Women's leisure in urban Turkey: a comparative neighbourhood study

This thesis examines women’s everyday experiences of leisure in two neighbourhoods of urban Turkey, drawing on qualitative data derived from interviews and observations with women living in the city of Bursa. By examining the relationship between women’s leisure and their labour, everyday mobility, and socialisation at a neighbourhood level, the thesis contributes to contemporary debates on leisure within the wider feminist literature, as well as to the current growing interest in everyday life in Turkish social science literature. Examination of the feminist literature on women’s leisure suggests that contextualising leisure within the structure of women’s everyday as a whole is fundamental to an understanding of their leisure. The more contemporary feminist studies on women’s leisure focus on how to understand the dynamic and ever-changing nature of power struggles between different groups, with different capitals and identities, in a specific context. The newly emerging studies on women’s leisure within different country contexts, outside of the North American and European sphere, foreground the necessity to embed leisure experiences within socio-cultural aspects of the context, where additional dynamics, such as the role of religion or the meanings attributed to family and individual independence may significantly differ from Western societies. The current thesis builds on and expands these later works by projecting the empirical focus on Turkey and thereby shedding light on the relevance and limitations of the existing literature in explaining women’s leisure in other contexts around the world. It critically engages with the existing research on (women’s) leisure in Turkey, which is scant and embodies certain limitations. The findings presented in this study illustrate that the prevailing gender order, which confines women to the ideals of the heterosexual family, plays a central role in regulating leisure behaviour. Class, particularly, gives shape both to the existence of leisure spaces in one’s neighbourhood and constructs the “respectability” of social behaviour differently. The thesis makes an original contribution to the existing feminist leisure research in terms of rethinking traditional assumptions about leisure, broadening the definition of leisure and highlighting the significance of local cultural context. It also makes an original contribution to research on gendered everyday in Turkey by evidencing the usefulness of the concept of leisure as a lens to investigate the urban everyday, beyond the dichotomies of work time, free time, workspace, family space, production/consumption etc.