in clashes with Kurdish guerillas are made, unmade, and remade through the complex interactions of multiple technologies of state and war-making, governmentality, welfare, military medicine, and assisted reproduction in the context of the ongoing peace and reconciliation processes. Focusing on the state-sponsored assisted conception program that seeks to make fathers out of paraplegic veterans, this chapter aims to contribute to our understanding of masculinity, disabled sexuality, and new reproductive technologies from the viewpoint of a war-torn Muslim-majority society.

This chapter draws from my doctoral work on Turkish conscripted soldiers disabled in clashes with Kurdish guerillas in the context of the Kurdish conflict, one of the longest-lasting ethnopolitical armed conflicts in the Middle East (Açıksöz 2011, 2012). My doctoral work explores disabled veterans’ memories and experiences of warfare, disability, welfare, and urban poverty, and analyzes how new gender and political identities are forged out of these embodied experiences and memories. For my dissertation research, I conducted more than two years of multi-sited fieldwork with disabled veterans in Istanbul and Ankara, Turkey, between 2005 and 2007. I attended disabled veterans’ grassroots organizations and any major event they organized or participated in, such as protests or ceremonies, collected their life histories, and conducted numerous interviews with them and people influencing their lives, such as military physicians, government officials, journalists, and disability activists.

Based on the findings of followup research on this fieldwork, this chapter delves into paraplegic veterans’ quest for fatherhood through assisted conception.¹ In addition to the disabled veterans’ narratives of family building that I collected during my fieldwork, my data includes a series of interviews that the well-known female journalist Ayşe Arman conducted with paraplegic veterans for the popular Turkish newspaper Hürriyet in late 2010. This interview series, entitled “Interrupted Lives,” features not only paraplegic veterans and their wives, but also obstetricians who specialize in working with paraplegic veterans, and provides the very first public account of Turkish disabled veterans’ sexual and reproductive lives (Arman 2010a, 2010b, 2010c).

This chapter explores veterans’ assisted reproduction and medicalized fatherhood experiences in relation to the masculinity crisis that they experience as disabled men, and situates the state’s assisted conception program within broader sociopolitical concerns over the recovery of disabled veterans’ masculinities. Building on the literature on disability and sexuality (Gerschick 2000, Shakespeare 1999, Shuttleworth, Wedgwood, and Wilson 2012, Tepper 1999), I illustrate how assisted conception helps paraplegic veterans challenge stereotypes regarding disabled masculinity (impotent or asexual “half-men”) and position themselves within the normative frameworks of manhood and family. Finally, I briefly discuss the implications of paraplegic veterans’ quest for fatherhood for our understanding of the transformation of biological citizenship, politics of reproduction, and nationalism under the rule of neo-liberal Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) government.

Military Service as a Masculine Rite of Passage

In contemporary Turkey, compulsory military service applies to all able-bodied heterosexual male citizens who reach the legal age of 20. One cannot overstate the importance of this gendered institution for nationalist symbolism, the definition of citizenship, and the socialization of men. Leaving women, openly gay men, and the disabled outside, compulsory military service draws the contours of both hegemonic masculinity and the national community (Altınay 2004, Sinclair-Webb 2000).

Military service was made compulsory for men in Turkey in 1927. Reinforcing the state monopoly on violence within the new national territory, compulsory military service also provided the political elite of the newly founded republic a useful institutional means to access the male half of the population. Through military service, generations of young men from different ethnic and class backgrounds were remade as acceptable national subjects. They were taught Turkish, literacy, “correct” forms of belief and worship, body care, and social decorum, and molded into educated, modernized, disciplined, docile, and productive laborers and citizens (Altınay 2004, Şen 1996). Hence, cultivating what the republic deemed proper masculinity, the exclusively male institution of compulsory military service both reflected and consolidated the gendered citizenship regime of the new republic, which promised young men an equal place in horizontal comradeship in exchange for their submission to the state’s military authority (Koğacıoğlu 2004, Sirman 2000).

This promise has taken deep roots in Turkey partly because of the legal sanctions that apply to those who have not undertaken their service. Evading military service is no easy task in Turkey because what it practically means for draft evaders is the suspension of even basic citizenship rights (Sinclair-Webb 2000). Failing to perform military service limits one’s ability to travel, especially out of the country. If caught, draft evaders are taken into military custody and forcefully recruited. Evading military service also means avoiding legal registration of residency, without which one cannot be included on the electoral register and hence is not allowed to vote. Moreover, until the very recent changes in the Turkish Nationality Law undertaken as a part of the European Union harmonization process, those who failed to complete military service before the age of 40 could be expelled from citizenship.

However, it would be a mistake to assume that military service was merely imposed by the state in a top-down manner. The particular masculinity that military service cultivated and its symbolic and socioeconomic implications have an appeal to wide segments of the population. Thus, the legal sanctions awaiting draft evaders are also supported by less formal social sanctions concerning formal employment and marriage. Employers are generally unwilling to employ men who have not completed their military service. Similarly, many families do not favor marriage until the prospective husband has completed his service. In other words, military service is both a legally and socially warranted prerequisite for becoming an unmarked man in Turkey.

To summarize, compulsory military service in Turkey operates as a key rite of passage into adult masculinity and full membership in the national community. A young man becomes marriageable and employable, a husband and a breadwinner, and a full citizen by the virtue of completing his military service. This social and legal expectation forms a sort of patriarchal contract between the state and male citizens.

A Broken Gendered Promise

The intimate relationship between military service and hegemonic masculinity has been dramatically destabilized since the onset of the armed conflict between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in 1984.² This destabilization manifested on multiple levels after the 1990s. In the context of the conflict, the number of draft evaders has reached an unprecedented level, estimated somewhere between 400,000 and 500,000 (Mater 2005). Middle and upper-middle classes have increasingly capitalized on their social and economic resources to develop strategies for dodging the draft and, even more importantly, avoiding deployment in the conflict zone—strategies such as paid exemption from full-term military service, becoming and remaining enrolled in college and graduate school for extended periods, and obtaining a medical report documenting ineligibility for military service (aka the “rotten report”). Young men were reported mutilating themselves by cutting off their index fingers or having their spleens removed with the purpose of obtaining medical exemption (Başaran forthcoming). Moreover, the first conscientious objection movement of Turkey emerged in this period through the efforts of activists who openly resisted the draft despite the extremely harsh measures taken by the state.

This destabilization is nowhere more evident than in the life stories of conscripted soldiers violently disabled during their military service. In the course of the Kurdish conflict, more than three million Turkish conscripts have been deployed against the PKK guerillas. Although official numbers are not disclosed, tens of thousands of soldiers have been injured and thousands of them have become permanently physically disabled. It should be noted that these numbers do not even include post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) cases, since the Turkish military-medical establishment systemically refuses to grant disability benefits to soldiers with PTSD symptoms.

The post-military life of conscripts disabled during military service is a radically different story from the dominant cultural script. It is a story not of “becoming man,” but of expulsion from hegemonic masculinity in a country where disabled people cannot join public life as equal citizens because of the strong stigma of disability and widespread discriminatory practices against the disabled.

During my fieldwork, I visited 35 disabled veterans at their homes in lower-class neighborhoods in the peripheries of Istanbul and Ankara, where they led a volatile coexistence with Kurdish forced migrants. Most of my informants were wounded during the height of the conflict between 1993 and 1996. Nearly all of them were between 35 and 40 years of age when we met. More than half of them had experienced lower extremity amputations after getting injured in landmine explosions. The rest mostly had orthopedic disabilities due to gunshot injuries, and a few had bilateral blindness due to trauma.

On my visits, I was nearly always hosted in the salon (guest room), where my informants reconstructed their life histories. In almost all cases, the moment of injury constituted a sharp break both in the consistency of my informants’ life-story narratives and in their actual life trajectories, radically separating their pre-conscription and post-injury life worlds. Upon leaving the military hospital, most became dependent on their natal families for financial support and daily care, either temporarily until their eligibility for compensation and welfare entitlements was eventually approved through a number of maze-like bureaucratic processes, or permanently, as in the case of most paraplegic veterans. This somewhat reversed rite of passage brought about a striking sense of infantilization and shame for disabled veterans, moments condensed in tropes of “the shame of being diapered by the mother” and “the shame of asking for cigarette money from the father.”

Most veterans had lost their former blue-collar jobs and were employed at state institutions as unskilled laborers in accordance with the state’s paternalist job placement policies. Those who were single before conscription experienced desertion by their girlfriends or fiancées and difficulty in finding a spouse, whereas the already married few faced marital problems exacerbated by financial troubles, intensified domestic violence, or bodily stigma. They frequently felt themselves cut off from their able-bodied friends, a feeling often reinforced by their inability to perform lower-class male bonding practices such as attending football games. Being both disabled and politically marked, their experience of the urban space was transformed in a way that made them feel vulnerable to various forces, such as street crime, political retaliation, and the ordinary performative violence of street masculinity.

In order to understand the disabled veteran’s masculinity crisis, one has to understand the overall situation of the disabled population in Turkey. Despite some recent improvements pushed through in the context of Turkey’s European Union accession process, the country has historically had a bad record in terms of the living standards, employment options, and mobility chances of its disabled citizens.

Some statistics may be useful to understand the plight of disabled citizens. According to the first Disability Survey of Turkey, conducted in 2002, there are 8.5 million disabled people in Turkey, constituting 12 percent of the total population (Republic of Turkey Prime Ministry Administration for Disabled People 2002). The survey findings clearly delineate the socioeconomic inequalities impinging on the lives of disabled people: 78 percent of the disabled population do not participate in the labor force, in contrast with 41 percent of the general population; 36 percent are illiterate in contrast to 12 percent of the general population; and 34 percent are never married in contrast to less than 26 percent of the general population.

Another nationwide research project stunningly reports that the word “disabled” (sakat) is most commonly associated with the word “needy” (muhtac) (Republic of Turkey Prime Ministry Administration for Disabled People 2009). Still another recent research poll shows that more than 70 percent of the population would prefer not having an orthopedically disabled neighbor.³ In such a milieu, the lives of disabled veterans, most of them already coming from lower-class backgrounds, were characterized by their exclusion from the public sphere and wage labor and their consequent social and economic dependency. Moreover, they had to face the strong cultural stigma of disability and live in a cultural climate in which people called them “half-men” or even “living dead,” as a popular sports commentator once infamously did on live TV. In short, military service made the disabled veteran “less of a man” rather than providing a passage into adult masculinity and full-fledged citizenship.

Remasculinizing Veterans

The social situation of the disabled conscripts just described has been an important source and surface of gendered anxieties for the Turkish state and society. The disruption of the idea that “military service makes a man” was a big blow, especially to the hegemonic militarized approach to the Kurdish question. As the conflict escalated and disabled conscripts became more and more publicly visible in the mid-1990s, a number of social actors within and beyond state institutions—including military officials, politicians, state bureaucrats, media personae, and nationalist philanthropists—started to call on the state to take drastic steps to fix this gendered crisis by ameliorating disabled veterans’ lives. The resulting shift in the state’s relationship with disabled veterans of the Kurdish conflict would have a radical impact on the lives of these men in the 2000s.

The best way to understand this shift is through Foucault’s concept of governmentality. The notion of governmentality is a part of Foucault’s broader scholarly attempt to reconceptualize power as not simply a repressive but a productive relationship that operates not only at the level of the state but at the micro levels of society that are not often associated with power, such as forms of knowledge and expertise or institutions like schools and hospitals (Foucault 1990, 2003, 2007, 2008). In Foucault’s work, governmentality refers to “an array of practices through which the population of a modern nation-state is governed, including institutions such as schools and the police, agencies for the provision of social services, discourses, norms, and even individual self-regulation through techniques for disciplining and caring for the self. These forms of governmentality encompass more than what might formally be called ‘the state’” (Ewing 2008, 6). In other words, governmentality cannot be reduced to the activities of the state because it “involves a multitude of heterogeneous entities” that seek to “enhance the security, longevity, health, prosperity, and happiness of populations” (Inda 2005, 6).

Informed by Foucault’s work, I conceptualize the emerging interest of political authorities and experts in the well-being of disabled veterans as a process of (furt...