Recent decades have witnessed both a renewed energy in feminist activism and widespread attacks taking back hard-won rights. Despite powerful feminist movements, the Covid-19 pandemic has significantly undermined the progress women have struggled for decades to achieve; how can this be? What explains this paradox of a strong feminist movement coexisting with stubborn patriarchal arrangements? How can we stop the next global catastrophe initiating a similar backlash? This book suggests that the limitations of social theory prevent feminist strategies from initiating transformative changes and achieving permanent gains. It investigates the impact of theoretical shortcomings upon feminist strategies by engaging with two clusters of work: ungendered accounts of capitalist development and theories on gendered oppression and inequality. Decentring feminist theorising grounded in histories and developments of the global North, the book provides an original theory of the patriarchal system by analysing changes within its forms and degrees as well as investigating the relationship between the gender, class and race-ethnicity based inequalities. Turkey offers a case that challenges assumptions and calls for rethinking major feminist categories and theories, thereby shedding light on the dynamics of social change in the global South. The timely intervention of this book is, therefore, crucial for feminist strategies going forward.
The book emerges at the intersections between Gender, International Development, Political Economy, and Sociology and its main readership will be found in, but not limited to, these disciplinary fields. The material covered in this book will be of great interest to students and researchers in these areas as well as policy makers and feminist activists.
Author(s): Ece Kocabıçak
Series: Routledge Studies in Gender and Economics
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 207
City: London
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
List of figures
List of tables
Acknowledgements
Introduction: The Contemporary Paradox
1. Reconsidering the determinants of socio-economic transformation
2. Bringing the causes of gender inequality into the focus of feminist analysis
3. Advantages of historical materialism for feminism
4. The patriarchal, capitalist and racist case of Turkey
5. The plan of the book
PART I: Theoretical Shortcomings and Political Implications
1. The Ungendered Accounts of Capitalist Development
1.1. The gendered patterns of labour movement
1.2. The patriarchal path of agrarian transformation
1.3. Landowning male peasants as an influential political actor
1.4. The ungendered perceptions of the state
1.5. Essentialist interpretations of culture and religion
1.6. Rethinking the problem
1.7. Conclusion
2. Conceptual Abandonment of Patriarchal Labour Exploitation
2.1. The initial accounts of patriarchal exploitation
2.1.1. Men exploit women as a whole
2.1.2. Men exploit women’s reproductive abilities and labour
2.1.3. Men exploit women’s labour within the family
2.2. Causality reduced to capitalism: The social reproduction approach
2.3. Obscured causality: Theories on varieties of gender regime
2.4. Conclusion
3. Theorising the Patriarchal System of Exploitation
3.1. Political implications of theoretical shortcomings
3.2. Patriarchal exploitation of labour
3.2.1. Distinctiveness of patriarchal labour exploitation
3.2.2. Exploitation or not?
3.3. Patriarchal collective subject
3.4. Systems of exploitation and regimes of oppression
3.5. The state
3.6. Theorising gender regimes in the global South
3.6.1. Debate on rural forms of patriarchy
3.6.2. The premodern and modern forms of domestic patriarchy
3.7 Conclusion
PART II: Varieties of Patriarchy and Implications for Capitalist Development: The Case of Turkey
4. New Varieties of Patriarchy: The Early Republican Period
4.1. The premodern form of domestic patriarchy
4.2. The modern form of domestic patriarchy
4.3. The patriarchal gender contract in the early Republican period
4.4. The first wave feminist movement
4.5. Division of rural and urban women
4.6. Conclusion
5. Emergence of Neoliberal Patriarchy: The Contemporary Period
5.1. Emergence of the neoliberal form of public patriarchy
5.1.1. Women’s double burden of paid and unpaid labour
5.1.2. The rise of the public patriarchal state
5.1.3. Changes within the gendered patterns of civil society
5.1.4. State interventions in violence against women
5.2. Hegemony of premodern and modern domestic patriarchies
5.2.1. Limited coverage of the double burden experience
5.2.2. Persistence of domestic patriarchal state
5.2.3. Male dominance over the civil society domain
5.2.4. Being trapped in a violent heterosexual family
5.3. Conclusion
6. Uneven and Combined Development of Patriarchy
6.1. The geopolitics of patriarchal transformation in Turkey
6.2. Diversified experiences of women
6.3. Alevi women and religion-based oppression
6.4. Kurdish women and ethnicity-based oppression
6.5. Class based oppression and exploitation
6.6. Conclusion
7. The Turkish Trajectory of Social Change: A Comparative Perspective
7.1. Brief note on the methodology
7.2. Implications for the gendered patterns of proletarianisation
7.2.1. Gendered dispossession and labour exploitation
7.2.2. Rural women’s exclusion from proletarianisation
7.3. Implications for capital accumulation strategies
7.3.1. Urban wage levels and labour supply constraint
7.3.2. Strategies of Turkish manufacturers
7.4. Implications for culture and religion
7.5. Conclusion
PART III: Towards a New Conceptual Framework
8. Discussion: The Patriarchal, Capitalist and Racist Totality
8.1. Shortcomings of theories on socio-economic transformation
8.2. Limitations of feminist theories
8.3. Feminist adaptation of complexity theory
8.4. Existing interpretations of historical materialism
8.4.1. The social reproduction approach
8.4.2. French materialist feminism
8.5. Reclaiming the historical materialist methodology and ontology
8.5.1. Collective subject and mediation
8.5.2. Totality
8.6. Conclusion
Conclusion: Drivers & Dampeners of Social Change
1. Diversified experiences of women
2. Capitalism or culture based reductionisms
3. Political power of the patriarchal collective subject
4. Strategic alliances of the feminist movement
Index
