Description:

Over the last decades, patriarchy has lost its prominence among Northern feminist theorists as a conceptual tool for theorizing and describing gender. “Out-sourced” to the global South, in the words of Inderpal Grewal, "patriarchy” circulates to explain violence to women done “elsewhere” while remaining undertheorized and devoid of temporal and cultural specificity in our literature. Yet patriarchy remains a critical and named prism through which women and men negotiate their self-making in a variety of contexts. In this talk I suggest a rethinking of the place of patriarchy in gender theory from the perspective of young heterosexual men in Turkey who are the subjects of, and mediums for, (re)producing patriarchy but who have unpatriarchal desires. Their narrated experiences of sex, love, and romance constitute a rich site for furthering the theorization of the masculinity-patriarchy nexus. I suggest the complex mediations of masculinity and patriarchy open an analytic space to reinvigorate the debate about the expulsion of patriarchy from gender theory.

Gul Ozyegin is Associate Professor of Sociology and Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at the College of William and Mary. She is the author of Untidy Gender (2001, Temple University Press), and New Desires, New Selves: Sex, Love, and Piety among Turkish Youth (2015, NYU). She is also editor of Gender and Sexuality in Muslim Cultures (2015, Ashgate Press). Her current research is on intersections of gender, generation, and (un)belonging among different generations of Turks in Germany. She is a recipient of the 2011 Plumeri Award for Faculty excellence and received a fellowship from the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS) during 2006-07 academic year.

This lecture is co-sponsored by the Keyman Program of Modern Turkish Studies