Hayrunnisa Goksel

Women on the Margins of Life and Death: Honour Crime and Governmentality in Turkey Hayrunnisa Goksel

The issue of honour crime is much debated in contemporary Turkey as well as in the Middle East. Honour crime can be perceived as the murder of a woman by one of her family members in the name of ¿redeeming honour of the family.¿ I intend to bring a multidimensional approach towards the issue of honor crime to show the interplay between different discourses on women and family. By using Foucauldian conceptualization of governmentality, I analyse the operation of honour at state and governmental levels in order to construct a portrayal of the cases of honour killings on historical and theoretical axis. Firstly, my framework provides a path for understanding the process of how the issue of honour crime becomes the object of knowledge and how women¿s bodies appear as the site of discussions, contestations and negotiations. The second is how issues of tradition and nationalism come together in the recent discussions of honour crime. In general, this study opens a new path for anyone, who is interested in social sciences and specifically gender studies, and who wants to grasp the interaction between state politics and sexual violence.