ARTICLES
Where is the Place of Woman in Women-Oriented Services? An example of Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality
Feyza Akınerdem
There are a few striking images when you just enter the web page of Istanbul Metropolian Municipality (İstanbul Büyükşehir Belediyesi, İBB) Women Coordination Center . On the right corner, there is a mother woman in the background of this slogan, “We support our women in every situation.” On the left side, on the orange background, there is the number of the “families” who have applied to the institution, have phoned the call centers, and have been aided. The statistical data is quite impressive: hundreds of applications and a considerable number of families being aided. What does it tell us about the place of woman concerning the services of municipal administrations in Istanbul that the concepts of woman, family, mother, and aid are used side by side like this and that they are the subject matters of statistical data? In order to answer this question, it would of course be useful to examine the women-oriented services closely.
We Conversed with Men
Nil Mutluer
… “but” these are men that aim to fight against all the attributes to manhood that are filled with violence and sexism. Our chat with Dağhan Azaklı, Kürşad Kızıltuğ and Yavuz Atan, who underline that they have started a war with the manhood inside themselves and that this is a long way turned into a bilateral telling of grief as may be expected. We have made cordial chat with the members of the Biz Erkek Değiliz (We Are Not Men) İnitiative, BEDI on manhood, authority, and interaction and common points with feminist and LGBT movements.
Localization of Place
Nükhet Sirman
As the local elections are approaching, I wanted to rethink what we understand from local and if we go further back, from place. Going back because local (yerel) is a word that is derived from locus/place (yer) and today it is more often used to refer to scale. Along with local, we think of words like regional, global and these indicate the covered area discussed. With these words, we can differentiate the covered area from the largest. It is possible arrange from the most area covered to the smaller ones: the largest area being the global and the smallest local.
Place as a word would turn our heads around with the meanings and the uses it includes. It carries the meaning of a location in space, to have a place, to know your place and with words attached to it carries various other metaphorical meanings.
To Say “The End”
Aylin
What are we afraid of most? Of dying? Of staying alone? Of losing the ones we love? Then, except these, what are women afraid of most? Of wrinkles or of cellulite? No! Being Raped. Women are afraid of being raped. And with this fear, life is spent. Walking in an empty street, this fear follows; controlling our door lock at night, there is this fear behind the door. We are right to be afraid because one out of every four women is raped at least once during her life. That is, always there are ones, who are raped, around. Me, you, us.
Well, after so many people are raped, why are not rapists in our prisons? There must be something wrong. Or do these rapists still live with us? Maybe we know some of them, maybe father, son, beloved of one of us. Maybe walking in streets, we saw many in a day. We may have met some.
Sex Workers are Forming Their Union: Red Umbrella Union
Nilgün Yurdalan
Sex workers are marginalized, beaten, killed. They are exposed to violence by family, policemen, media, men in the street, customers, neighbours. Sex workers had been struggling to form a union against the oppression they experience, and they held their first meeting for this aim on 2007, March. The foundation day of the Red Umbrella Union was on the International Sex Workers Day, 3 March 2008. Sex work is very widespread in Turkey but it is being neglected. Especially the sex work of trans people is generally mentioned through transphobia, hatred, and hate killings in which the murderers cannot be found. At about the time we made this interview with Belgin Çelik from Lambdaistanbul LGBT Solidarity Association (Lambdaistanbul LGBTT Dayanışma Derneği, Lambda) about the union and about the problems especially trans sex workers face, Dilek İnce was shot in the evening of 10 November 2008 with a gun by the head. Dilek İnce was one of the complainants and witneses of a court case about the charge against transvestites and transsexuals.
The Homemaker of the House: The Caravel Haired Woman
Aksu Bora
Caravel is actually the name of a type of a sailboat. This woman’s hair curls upwards like the sail of the boat; that is why this hairstyle is called caravel. I do not know whether the caravel woman boards a sailboat or not; I took liking her at home. The caravel woman is a cartoon-like woman, a woman who seems as if she has been drawn. She wears a blouse and a flared skirt and an apron winding around her slim waist. She wears an apron but she also has shoes – which must be high heeled. She sometimes has a vacuum cleaner in her hand, sometimes a tray or a piece of cloth… Usually, she wears a rubber band, she dries her laundry in a garden full of sun, and she bakes her pastries in a wide kitchen.
Transmen Compose Voltran
Aligül Arıkan
We have began to gather under the roof of LambdaIstanbul four months ago regularly as three transmen, after having thought “well, why don’t we come together and talk about ourselves.” First of all, we would like to see how do we interpret ourselves and what do we experience. We recognized that we have similar questions and similar troubles where our experiences have something in common and where they differentiate from each other. Having all of these in our minds, we came together in order to find solutions. I want to talk a little bit about what we had talked in these meetings. Since all three of us are part of both a feminist movement and a LGBTT movement at the same time, our discussions concentrate on “womanhood, manhood, transsexuality and gender, opening the identity, the acceptance of the identity.”
The Fall of Alissa
Yıldız Ramazanoğlu
My father looked through the key hole. Tuncer Bey was standing across the hall in his pajamas. Right at the threshold. “Our son is calling us at a late hour again, embarrassing us like that,” my mother said. A bunch of wildflowers in the shape of a crown, hanging on the door, welcomed us. This ornament, which was peculiar to our neighbors, was a small sign of their being slightly different than us. We rushed into their house.
We were summoned to our neighbor’s apartment by the first phone call; the second call would be soon. We would wait for it in Alissas’ livingroom. There was nothing to do but wait to hear my brother’s voice.
My mother raised her weepy voice to a high pitch. “Son! I don’t want any foreign daughter-in-law.
We Are Paving Our Way in the Midst of a Minefield
Pınar Selek
Up to now I am nurtured by every interview that I have made. But this time something else happened. When four women met, experiences, grieves, resistances and dreams melt into each other… Lives flew forth.
As we continue talking, Eda, Selda, Gülseren and I complete each other, and we stimulate each other.
Eda is the mother of an 18 years old transsexual. The son of Gülseren, who is 20 years old, is a bisexual. And Selma has a gay son, being 25 years old. All three of them facing the challenges of being a mother of a transsexual or a bisexual, all alone, found a place to be relieved in Lambda which is fighting against the decision of closure. There they hugged each other and established “Lambda Family Group”. Mehmet Tarhan, who is a Lambda volunteer and has made big contributions to the establishment of the group, told me that he was much impressed by this process: “I am open to my family but we do not talk about my orientation much. But of course I had some expectations from my family. I have changed through this work a lot. I’ve understood that what we experience as a problem, they experience it as well. It is not easy to be the mother of a homosexual. They are caught by social pressures, mental confusions, reactions among the relationships with relatives, without ever having been prepared. It is hard to struggle against these hardships, since they are not a part of an organization. They experience the shock in front of the death. After being a part of the Lambda family work, I begin to expect less from my family. I observed that we are expecting too much from them… It’s wrong.”
As The Seats Of Sovereignity, Domination Quake, The Canes Of Morality Arise
Selen Lermioğlu Yılmaz & Aysun Sayın
During the arguments about the constitution, “public morality”, which was the basis of many articles connected to the restriction of basic rights and freedoms, is a subject on which many statements according to what it exactly it is, are quite doubtful and vague. Let us see some definitions of Morality from certain sources:
“in the most restricted sense of the word it is concerned with what is (should be) right or wrong. The term is usually used to refer to the concept and/or belief of a system of judgements and principles usually created by a cultural, religious, secular or philosophical society, in order to determine (subjectively) which of people’s behaviours are wrong and which are right.
