Nükhet Sirman (born 1951) is a Turkish social anthropologist. She earned a doctorate degree from Britain's University College London in 1988, and since 1989, she is a professor of anthropology at the Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, Turkey. She has done academic analysis of the feminist movement in Turkey and introduced the concept of "familial citizenship" in the academic realm.
Sirman finished high school education at the American Robert College of Istanbul and did a B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. in anthropology at the University College London.[4][5] She completed her Ph.D. in 1988 with the thesis titled Peasants and Family Farms: The Position of Households in Cotton Production in a Village of Western Turkey.[4][6] It was an ethnographic study of the production of cotton in Turkey's Söke which detailed "the production and labor processes during the 1980s in terms of household".[7] Since 1989, she is a professor of anthropology at sociology department of Boğaziçi University.[8]
Sirman is a social anthropologist.[9] Her research subjects include gender, establishment of gender identity, ethnic conflict, family and kinship, feminist theory, interpretive methods, postcolonial societies, rural sociology, and sociology of emotions.[3][5] She has also studied "gender construction under nationalist discourses", "honor crimes and violence against women", "Kurdish women's movements", and "settlement of internally displaced persons".[1]
Sirman is a feminist.[1] Between 1984 and 1991, she participated in Turkey's feminist movement, and she has carried out research on the life of women in Turkey.[10] In her research on the feminist struggle, Sirman pointed out three movements which she considers as "standard reference points" in the study of feminism in Turkey. She views the resistance to the "Ottoman family system" by women "within the framework of proposed reforms to save the empire" during its final decades as the first, the according of numerous rights to women by the "modernizing Turkish state" as the second, and the "reaction" of women in opposition to "the patronizing role of the Turkish state in defining how women's liberation should look" that surfaced as an after-effect of the 1980 Turkish coup d'état as the third historically important movement.[11] Sirman is of the view that the feminist movement in the 1980s was Turkish women's stand against the "Kemalist regime and the limitations of state feminism inspired by Kemalism". Some feminism and social science scholars are of the opinion that the leftist and Kemalist ideologies equally repress women's gender identity. Sirman suggests that though the "integration" of women in "traditional Islamic", "statist Kemalist" and "revolutionary leftist" ideologies made them enter the political arena, the feminist movement will gain momentum only when it would steer clear of these ideologies.[12][13][14]
In her study on the "discursive and cultural productions" of nation state, Sirman has put forward the idea that "women were made part of the nation through the control of their bodies and, through cultural elaborations of femininity, the definition and control of the cultural boundaries of the nation".[15]
Sirman studied Turkey's "nation-building discourse" which had established that a "sovereign" man and his "dependent" wife or mother are "ideal" citizens. In 2005, she devised the term "familial citizenship" to describe "a situation in which a position within a particular familial discourse provides the person with a status within the national polity." Daphna Hacker views Sirman's definition of the term as "relational and identity-based". Drawing from Christian Joppke's definition of citizenship as "membership in a State", Hacker herself applies a "physical-legal sense" to term "familial citizenship" and defines it as "the right of family members to be citizens of the same country, based on their family relations". "Familial citizenship" differs in meaning from the term "family citizenship" which was devised by Pierpaolo Donati in 1998. Donati wrote that "family citizenship means that the family as such must enjoy its own set of rights–obligations, as a reality of solidarity, and not simply as the sum of the rights–obligations of its individual members".[16]: 150
From October 2016 to June 2017, Sirman worked on a research project titled Creating a Life Alongside the Law as a research fellow at the Nantes Institute for Advanced Study Foundation. In her research, she worked to present an ethnographic study report from her field study that was conducted in Turkey's Mersin where the Kurds have moved in to, and are not living within the bounds of official laws, after being "forcefully displaced from their villages in the 1990s". Sirman labored to answer — "what exactly is the law, and what does it mean to be alongside the law; and, secondly, what do we understand from the notion of "a life," what constitutes a life?"[1]
For instance, the sociologist Nükhet Sirman's (1951– ) analysis of the identity of a specifically "Turkish" feminism' (Sirman 1988: 2) describes feminist politics in the 1980s as one that has had to carve a space for itself by engaging in debates with two other ideologies that attempt to capture the same political ground: left-wing ideologies propounding a class-based political struggle and Islamic discourses. Both Islam and the left in Turkey today have their own recipes for the 'liberation of women from capitalist oppression'. (Sirman 1988: 3)
Dr. Nükhet Sirman ile akademik hayatı, Türkiye'nin mevcut toplumsal sorunları ve sosyal bilimlerdeki metodolojik ve epistemolojik sorunlar üzerine, çalıştığı kurumda uzun bir söyleşi gerçekleştirdik. Nükhet Sirman halen Boğaziçi Üniversitesi Sosyoloji bölümünde akademik hayatına devam etmektedir. Sirman özellikle, temel uzmanlık alanı olan kırsal ve tarımsal dönüşüm sosyolojisilantropolojisi, akrabalık ve aile antropolojisi konularında önemli çalışmalar yapmış ve önemli tartışmalar inşa etmiştir. Son dönemde feminist kuram, duygu sosyolojisi, etnik sorunlar ve erkek-kadın kimliklerinin kuruluşu üzerine çalışmaktadır. Yayınlanmış kitapları arasında "Turkish State - Turkish Society" (Andrew Finkel ile birlikte ed.) (Routledge: London, 1990; Üç Kuşak Cumhuriyet, (İstanbul: Tarih Vakfi Yurt Yayınları, 1998) vardır. Prof. Sirman, halen kurucusu olduğu Amargi dergisinin yayın kurulu üyeliğini yapmaktadır. Hocam, isterseniz kişisel serüveninizden başlayalım. Akademik kariyeriniz hangi aşamalardan geçti, lisans, master ve doktora eğitiminizi nerede yaptiniz? 1972 yılında Robert Kolej'den mezun olduğumda tek istediğim şey yurtdışına gitmekti. Ve İngiltere'ye gittim. İngiltere'de antropoloji okudum, lisans derecesi olarak. Yüksek lisans ve doktoramı da antropoloji bölümünde yaptım. 1988'de doktora derecemi University College of London'da yaptım. 1981'de ODTÜ Sosyoloji Bölümü'ne girdim. 1989 yılına kadar oradaydım. 1989'dan itibaren de burada, Boğaziçi Üniversitesi'ndeyim.
Sirman, N. (1988). "Peasants and Family Farms: The Position of Households in Cotton Production in a Village of Western Turkey," unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of London
The literature on farmers in Turkey is underdeveloped in terms of ethnographies of agricultural production. The remarkable exception to this is Nükhet Sirman's ethnography of cotton production in Söke, in which she describes the production and labor processes during the 1980s in terms of household.
(footnote) Sirman, Nükhet. "Peasants and Family Farms: The Position of Households in Cotton Production in a Village of Western Turkey." Ph.D. Dissertation, University college, 1988.
Nükhet Sirman is Professor of Anthropology at the Department of Sociology, Boğaziçi University. She has worked on gender, nationalism and the construction of the modern family in Turkey.
Nükhet Sirman, a British trained social anthropologist, writing extensively on feminism, the status of women, nationalism, and gender in Turkey, and currently working in the Sociology Department at Bogazici University, evaluates the present status of the discipline as follows...
Halen Boğaziçi Üniversitesi Sosyoloji Bölümü'nde doçent olan Nükhet Sirman, 1984-1991 yıllan arasında Türkiye'de gelişen feminist harekete katılmış, kadın yaşamını odak alan araştırmalar yapmıştır.
Thus, Nükhet Sirman came to define the women's movement of the 1980s as a reaction against the Kemalist regime and the limitations of state feminism inspired by Kemalism.
As Nukhet Sirman states, "The women's movement most directly developed in opposition to Kemalist feminism." ( 1989, 1–35).
Particularly since the beginning of the 1980s, an "autonomous" feminist movement has flourished in society. Giving credit to the fact that women entered the political realm along with their integration into the statist Kemalist, revolutionary leftist, and the traditional Islamic ideologies, Nükhet Sirman acknowledges that the women's movement will become more influential in society only when it is free of these movements and ideologies. Not only the detachment of feminism from Kemalist ideology but also its connections to leftist ideologies is questioned within the feminist movement. Feminist social scientists assert that the leftist ideology oppresses the gender identity of women as much as the Kemalist one does, pointing at feminism as an example of "bourgeois deviation" and a way of confining women to traditional roles.
Focusing on the discursive and cultural productions of the nation-state, Nükhet Sirman notes: "Women were made part of the nation through the control of their bodies and, through cultural elaborations of femininity, the definition and control of the cultural boundaries of the nation" (Sirman 2005, 149).