The gendered workplaces of women garment workers in Istanbul

Abstract Drawing on 20 semi-structured interviews with women garment workers in a low-income neighbourhood of Istanbul, and observations in the ateliers where they worked, this article examines their work experiences in the gendered and sexualised work atmosphere of garment workshops. There are three interrelated levels upon which the gender-related issues emerge in women garment workers’ stories. The first set of discourses portrays young female garment workers in highly sexualised terms, and the second concerns the use of kinship vocabulary and avoidance of impersonal work relationships. That is, women workers’ experiences in capitalist production sites were trivialised and regulated through the sexualisation of their bodies and the deployment of kinship idioms while addressing their role at the workplace. The third level analyses women’s submissive, subversive or contradictory responses to these gendered disciplinary techniques and representations, i.e. the construction of their subjectivities. These three levels point to two things: first, cultural presumptions about marriage, women’s sexuality and reproductive cycles are materialised at the workplace. Second, gendered instantiations of these presumptions in a specific work environment are both informed by their familial roles (such as daughter, wife, mother, widowed) and inform their future reproductive preferences (whether they marry, have a child, get a divorce, etc.). This article shows how the ways in which women’s difference is construed and acted upon in the garment industry are inseparable from women’s reproductive decisions.


Introduction
Feminisation of the labour force, [1][2][3][4][5] i.e. women's increased participation in labour markets, is a multi-layered process that reflects profound structural transformations at the global level in the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services. One important layer is the globalisation of production, which gives rise to new industrial zones in low-and middle-income countries under the pressure of increased competition. 6 These manufacturing zones often rely on women's low-cost labour. However, Turkey's export-led industrialisation beginning in the 1980s did not lead to feminisation of the labour force. 7 After three decades of structural adjustment, the urban women's labour force participation is only at 22%, much lower than other low-and middleincome countries outside Middle East and North Africa (MENA). 8 This picture changes somewhat in the textile and garment sectors in which women's labour force participation is at 37%, and 40% only in the garment sector, 9 Turkey's most successful export sector. To survive under the pressure of global competition, export-oriented subcontracting networks and arrangements in garment industry rely on cheap female labour organised around kinship networks in the peripheries of urban centres. 10 Scholarly works pertaining to global factories in the low-and middle-income countries point to the proliferation of the discourses on the docility and malleability of women workers. [11][12][13][14][15] These discourses are used as part of a managerial strategy to attract foreign capital to a country or to discipline the labour force. The studies show that such discourses aim at the creation of the image of "docile third world women" who can be employed and exploited easily. However, in the case of women garment workers in Turkey, managerial discourses that strictly emphasise the docility and malleability of the female workforce in order to attract foreign capital are not common.
In order to understand the social organisation of garment production in Turkey, one needs to explore how existing gender inequalities and immediate and extensive kinship networks, specifically the cheap labour force of young women, are mobilised to sustain a flexible and disciplined garment labour force. This requires both the analysis of disciplinary mechanisms as gendered artefacts and the way women experience, give meaning to and respond to these gendered disciplinary mechanisms. 11,[16][17][18][19] Focusing on the experiences of younger women from low-income, migrant families, who usually engage in lower paying tasks and are informally employed in garment workshops, this paper explores how local gendered discourses and practices about women workers are promoted to maintain a flexible and docile workforce in exportoriented garment production in Turkey.

Methodology
This article draws on 20 semi-structured interviews conducted in 2006 and 2007 with women garment workers living and working in Gazi neighbourhood as well as observations in the sweatshops where they worked. Gazi neighbourhood is located in Gaziosmanpaşa which is one of the centres of Istanbul's most labour-intensive industries and hosts numerous garment sweatshops. 20 All of the women were from low-income families, who had migrated to Istanbul from rural areas in the 1980s or 1990s. Fifteen of the women were unmarried and under the age of 35. All of the women were born in Istanbul and living with their parental families who migrated to Istanbul from rural areas. The other five were either married or divorced and between 30 and 50 years of age (i.e. relatively older). All of the women were working in informal or semi-informal small-scale family-owned garment sweatshops employing 20-50 people in the same neighbourhood, the majority of whom without any social security. These sweatshops are not owned by their parental or conjugal families.
After gaining access to one of these garment sweatshops, I recruited women workers through snowball sampling method and interviewed them mostly in their homes during the weekends. I also socialised with them in cafes and parks in the neighbourhood. The interviews took approximately two hours and started with open-ended questions about the life and work stories of the informants. I was mainly interested in understanding how the workers see themselves vis-à-vis their roles at the workplace and at home. I tried to understand how their marital status, age and status at work inform their relationships with other female and male co-workers and supervisors at the workplace.
I obtained ethical approval for this research from Institutional Review Board for Research at Bogaziçi University. Oral informed consent was obtained from all participants.
I used the qualitative research software (Nvivo) to code, index and organise my data. To process the collected data, I identified common themes that emerged throughout the interviews and terminology used to address those themes by the interviewees as they talked about their work and life experiences. As I analysed the data, I specifically focused on how familial and gender roles are negotiated, strengthened or challenged in garment sweatshops.

Findings
This study identified three interrelated levels upon which gender-related issues emerge in women garment workers' stories. The first level concerns the predominance of sexualised male gaze and public representations of women garment workers at the garment workshop. The operation of gendered discourses and practices, such as familial idioms, sexual harassment, and gossip around the chastity of women workers as a disciplinary mechanism in the operation of the workshop, forges the second level. Finally, women's submissive, subversive or contradictory responses to these techniques and representations, i.e. the construction of their subjectivities, form the third level.

Sexualised male gaze and public representations of women garment workers
The sexualised representations of female garment workers circulating in the workplace inform relations among workers in various ways. Derogatory representations of women garment workers as being potentially promiscuous restrain and shape women workers' discursive and practical interactions among themselves and with male workers. For example, when I asked about her B Can. Reproductive Health Matters 2017;25(S1):S47-S55 S48 relations with other men and women at the workplace, Zeynep, who is 25 and unmarried, says: "I know pretty well who behaves how at the workplace. If I were a bad person, no one but the men would talk to me. Men would say that she is a frivolous girl, and they would have affairs with her, and then give her a kick." She underscores how she is seen as a decent person at the workplace. In a similar vein, women's narratives are full of the minutiae of life at the workplace which signal decency: "It is not good for a woman to have her mobile phone ringing so often at the workplace." "Laughing loudly is not an appropriate behaviour for a decent woman." "Making friends with male workers is an indicator of a woman's frivolity." Women's narratives reveal how hard they work and how vigilant they need to be to dissociate themselves from this image and show their chastity and decency with their bodily actions and words. Women workers frequently evaluate themselves and their female co-workers by male-centred moral criteria. The symbolic violence women exert on themselves and other women dovetails with women's subordination to male gaze at the workplace. In short, the relationships between women workers are informed by socially sanctioned expectations from women depending on their age, familial position and marital status.
Women's bodily self-control at the workplace is affected not only by the publicly circulating sexualised image of the feminine garment worker, but also by the acts of male co-workers or foreman. From the moment she enters the workplace, any female worker is made aware of her body and behaviours. For example, Sabiş, who is 30 years old, not married, working in textiles for 15 years, tells how she always feels her body is constantly being watched and monitored by male workers and foreman: "In our workplace, I constantly bend down and stand up, there is such a big psychological pressure on me that I cannot work without wearing my apron and covering my back. … They look in such a way that I feel so annoyed. They judge you according to your clothes." Another woman, Ayşe, tells how it was hard for her to get used to being watched as she eats her lunch and how she was thinking if there was something wrong with the way she eats her food. All women workers I interviewed stated how they are annoyed with the way male workers and foremen look at them as they work, eat, chat and walk. Women's bodies and acts are the object of male gaze and visual surveillance at garment sweatshops. This generalised male gaze at the workshop is inevitably a sexualised gaze, which imagines women as an object of desire. Labouring at the workshop as a woman comes with an awareness that one's acts and words are constantly being watched. This turns out to be vital for the gendered regulation and disciplining of daily encounters at the workplace. In the following, gendered managerial control at the workplace will be examined in more detail with a specific focus on the role of family and familial idioms and sentiments.

Global workplace regimes, local mediations and familial sentiments
The sexualised male gaze and public representations of women garment workers are complemented by the pervasiveness of a series of familial networks and idioms in the everyday life in garment workshop. The familial networks within which young women garment workers are embedded not only influence the way they enter or drop out of paid work and make decisions over their life trajectories, but also inform the way management develops strategies for efficient production. The use of kinship vocabulary and avoidance of impersonal work relationships are indispensable for a flexible workforce to sustain profitability in the export-oriented garment industry. This section explores the ways in which the family, familial networks and idioms are inseparable to the analysis of production relations in garment workshops.
Despite high levels of informality and sporadic spatial expansion of garment workshops, semiinformal workplace codes are universally effective in all garment workshops across Istanbul. Yörük 21 shows that there is a strictly regulated work and time discipline even in the small garment workshops which are usually family-owned enterprises and employ unregistered workers including many family members, relatives and friends. The way in which employees are recruited, payments negotiated and working hours are organised are similar in most urban workshops. The long and exhausting B Can. Reproductive Health Matters 2017;25(S1):S47-S55 S49 working hours are the rule in garment workshops. They work six days a week. Given the demand-driven nature of global garment production, overtime shifts are not announced beforehand, which means that workers are subject to arbitrary interruptions of their life schedules. However, these despotic forms of regulations can be applied flexibly for family members or relatives working in family-owned workshops. In garment factories, leaving work for the bathroom or smoking, chatting or even chewing a gum might be a reason to get a scolding from the foremen. This is one reason why many young women opt for workshops owned and run by families, where they can chat with their co-workers, visit the bathroom whenever they want to, smoke or eat snacks during production, or arrive a little bit late at the workplace.
In family-owned garment sweatshops, even if the employee is not related to the sweatshop owners, workplace relations are mediated through familial idioms, which are the dominant and common form of address among workers and employers. The workers call the boss and the foreman, who are almost always male, abi [elder brother], even when they are much younger. The employers call relatively older women abla [elder sister]. The use of the familial terminology in the public sphere to evoke familial sentiments is commonplace in Turkey. 22 Then the question is which sentiments are evoked, by whom and for what in the workplace? Hanım, who works as a quality controller in a relatively big denim workshop, tells this story. The boss invites her to his office to warn her about a group of workers, who, it turns out, are trying to form a workers' union at the workplace. He says to her, "I am going to tell you something that I don't believe" and tells how disappointed he was to hear that her name was in the list. Hanım denies this and asks for a confrontation with those who told him that she was going to be one of the founders of the trade union at the workplace. The conversation ends with his assurance: "There is no need to do something like that, we believe in you and we trust you. If you have any problems, directly come to me, there is nothing that I cannot solve." During the conversation, the boss invokes the feelings of loyalty and faithfulness that are expected of Hanım with a familial, paternalistic language. Therefore, he softens the terms of the encounter with Hanım, as a worker, by depicting her as a loyal member of the companyas familysince she has been working in this company for a long time. By rejecting the anonymity of workeremployer relationships, and the impersonal, specific, rule regulated character of the rights and duties that pertain to such a relationship, the boss reframes the relationship with the worker in familial terms, where rights and duties are more amorphous and open-ended. Hanım's depiction of her previous workplace reflects a similar understanding of idealised workplace relations, which is full of appeals to family sentiments, such as affection, protection and security.
"We had such a pretty environment there, full of love, compassion, respect just like in a family … My previous boss used to tell me this. He also used to tell me 'Hanım, my daughter, if someone passes a word to you, tell me, even if he is the most talented machinist, I will dismiss him, I will not listen to him, we are brothers-sisters here.'" In Hanım's narrative, familial relations and sentiments are perceived to operate as a protective shelter against brutal work conditions. Submission to arbitrary, personalised and gendered power relations emerge as a way of securing one's position and rights at the workplace.
Such examples in which both employers and workers refer to various familial relationships are abundant in women workers' narratives. These examples show that the bosses or foremen create moments and encounters in which they say to women workers that they expect them to be loyal to the workshop, as to a family. These encounters turn out to be an effective way of keeping wages low and workers loyal and obedient. Since workers are recruited mainly through kin networks and most women workers opt for workshops belonging to the family or neighbours, kin relations and metaphors are useful to prevent absenteeism and guarantee the continuity of the labour force. The management also makes use of various familial concerns of the workers to legitimise or naturalise the exploitative work. In other words, economic relations under the guise of familial discourses, idioms and reciprocities contribute to the invisibility of exploitation of women's labour 10,17,23 by naturalising the hierarchy between women workers and managers through kin terms and relations.
Ngai 19 and Rofel 24 cite examples from Chinese workplaces in which women workers use family B Can. Reproductive Health Matters 2017;25(S1):S47-S55 S50 and female reasons including menstruation pains or various familial obligations for taking time off work. Kondo,18 in her book on gender and power relations in a Japanese workshop, also observes that the perpetuation of familial roles of women in the workplace facilitates a certain degree of flexibility. Women workers are tolerated because their contribution to work is seen as secondary, and they are assumed to have other obligations outside the workplace as a result of naturalised gender expectations. Although this carries the risk of perpetuating patriarchal familial roles, it offers women workers extra time and flexibility that male workers are deprived of. In the everyday life of most garment workshops in Turkey, however, being a woman or raising women-specific reasons, such as menstruation, does not necessarily relax working conditions. Nearly all women in this study recount stories in which they desperately ask for permission to take care of their sick children or parents, but the foreman or director does not let them go. If they miss a workday without the permission of the foreman, three days' pay is cut from their monthly payments. Women can cite neither sickness nor menstruation for taking time off work. Nuran tells how women who have severe menstruation pains each month are usually seen as useless and easily dismissed. In many garment workshops, it is generally the women who do the cleaning and quality control and they stand all day at work. Sabiş says: "There are old women in my section. They suffer from chronic pain, but they could not voice this. Actually, women are not weak at all in terms of the work they undertake, according to me, women work harder than men do, but they are not respected as much as men are respected. When a man expresses his problems, he is listened to, but whenever a woman tells her problems regarding the work, she is regarded as a person who has problems." In garment workplaces in Turkey, familial roles and obligations, and female-related problems do not provide women with a strategy to protect themselves from the harshness of work.

Formation of women's subjectivities at the intersection of home and work
Up to this point I tried to show that women workers' position at the workplace is largely informed by familial positions and idioms as well as various allusions concerning their sexuality. However, women's engagement in paid work since their childhood has repercussions for their familial relations and their status as daughter or mother at home. An analysis concerning the subjectivities of women workers needs to trace the interactions and contradictions between their familial roles and obligations on the one hand and their work experiences on the other. The recent ethnographies on women workers in global factories assert that the rising consumption culture with its seductive impulses creates desires for personal autonomy and self-realisation in young women workers. 11,19,24 These desires are generally in contradiction with their familial duties and obligations. The incomes of the women I talked to were indispensable for their families. They all took pride in being in this position in different ways. However, they also find themselves entrapped between their familial obligations and personal desires. The way they express this entrapment and develop strategies to deal with it depends on their familial position, marital status and age.
The narratives of young, unmarried girls revolve around unfulfilled desires and postponed marriages, whereas the narratives of mothers, widowed or not, emphasise their unending and tedious struggles to survive with their families, rather than their personal desires. Despite the employers' discourse that young women are temporary labourers since they quit work after marriage, for the young women I talked to the idea of getting married does not seem to be an exit strategy from work. They do not describe the idea of marriage as a possible protective shelter against the brutality of working conditions. Having lived with jobless fathers, the fear that they will continue to live the same oppression when they get married dominates their narratives. Moreover, they say that they have doubts about marriage because if they marry and stop working they cannot ask their husbands for money, as they are used to earning and spending their own money since their childhood. In short, they do not perceive marriage and work as contradictory spheres, rather their present vulnerability within their parental families and being obliged to work for the survival of the family for years combine to produce highly defensive stances towards marriage. The parental family's continuous need for their support perpetuates this stance. Yet, the families of these young women still tightly regulate their everyday lives.

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Despite such hardships, women develop some tactics to carve more personal spaces for themselves. The basic and most common tactic deployed by them is to lie to their families about their wages or work schedules. They want to spend more time with their friends. They complain how little they are able to spend on themselves or to save despite being engaged in paid-labour for years. Thus, their grievances regarding work and familial obligations constantly intersect with their demands to spend more time and money for themselves. In an environment where neither the maternal family nor existing work emerges as a source of identification and support, they intend to leave garment work for a better paying and cleaner job. Despite the fact that the discourse of sacrifice is still an important discursive tool for them to deal with their predicaments, their unfulfilled personal desires create strong feelings of resentment both towards work and family. The feelings of meaninglessness and predestination occasionally erupt in their narratives, undermining all the alternative prospects in their lives. These young women's sense of self is determined by the trope of "not being able to do what one desires in this life, to realise one's dreams" either due to the strict time regulations of work or the unending needs of their parental families.
The narratives of married women are slightly different. The theme of sacrifice is also indispensable for these women's construction of their selfimage. However, as opposed to the young daughters, rather than emphasising their unfulfilled desires, their narratives seem to be characterised by pride arising from being able to sustain the survival of their families. The unending calculation of debts and payments and how they try hard to spend as little as possible are the main topics of their narratives. Instead of lamenting their fates, they emphasise their effort and success to look after their family, and their ability to stand on their feet. 25 Moreover, despite the economic hardships they endure (which are perpetuated by the unemployed or deceased husband) they constantly mention how they worked honestly to support their families and endured various difficulties at work.

Discussion
The relationship between capitalist production and reproduction has been on the agenda of feminist scholars since the 1970s. Debunking the once popular distinction between sex and gender, they have challenged the ideologies and theories that approach reproduction and reproductive labour as natural or biological processes and advanced critical analyses of reproduction as a socially and politically determined process. For example, Federici, 26 among others, showed the centrality of women's reproductive processes during the formation of primitive capitalist accumulation. The debates about the importance of women's reproductive roles for capitalist production unfolded against the backdrop of the capitalist crisis of the 1970s. Indeed, one response to this crisis has been increased employment of women. 27 Feminisation of work and production across the globe has also given rise to the emergence of ethnographic studies on women workers in global factories.
In the light of these studies, I show with ethnographic examples from my field research among women workers in Turkey the inseparability of discursive and material dimensions of reproduction, sexuality and capitalist work in garment sweatshops. In order to trace the interactions between capitalist production and women's reproductive processes, we can benefit from Almeling's definition of reproduction as "the biological and social process of having or not having children," and her invitation to see reproduction not as isolated events but as a multi-layered process that unfolds "throughout the life course and at all analytical levels." 28 As disciplinary processes take gendered forms in garment sweatshops; cultural presumptions about marriage, women's sexuality, reproductive cycles are materialised at the workplace. Gendered instantiations of these presumptions about women in a specific work environment are both informed by their familial roles (such as daughter, wife, mother, widowed) and inform their future reproductive preferences (whether they marry, have a child, get a divorce).
Existing literature on the relationship between women workers and reproductive and sexual health predominantly focus on the question of women's access to reproductive and sexual health knowledge and services. These studies explore diverse social, economic and cultural barriers to access and their emotional and material costs to women workers. [29][30][31][32] Most such research, however, fails to situate women's reproductive processes within broader networks of kin and work.

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Ethnographic research that examines the role of sexuality and family dynamics in manufacturing jobs [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19] provides an important lens to re-think the relationship between capitalist production and reproduction. Inspired from this literature, this article shows the ways in which women's difference is construed and acted upon in the garment industry are inseparable from women's reproductive decisions in both mediated and unmediated ways. Women's reproductive capacity first and foremost is seen as an alibi to label them as temporary and disposable in garment ateliers. Employers frame young women as disposable workforce for they think women's productivity has limits that come with marriage and childbirth. By citing gender essentialist arguments about women's bodies and reproductive processes, sweatshop owners seek to legitimise their preference for single young women over older married women.
The stories of sexualisation of women's bodies and sexual harassment are also implicated in women's reproductive decisions because it is usually the young, unmarried or widowed women who are subject to such attitudes. In most garment sweatshops, foremen and owners intervene in young girls' relations with male workers, asserting that they cannot let these women tarnish the company's name. It is mostly the sexually harassed women who end up being stigmatised, disparaged or even dismissed from the workplace. Harassment and discrimination these women face at the workplace dovetail with their marital decisions. Given the fact that having a child out of wedlock is not socially acceptable in Turkey, women's encounters with the opposite sex at work have concrete consequences for women and their short-and long-term reproductive decisions.
Even though many young women end up getting married after dating a co-worker, some insist on staying unmarried. Raised in families in which fathers usually cannot take care of the family, they work to take care of their parents. Some are afraid that they will experience the same thing with their husbands in their own conjugal families. Some others say that marriage might mean they have to quit work and it is unimaginable for them to ask their husbands for money because they are used to earning their own money from an early age.