Fragile identities: prostitutes as signifiers of patriarchy and heteronormativity in Turkey

Abstract

'Prostitute', being a term or a stigma, both talks through the mouth of patriarchal system and deciphers it as an object, a tool and a subject created and reproduced by this very system over and over again. In a society where religion has penetrated into the social everyday life practices and where culture works as a shaping mechanism beyond law, female body can claim existence or agency only as much as the hegemonic patriarchal ideology consents. Prostitute body which has deliberately detached itself from or been cast out of the dominant ideology has to either embrace the 'victim' identity exposed to her or become one of the gears of the mechanism as a power holding subject. The extracts from the interviews studied in this work reveal that prostitutes reproduce the victimization discourse as a way of realizing their social existence and by doing that they describe the 'essential' elements of womanhood definition such as marriage and motherhood as a lack, nostalgia or a utopia. Those women see men in their lives either as sacred and untouchable figures or as symbols of power to succumb to. Therefore, they serve as the sustainable and suppressible source created by the patriarchal and heteronorrnative ideology to satisfy male desire. When the interview extracts of the prostitutes who reject the victimization discourse, knowingly or not, are analyzed, it is seen that the only way to get empowered for them is to appropriate masculine power and become an oppressor or a masculanized woman. Thus, it still remains a utopia to talk about prostitutes as empowered women and a counter-power against patriarchy and heteronorrnativity.