Gender, Class, and Respectability in Leisure : Understanding Women’s ‘Free Time Activities’ in Modern Turkey

Abstract

This book interrogates the role of gender and class in shaping women’s everyday leisure practices. Drawing on empirical research in urban Turkey, the book explores how leisure is perceived and practised by women within their communities.

The book examines the relationship of women’s leisure to their labour, women’s access to and uses of public leisure spaces, and the dynamics of their everyday sociability within their neighbourhoods. It is the first book to apply Skegg’s concept of ‘respectability’ – socially recognised judgments and standards which label the ‘right’ practices, that hold morality and power in a given context – as a theoretical tool with which to understand leisure in a country in which modernisation and Westernisation have been a central dynamic shaping political, social, and cultural life. This analysis reveals that two measures of gendered respectability – reproductive work and the honour code – and how they mediate with the classed measures of respectability, are essential to understanding women’s leisure practices in the Turkish context. The book argues that these interactions are likely shared in many Global South countries, including Islamic societies. Therefore, this analysis shines important new light on women’s experiences more broadly, and on the social, political, and cultural dynamics of traditional social structures in a modernising world.

This book is fascinating reading for anybody with an interest in leisure studies, women’s studies, sociology, cultural studies, or Middle East studies.