CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2016
| Author | Adal, Yilmaz |
|---|---|
| Title | 'Fighting against your own': Kurdish men serving in the Turkish Army |
| Summary | This thesis discusses what kinds of experiences Kurdish men go through in Turkish Army during their military service with regards to the nationalist and gendered rituals, symbols and discourse. It strives to find out what sorts of gendered, specifically masculinities-related, experiences Kurdish men, as a socially de-authorized heterogeneous group, go through during their service in order to understand how the Turkish army, as a highly masculinized institution, becomes a gendered site for men of different ethnic and/or religious minorities in varied ways in Turkey. In order to discuss the experiences of Kurdish men, the thesis relies on a field research in Istanbul where I have conducted twenty semi-structured in-depth interviews with Kurdish men from various categories of difference such as class, religion, political ideology and educational level as well as different time of the service. Since there is a scarce scholarly attention to the military service with regards to the experiences of Kurds in Turkey, this study should be viewed as a step towards addressing the gap in the literature on the military service in Turkey with regards to the experiences of ethnic and religious minorities. In that regard, it shows some of the possible ways in which men of minority groups are made to feel different in the Turkish Army. Through analyzing the narratives of Kurdish men who have served in the Turkish Army, the thesis shows how ethnic, nationalist and gender identities are negotiated, constructed, stabilized or obscured through various acts, discourses, and rituals. It overall argues that the Turkish Army adopts various mechanisms through which it creates its internal others, that although there are variations among the Kurdish men’s perspectives on military service with regards to gendered and nationalist orders in the army, how they navigate the military service is informed by their Kurdishness, and that the Turkish Army becomes a site in which Kurdish men construct forms of masculinity which, on the one hand, complicate hegemonic masculinity in the Turkish Army and, on the other, are still within a patriarchal framework. |
| Supervisor | Helms, Elissa |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2016/adal_yilmaz.pdf |
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