Under the Gaze of Patriarchy: Turkish Women Academics' Narratives of Subjectification and Resistance

Abstract

Patriarchy is a system deeply embedded in cultural, familial, economic, and state structures worldwide, creating power imbalances and inequality (Abalkhail, 2017, 2019; Arat, Z., 2022; Johnson, 2014; Kabeer, 2016; Rezai-Rashti, 2015; Walby, 1989). In Türkiye, the convergence of neoliberal policies, Islamist conservative ideologies, and populist authoritarianism has intensified patriarchal structures (Arat, Z.,2022; Gokay & Aybak, 2023; Kandiyoti, 2016; Uysal, 2019). Despite achieving the highest representation in academia among OECD countries at 45% (World Bank, 2024), women academics continue to encounter patriarchy in various spheres of their lives (Bakioğlu & Ülker, 2018; Bülbül, 2021; Tombal, 2023). Within this context, this narrative inquiry strove to capture and reflect the lived experiences of nine women academics with patriarchy across macro, meso, and micro levels.

Informed by (feminist) poststructuralism and drawing upon Foucault's understanding of power, Allen's concept of "power-with, Crenshaw's intersectionality, Marková's intersubjectivity, Arendt's spaces of appearance, and Karam and Afiouni's career success framework, this study addressed three research questions: 1) How does patriarchy manifest within the micro, meso, and macro domains of Turkish women academics' lives? 2) How do Turkish women academics navigate patriarchal power technologies? and 3) How do women academics conceptualise and navigate career success within Türkiye's patriarchal climate? The analysis of participant narratives revealed that at the macro level, patriarchy operated through state-endorsed biopower and patriarchal disciplinary power technologies, which produced gendered regimes of truth. At the meso level, women encountered gendered institutional practices such as motherly expectations, limited mentorship opportunities, exclusionary networks, the imposter phenomenon, and homosocial networking. At the micro level, the family emerged as a primary site of disciplinary power technologies. Additionally, the findings of this study revealed the emergence of various subject positions that women occupied while navigating patriarchal power technologies and discourses.

This study made four key contributions: first, by integrating Allen's power-with, Marková's intersubjectivity, and Arendt's spaces of appearance, it proposed a feminist resistance ecosystem that enables women to resist and subvert patriarchy; second, it extended Karam and Afiouni's career success framework through a values-structure tension model; third, it revealed the mutually constitutive relationship between imposter phenomenon and patriarchy, and fourth, it introduced novel concepts, namely "patriarchtopus", "spatiotemporal resistarity", and "spatiotemporal feminist bridges". These contributions offer theoretical and practical implications for feminist scholarship and institutional practices in Türkiye and other patriarchal contexts.