Cultural Sociology

http://cus.sagepub.com/ Public Sphere and Symbolic Power: 'Woman's Voice' as a Case of Cultural Citizenship
Solen Sanli Cultural Sociology 2011 5: 281 originally published online 26 January 2011 DOI: 10.1177/1749975510379965 The online version of this article can be found at: http://cus.sagepub.com/content/5/2/281

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Article

Public Sphere and Symbolic Power: Womans Voice as a Case of Cultural Citizenship
Solen Sanli

Cultural Sociology 5(2) 281299 The Author(s) 2011 Reprints and permission: sagepub. co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1749975510379965 cus.sagepub.com

Metropolitan State College of Denver and Regis University

Abstract
This study discusses Habermass notions of public sphere and power, and suggests a novel approach by complementing Habermass limited take on the political with Bourdieus notion of symbolic power. To this end, cultural citizenship is used as a helpful concept. The study draws on the analysis of a Turkish talk show format womans voice (WV) and its audience. It is proposed that viewing WV should be considered a political activity. An analysis of womens first-hand narrations of the domestic and symbolic violence in their lives reveals that many women continue to live under the patriarchal authority of the honour code and the Turkish ruling elite have until recently neglected the needs of these women. WV provides a sphere where the needs and problems of these women are discussed for the first time in Turkish broadcasting history. It is shown with examples from field research that WV may potentially create subversive subjectpositions among the disadvantaged groups of women, such as rural-urban migrants.

Keywords
cultural citizenship, honour code, public sphere, symbolic power, talk show, television, Turkey, women

Introduction
In a recent Time article, media and television critic James Poniewozik (2008) hails so-called soft media programs such as The View, Colbert Report, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Saturday Night Live as politically relevant in their ability to raise issues people actually care about and in covering the 2008 presidential elections with a refreshing air of head-on sincerity absent from most serious news media. He asks:
When The View gives an increasingly press-shy candidate his toughest interview in a while, when it and David Letterman prod the scars of the Democratic primary in interviews with
Corresponding author: Solen Sanli Email: ssanli@mscd.edu

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Clinton, when pundits debate the fairness of US Weekly covers and when Saturday Night Live crystallizes the discussion of sexism and vice-presidential choices, whats so soft about them? (p. 28)

However, most studies on the media and television in the last two decades would overlook formats such as these as legitimate venues for political deliberation. I will argue here that the reluctance to recognize their political relevance is due to the public sphere literatures overreliance on Habermass refeudalization of the public sphere theory and his Frankfurt School-style critique of the culture industry. Since its publication in English in 1989, Jrgen Habermass Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (STPS) has become the most influential work in the social analysis of the media, politics, and the public sphere. John Durham Peters summarizes Habermass greatest contribution to the discussion of the role of mass media in democracy as
the idea of a sovereign, reasonable public, nourished by the critical reporting of the press and engaged in the mutually enlightening clash of arguments. Over timethe civic forum arrives at a rational public opinion which then both legitimises and dictates the actions of the government. (1993: 544, emphasis in original)

According to Habermas, the bourgeois public sphere came into being with the separation of society from the state. This marked the end of feudalism, a system that was merging economic authority with political authority. Society meant the realm of the private, economic interest and individual survival in the 18th century; as the state was concerned with public issues. However, the bourgeois public sphere began to degenerate towards the end of the 19th century according to Habermas, as the separation of the public and private spheres began to be undermined. Habermas called this phenomenon the refeudalization of the public sphere. In the last two decades, STPSs Frankfurt School-style disdain for the convergence of entertainment and news, its disapproval for the coverage of private affairs and humaninterest stories in newspapers, and its critique of the commodification of the news industry caused media scholars to overlook the political signifance of popular media formats such as day-time talk shows, soap operas, sit-coms, and comedy/variety shows as venues where political discourse is created, reinforced and contested. Challenging the limited understanding of the good life in Habermas and those inspired by him, Hermes (1997: 77) asserts: The consumption of popular culture always entails the production of hopes, fantasies and utopias. To my mind, they therefore could and should be part of politics and of citizenship in its (ideal) sense as deliberation about what for most of us would be the best kind of life. This study is located within a newly emerging cultural citizenship model, in which citizenship and political participation are not merely limited to strictly state-related issues of elections, taxes or military action, but also so-called softer public issues such as womens, racial and ethnic minorities and sexual orientation minorities statuses in the family, workplace, politics, and media as well as issues such as poverty, environment, welfare reform, education, and healthcare. Moreover, in the cultural citizenship model, the sources of relevant political discourse are not limited to the mainstream political news programs originating from CNN, CNBC, BBC and the like, but also female-coded day-time talk shows such as Oprah, Maury, Dr. Phil and
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The View, as well as late-night satirical comedies such as SNL, Colbert Report, and Daily Show. Habermass emphasis on rational-critical debate is replaced with emphasis on everyday language that does not adhere to the formal rules of argumentation and deliberation, which often require privileged (and male) status (Young, 1996). This study uses the example of a day-time talk show format aired in Turkey to argue for the importance of cultural citizenship in addition to political citizenship. The concept cultural citizenship was first used by Renato Rosaldo in 1987 (cited in Stevenson, 2003: 23) within the context of the Latino Cultural Studies Working Group. The concept of cultural citizenship emphasizes the necessity for respect for the cultural specificities of subordinate groups. Thus, cultural citizenship is concerned with who needs to be visible, to be heard of, and to belong. I argue here that a certain segment of Turkish women cannot be considered as cultural citizens of Turkey due to their exclusion from media representation and their subsequent exclusion from the public sphere. Thus, the term cultural citizenship works in three complementary ways: first, it is concerned with who is represented and in what light. Are certain segments of society excluded from the public sphere by being excluded from the means of representation and political discourse? Second, it asks which cultural characteristics of society are excluded from the public sphere and what the repercussions of such exclusions are. Finally, the cultural citizenship approach is concerned with what kind of cultural consumption is privileged by society as significant whereas other forms of consumption are relegated to the status of the banal, vulgar, and low-taste. This study argues that the womans voice programs publicize cultural characteristics of the disenfranchised, such as the gender honour code which had thus far been carefully censored out from the public sphere by the means of state-sponsored public service broadcasting. In that sense, those who lived according to the gender honour code were not considered as cultural citizens of the Turkish Republic but as aberrations from the norm. Finally, by trivializing WV programs, which are commonly consumed by the masses from lower socio-economic circles, the Turkish elite attempt to reinforce their elite status. Thus, by relegating WV programs to the status of the vulgar and trivial, the Turkish elite also reduce the issues raised by the programs to the status of the inconsequential and politically irrelevant. It is proposed here that womans voice, a specific genre of talk show aired on Turkish national television since 2002, encourages the discussion of forms of violence towards women. This is accomplished by publicizing the private lives of a certain segment of Turkish women, who continue to live under extreme subordination imposed by the prevalent gender honour code, despite a general legal betterment of womens status in Turkey in the 1920s and 30s. In these programs, women narrate their first-hand experience with domestic violence, divorce, abortion, abduction, child custody rights, religious marriage, rape, and arranged marriage. In doing so, they open up a much needed forum regarding issues of violence (physical and symbolic violence). Potentially, this increased public visibility and heightened discourse on womens issues could not only strengthen the womens movement by raising awareness but also urge social reform by showing the dire need for womens shelters and encouraging a more diligent implementation of womens rights. In the following pages, I will analyze excerpts from WV programs and discuss the ways in which they reveal womens status in Turkey. Further, I will provide examples from viewers reactions to WV, which I collected through in-depth interviews and participant observation. I will argue that women
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who share a similar habitus to those represented on WV embrace the programs as educating, illuminating and potentially empowering, while members of the Turkish secular elite ignore the programs as banal and politically inconsequential. A feminist-critical approach to Habermass concepts of the public sphere and power coupled with Bourdieus insights into symbolic power informs the link between political citizenship and cultural consumption this project attempts to establish. However, first, it is necessary to discuss the specificities of Turkish modernization and the repercussions of this specific history on the formation of the public sphere in Turkey as well as womens status in Turkish society.

Turkish Modernization: Media, Public Sphere and Womens Status

Here, I would like to provide a brief history of the public sphere, media and womens status in Turkey, as well as develop the notion of republican capital. I propose that the public sphere and media in Turkey have been monopolized by those with high republican capital until the 1980s. Despite efforts at modernization and citizenization,1 womens status has remained at symbolic levels and varied according to republican capital. In the 1980s, as an unintended consequence of economic liberalization, new discourses and identities began to emerge in the public sphere. The newly attained visibility and self-expression of women with low levels of republican capital on WV programs must be evaluated in this context. I will argue that in the Turkish context, what I will call republican capital had critical importance in the field of power.2 As I conceptualize it, republican capital, is a certain kind of symbolic capital, the existence of which goes unrecognized although it plays a great role in determining ones trajectory in society. In the modernizing Turkish Republic, I argue, ones trajectory was parallel to the extent to which one had internalized the tenets of secularism, Turkish nationalism and republicanism. Owners of economic capital integrated themselves into the center and received a slice of the economic cake more easily if they conformed to the principles the republic was built on. Republican capital served the purposes of distinction and legitimized the monopolistic rule of the republican elite.3 The founding republican elite also had monopoly over representation in the public sphere by maintaining direct control over audio-visual media from the 1930s until 1990. Through the state broadcasting monopoly TRT (Turkish Radio and Television), representation in mass media was only accessible to the members of the republican elite. The naturalization of the modern and secular ways of life was achieved by othering traditional, religious and ethnic lifestyles and worldviews. While fulfilling the task of secularization and nation-state formation, many voices were left outside of official ideology. Women from different backgrounds were represented in the public sphere disproportionately although women as a symbolic group played a significant role in the construction of the Turkish Republic. Womens rights largely remained a symbolic attempt at development and westernization, rather than a genuine mobilization for gender equality. Women who were visible in the public sphere were confined to the role of the republican

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woman stripped of their femininity and delineated within carefully observed parameters of modesty. Elizabeth Maddock Dillon (2004: 159) diagnoses that the privatization of femininity and the limitations imposed on the female bodys public representation have been the founding disciplining technologies of the liberal order in the Anglo-American case. According to her, while women were central to the construction of the liberal subjectivity, this very construction interpolated them as private and apolitical. Similarly, in modern Turkey, the public sphere cannot be characterized by an absence or lack of women; on the contrary, women have always been active players in the sphere of public representation. However, the parameters within which women were represented determined the meaning of female sexuality. On public television, women were confined to the roles of gracious ladies,, respectable housewives or revered mothers (Saktanber, 1995: 156). Elite womens representation in the public sphere, however, created the illusion that women enjoyed an adequate voice in the public sphere and thus, the disproportionate character of this representation was rarely questioned. It was not until the 1980s that feminism began to function as an independent social movement and the status the republican revolution had granted Turkish women began to be problematized. The secularization and granting of equal rights to women in the 1920s and 1930s had resulted in a legal betterment of womens status. However, in the 1980s it started to become clear that the immediate circumstances of many women left much to be desired. Studies published in the 1990s began to show that the republican reforms had barely integrated rural areas. Yakn Ertrk (1995: 144) writes of the Southeast (predominantly Kurdish) region of Turkey: many of the women over 30 years of age in the region do not speak Turkish, the official language; many are married by religious law, which is not recognized under the modern, secular legal system; many are not even registered with the population bureau, thus they do not officially exist. Thus, although they might be citizens of the modern, secular state, their cultural status precludes them from enjoying rights of citizenship. A study conducted in 19967 estimated that in Eastern and Southeastern Anatolia, 22.7 per cent of all marriages in rural areas were religious marriages (Ilkkaracan and Ilkkaracan, 2003). Unless accompanied by civil marriage, the so called religious marriage, has no legal bearing and has been banned by the state. Through religious marriage, women are enticed into a domestic arrangement which provides no binding legal obligations or protections. This domestic arrangement allows men to marry multiple women, and deny inheritance and alimony to the wife and children born from her (WWHR-New Ways, 2005: 25). Ilkkaracan and Ilkkaracan (2003) also found that in Eastern and Southeastern Anatolia the rights determining womens share of the inheritance are primarily decided through tribal customs and not according to the Civil Code (61.3% of the interviewees). Deciding which party to vote for is also found to be something women are not trusted to do alone. Only 7 out of 10 women in mraniye,4 half of all respondents in Eastern and Southeastern urban areas and one-fourth of women in rural Eastern and Southeastern Anatolia reported being allowed to make that decision on their own (Ilkkaracan and Ilkkaracan, 2003). Moreover, most political discussion occurs in locales exclusively accessible by men. The neighborhood kahve, coffeehouse resembles the Tischgesellschaften, salons and coffee houses that Habermas identifies as locales where the bourgeois public sphere came

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into being in 18th- and 19th-century Europe. The kahve is a strictly male locale where coffee, tea and soft drinks are served, games such as backgammon and cards are played, and in a Habermasian manner, men engage in political discussions, accompanied by newspaper reading and television viewing (Karpat, 1976; White, 2002). Men socialize and connect to the outside world of economics and politics through their employment, as well as their relations with other men in settings such as the coffeehouse. Womens connection to the outside world, on the other hand, is limited to their circle of close relatives and friends, as well as television. Womens entry into a coffee house is highly uncommon and unacceptable; therefore, women also lack a public locale where they can exchange opinions. The WV programs should be placed within the framework of a fairly recent fragmentation and multiplication of discourses in contrast to the clean-cut, state-line discourse of TRT. The economic liberalism of the 1980s brought the end of TRTs monopoly in radio and television broadcasting, resulting in the 1990s communication revolution. Between 1990 and 1998, 16 national, 15 regional, and 230 local television channels were launched, in contrast to TRTs 60-year reign (Sahin, 1999). The dynamic growth of the privately owned media contributed greatly to the rise of ethnic, religious, and sexual self-reflexivity and increased visibility for those who had thus far been excluded from the public sphere:
And what was incredible was how many voices there were, and how they wanted to talk about all manner of things and issues that had been repressed by the official culture. Official untouchables Kurdish leaders, Alevis, religious leaders, veiled women, radical feminists, transvestites, homosexuals, even former secret service agents paraded through current affairs and talk shows. Films that were banned or heavily censored in previous years were broadcast uncut. Taboo subjects were tackled in uncensored debates and discussion programs. What had been repressed for a long time came rushing back to the surface of the culture. (Aksoy and Robins, 1997: 1949)

Nick Stevenson (2003), in his quest for a cosmopolitan cultural citizenship, asks the questions of inclusion/exclusion in the age of information and globalization. The previously assumed cultural consensus, he observes, is breaking down into fragmentation and diversification. The question of cultural citizenship, according to Stevenson, is linked to whose language is given public acceptance, whose history is taught in schools, which sexual activities are confined in the private and who is permitted to move securely through public space (Stevenson, 2003: 234). Similarly, the fragmentation and multiplication of discourses at the national, ethnic, religious and sexual levels in Turkey led to what Fuat Keyman (1995) calls the inability of Turkish nationalism to reproduce itself in the face of the changing economic dynamics as well as a changing discourse on identity and difference. This fragmentation led to the dissolution of the myth of the Turkish people as a monolithic entity and showed with clarity the differences stemming from characteristics such as class, ethnicity, gender, region, sexual orientation, and migrant status. I would like to argue that WV programs provide nonelite women with a sphere to discuss their cultural citizenship, that is, their rights, their aspirations, and their available choices. For the first time, women do not appear on television by virtue of their expert, artist, journalist or academic status. On WV, migrant women are primary signifiers,5 determining the terms of their speech. I would like to
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argue that WV is groundbreaking in its coverage of the private as potentially political and in giving the formerly voiceless a forum in which to voice their problems. They are part of an emerging public sphere where gender norms are critically discussed.

Cultural Citizenship: An Integral Task of the Public Sphere

In this section, I would like to suggest two revisions to Jrgen Habermass theory of the public sphere. First, I posit that Habermass notion of power is linked solely to politics and state, and fails to recognize other, more subtle forms of power such as symbolic power. According to Habermas (1984: 287), everyday communication is an exchange between equals which occurs rationally; devoid of power, otherwise agreement or disagreement, and therefore, understanding cannot take place:
A communicatively achieved agreement has a rational basis; it cannot be imposed by either party, whether instrumentally through intervention in the situation directly or strategically through influencing the decisions of opponents. Agreement can indeed be objectively obtained by force; but what comes to pass manifestly through outside influence or the use of violence cannot count subjectively as agreement. Agreement rests on common convictions. The speech act of one person succeeds only if the other accepts the offer contained in it by taking (however implicitly) a yes or no position on a validity claim with his utterance, and alter, who recognizes or rejects it, base their decisions on potential grounds or reasons.

However, it is precisely common convictions, or in the words of Bourdieu (1998: 103), collective expectations or socially inculcated beliefs that hide symbolic power as arbitrary and natural. As Bourdieu exemplifies, the devotion a worker feels towards his/ her employer, or a wife feels towards her husband may conceal the domination upon which the employer/worker or husband/wife relationship is based. Similarly, the elite in Turkey have always considered the rural residents and rural-urban migrants as less than equals, as Orientals who had to be taught to lead civilized lives (Kahraman, 2000). The elites paternalistic attitude, however, has hidden the power differentials between them and the Orientals (Ozyegin, 2001). In speech, it is well known that sometimes who the speaker is is more important than what the speaker says.6 As symbolic power, what Habermas loosely calls force can hide behind the mask of rationality and agreement. Some individuals are endowed with (a perception of) legitimate authority to speak, not only on their own behalf, but also on others. Ones sense of place always determines ones perception of what one can or cannot say in a certain situation. Thus, speech is not as power-free as Habermas considers it. Whereas Habermass concerns are confined to the domination of the system over the lifeworld, Bourdieu is interested in the power hierarchies within the lifeworld. Forms of power that permeate the lifeworld are harder to recognize since they do not necessarily require external legitimization like the power of the state. Symbolic power only becomes effective if it is successfully masked as natural and inevitable. Symbolic violence is the violence which extorts submission, which is not perceived as such, based on collective expectations or socially inculcated beliefs (Bourdieu, 1998: 103). This is not an explicit belief, but rather an immediate adherence, a doxical submission (Bourdieu, 1998: 103). Thus, symbolic power must not explicitly justify itself to affect submission each time it is employed.
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As a result of his neglect of the hierarchies in the lifeworld, Habermas also fails to see power at home. In order to exemplify his notion of colonization of the lifeworld by the system, he argues that the measures of the welfare state cause another form of dependency by allowing the state to invade the familial sphere (1987: 370). However, while attempting to salvage the family from the domination of the state and the market, Habermas overlooks the patriarchal domination embedded in the family structure. He considers the protection of the child from his/her parents as well as the protection of the wife against her husband by the state as yet another sign for the submission of the lifeworld to the mechanisms of the system. However, feminists such as Nancy Fraser (1985: 107) object to Habermass take on the family since he treats the family as a sphere devoid of relations of power:
Feminists have shown via empirical analyses of contemporary familial decision-making, handling of finances and wife battering that families are thoroughly permeated with, in Habermass terms, the media of money and power. They are sites of egocentric, strategic and instrumental calculation as well as sites of usually exploitative exchanges of services, labor, cash and sex, not to mention sites, frequently, of coercion and violence.

Habermas thus fails to recognize symbolic forms of power, concentrating only on blatant power, power which invokes explicit legitimacy, such as the power of the state. In this sense, Bourdieus insights are helpful in understanding that domination in its embodied form is not so easily recognized. Thus, without problematizing the hierarchies which appear as natural, normal and inevitable as those that exist within the family and in the sexual division of labor, we cannot arrive at a complete notion of power and domination. We must enter into a dialectical alliance with Habermass theory, as Seyla Benhabib (1992) proposes. While acknowledging the importance of his theory for imagining a public sphere in which issues that concern many will be discussed, we should imagine this public sphere as an inclusive one where the power hierarchies Habermas overlooks are potentially toppled. If we widen the notion of political to cover subtle forms of power, such as masculine domination in the family, we arrive at a healthier understanding of justice and democracy. My second critique is concerned with Habermass distinction of private and public spheres. Many scholars have challenged Habermass (1989) strict distinction between the public and private spheres and its historical accuracy, specifically his exclusion of the literary public sphere from the political public sphere. Maria Pia Lara (1998) points to the ways in which literature in the form of biographies and autobiographies has fashioned new beginnings for women, facilitating the understanding between self and other. Womens artistic narrations in the first-person helped other women to challenge the limited understanding of justice.7 That is how feminist discourses entered the public sphere. Thus, interest in and discourse about intimacy broke down the public/private barrier. In light of this approach, Habermass exclusion of the literary public sphere, that is, the cultural from the sphere of influence is not attainable. In this fashion, studies of the media and public sphere inspired by Habermas also primarily discuss the public sphere as the venue of rational-critical discussion of strictly

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political issues such as elections, taxes, international affairs, and the like (Corner, 1995; Keane, 1991). In the process, politics and culture are hierarchized respectively as masculine, superior, serious vs. feminine, inferior, entertaining. By the same token, scholarship and research have also differentiated the public knowledge project from the popular culture project by placing the former at a higher level:
The divide between public knowledge and popular culture would seem to echo other divisions such as between serious business and pleasure, between production and consumption, and thus between what in a highly conservative vocabulary would be seen as mans business and womens pastimes. (Hermes, 1997: 65)

Joke Hermes introduces the notion of cultural citizenship to correct this restrictive understanding of good life. Toby Miller (2007: 35) defines cultural citizenship as the
right to know and speak. His analysis of television shows how citizens consumption of what is held as culture has direct repercussions on their citizenship and on democracy. The notion of cultural citizenship is intended to correct the hierarchy in which politics and economy are prioritized as important, serious and urgent, whereas issues of cultural and private nature, such as consumption, popular culture, womens and family issues are rendered secondary, unimportant and often taboo. The following words of a male respondent clearly show the hierarchy into which domestic violence is placed in Turkey:
Today, in Turkey, there are many elderly who sleep on the streets. There are many who cant buy medication, handicapped people, people who cant take care of their household, people who need a loaf of bread, people who cant go to school. Instead of media bringing these issues up, trying to remedy these, she goes on television, and says my husband beats me. Is that so important? (Tolga, 32, STR, male, elementary school graduate, hairdresser).8

Research Methods
This article draws on field research conducted in Istanbul in JuneDecember 2005, which sought to simultaneously address the content, production and reception aspects of the WV programs. I refer to the genre as womans voice (WV) since the format is fairly homogeneous regardless of the actual titles of the individual programs. I applied discourse analysis to 15 randomly selected episodes of the three WV programs on air at the time of research. My analysis concluded that the discourse created on WV is parallel to the findings of talk show scholars who work on the media in Europe and the USA. These media scholars conclude that talk shows offer unique potentials for public sphering (Carpignano et al., 1993; Gamson, 1998; Livingstone and Lunt, 1994). The talk show is one of the few spaces where ordinary people engage in conversation on television. As Carpignano et al. (1993: 96) argue, talk shows constitute a contested space in which new discursive practices are developed in contrast to the traditional modes of political and ideological presentation. In contrast to the pre-written, edited, rehearsed and carefully delivered texts of other formats such as news or drama, talk shows produce alternative discourses. In this regard, I have found that WV works in four complementary ways: first, it makes a previously invisible group, namely women with low republican capital, visible for the first time in the public sphere. Additionally, WV

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constitutes a public sphere where these women can engage in unscripted, first-hand narrations of events that define their lives. My participant observations during studio visits revealed that WV differs from its western counterparts in the sense that the speech is not coached and since the programs are aired live, no editing is possible. Thus, through their unrehearsed speech, women make visible the structures of gender relations in which they are confined, especially due to the honour code. Finally, they engage in a discourse which might potentially empower them as well as the home audience. Additionally, 10 men and 29 women were interviewed in relation to their television viewing activities in general and their thoughts about WV in particular. The respondents were recruited through the snowball method. I was particularly interested in similarities and contrasts between television viewing activities of two groups of women living in or on the outskirts of Istanbul: first, women who originate from urban, fairly affluent families with high republican capital. They are for the most part educated, so called liberated women. I will call this cohort established urban dwellers (EUDs). Second, women with no or very little education who come from families with lower republican capital. This group mostly consisted of first or second-generation rural-urban migrants. I will name this group squatter town residents (STRs). Many STRs live according to the honour code to varying degrees. Most STRs recounted that they were not allowed by their families to continue their schooling beyond elementary or middle school, and even if they went to school, they were subsequently not allowed to work outside the home by their fathers or husbands. Of the 39 in my interview cohort, 3 men and 8 women were EUDs and 7 men and 21 women were residents of two main squatter areas of Istanbul (Dudullu and Gebze). One striking finding of the audience reception research was the disinterest EUDs showed toward WV. On the other hand, STRs engaged in discourse indicating that their consumption of womans voice helps them develop critical political opinions concerning their roles and status in Turkish society. I will exemplify later on in the argument.

Womans Voice as Text: Contestation and Reproduction of Symbolic Violence

Guests come to us with a missing person case, but underneath it all, other stories are revealed. (Inci Ertugrul on a program aired on 30 November 2005)

I identified 90 individual cases which appeared on the 15 WV programs I had taped and analysed. These programs were Among Ourselves hosted by Serap Ezg on Show TV, Your Voice hosted by Inci Ertugrul on TGRT; and Womans Voice hosted by Yasemin Bozkurt on Flash TV. A majority of guests appear on the programs to look for missing loved ones, such as spouses or children. When individuals or family members appear on the programs to make a plea, they engage in approximately 20 minutes of narration prompted by the hosts questions. Although variations exist between the three programs, each lasts approximately two net hours (three with commercials) and presents six guests on average. A lawyer and a psychologist are present in Serap Ezg s program; the other two programs do not feature any experts. The narratives featured on the programs derive from individual situations and circumstances, and prompt individual

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responses. The stories allow us to glance into the ways agents contribute to the reproduction of structures but also transform their realities by the choices they make, including the choice to appear on the program. While these stories and the discourse with which they are told delineate the confines of the honour code, the womens appearance on WV also challenges the same codes and reveals them as unjust and unnatural. Here, I would like to concentrate on the cases of mothers pleading to see their missing children. From there, I will move on to womens options for divorce, remarriage and employment as they were revealed on WV, as well as in my interviews. The appearance of similar narrations on WV as well as in the interviews shows that the stories told on WV are not isolated, exceptional incidences; on the contrary, they constitute crucial parts of STRs lives. In the following example, Glzade is looking for her five children who have been separated from her by their father and his relatives six years before. On WV, she remembers the moment of separation with the following words: My motherin-law stood in front of me with her legs separated like this (shows with her hands), took the kids to her side, my sisters-in-law stood on my way. They kicked me out. It was snowing (Womans Voice, 30 November 2005). A respondent engaged in a similar narration during an interview. Didem told me that upon her husbands death 15 years ago, her late husbands family separated her from her daughter. Today, her brother-in-law and his wife continue to take care of her daughter.
I didnt let her go, they took her by force. I fainted when they tried to take her; her shoes remained in my hands. But at least they take good care of her. If she was in a bad condition, I would go to court and take her. But by God, they take good care of her. (Didem, 36, no schooling, domestic worker, STR)

Didem also drew parallels between her situation and similar cases on WV: I see on the womens programs (WV). For example, someone hasnt seen her/his mother in 20 years. They find the mother. Thats such a great thing. The practice of removing children from their mother upon divorce or the fathers death has its origins in the honour code. This is despite the fact that according to the Turkish Civil Code, mothers and fathers have equal rights to custody in case of divorce. Also, this practice is not known among EUD circles, although it is apparently common among STRs and in rural areas. As a result of ethnographic research in a village of Turkey in the 1980s, Carol Delaney (1991: 53) writes the following:
Because of the meaning of paternity, a woman contemplating divorce or a widow contemplating remarriage must face leaving her children behind. If she is divorced, they are, according to village custom, the mans by right; if she is widowed, the children will stay with their dead fathers parents or relatives.

Delaney (1991: 40) argues that the function of the honour system is to guarantee the legitimacy of the mans seed, that is, that the woman must guarantee the child born is from her husbands seed, and not anothers, ensuring the exclusiveness of the family lineage. Thus, the thought of a child raised by a man other than his/her father in case of

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the mothers remarriage is against the notion of the seed belonging to the father and by extension, to his extended family.
Divorce, on the other hand, constitutes a challenge for women since divorce itself is a dishonourable act according to the honour code. A woman is under the control and protection of her natal family until marriage. During this time, her father, brothers, uncles, and male cousins are responsible for her and by extension, the familys honour. After marriage, both her own family, and her husbands family are responsible since a mans wife is considered to be his honour. Divorce constitutes a controversial event. Divorced women have to move back to their natal homes in order to retain honourable status. However, even then, they are stigmatized for not being under the control of a man. This is considered a danger for the

sanctity of the family, and a threat to other women, whose husbands might be lured by this sexually active loose woman. Therefore, being widowed or divorced curbs womens space of possibles and locks them in a carefully delineated web of social relationships for the sake of their honourable name. Remarriage seems like the best option in such a case.
My parents helped me out after I divorced and Im so grateful to them. But thats only up to a point. I am young. You cannot stay unmarried in a place like the rural areas of the Black Sea region. (Meral, on Your Voice, 11 November 2005)

Didem conveyed the sense of homelessness divorced or widowed women feel very aptly in our interview:
After my husband died, I stayed in my fathers house for two years. But of course, you dont fit anywhere. You go to your sister-in-laws [brothers] house, she doesnt want you, you go to your other sister-in-laws house, she doesnt want you either. Then my current husband asked [to marry me], he said he would accept my child too. I thought about it for a year. Then I said to myself, you dont have an income, no salary, you dont have anything. Everywhere youre like a refugee. It was destiny, we got married.

However, because of the meaning of paternity explained earlier, remarriage might also mean losing ones child to ones in-laws, as Meral and Didems cases indicate. On 11 November 2005, Meral, a 27-year-old woman seeking her six-year-old daughter explained on Inci Ertugruls program that she divorced in 2003. Although Meral had legal custody, her daughter was retained by her ex-husbands family in 2005 during a pre-arranged visit. This was after Meral married for the second time in 2005. Merals ex-sister-in-law Canan explained during an on-air telephone conversation why her brother decided to keep little Ilayda two years after the divorce:
Canan:  My brother didnt want to give the child back to Meral after she got married. Inci Ertrugul: Is that because she got remarried? Canan:  Yes, because she got married, my brother did not want to give the child back to her.

Finally, a single STR woman typically has difficulties sustaining herself economically since the options of employment also remain problematic for many STR women,

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for reasons such as lack of education and work experience, as well as the meaning of womens employment in the honour code. On Yasemin Bozkurts programme aired on 21 November 2005, 25-year-old Dilek pleads to see her two children from whom she had been estranged for five years. She narrated that during their divorce trial, although the court gave her custody, she let her husband take the children on the grounds that she could not take care of them. After Yasemin Bozkurt, the host, inquired about why she could not take care of her children, Dilek explained:
I was going to take them but my mother said, if you come with your children, you cant live with me. Im unemployed, I cant do anything. I dont want to be bad either.9 What can I do outside? I go to my sisters house, it doesnt work, I go to my mothers house, she says I should find a job. Where will I find money, I mean where!!?

Dilek does the right thing by going to her natal home after divorce. She also apparently upholds the patriarchal idea that it is not honourable for a woman to work and probably lacks the appropriate training and experience to enter the workforce. Bozkurt, instead of inquiring into the reasons why she thinks she could not work, suggests the following:
But wait a minute. Havent you considered remarrying?

Dilek immediately picks up on that and says:

Thats what I was going to say. I want to get married. If there is a candidate, I want to get married, even today, Ill get married, make a home!10

Dileks apparent belief that she cannot lead a decent life unless she is married precludes her space of possibilities to impossibility, rendering remarriage her only chance. Bozkurts question reveals her inability to critically approach the gender structure which confines women into a web of marriage or social disappearance. This lack of awareness was common in many of the WV hosts. I found that to be a result of haphazard host recruitment patterns, high host turnover and the general disinterest of the media producers in promoting womens rights and status. Thus, deregulation in broadcasting, it can be argued, has unintentionally produced a quasi-public sphere in which the true nature of gender inequality in Turkey becomes visible. This is in stark contrast to the state-centrist discourse of public broadcasting monopoly TRT, which carefully excluded any criticism of the state and open discussion of womens private issues as taboo. This project also attempts to analyze STRs representation on and consumption of WV. I will now turn to an analysis of their reception of WV.

Talking About Womans Voice

WV and its consumption have been criticized by many EUDs I interviewed. However, the group that constitutes the main target of this study, namely, female STRs engaged in a serious discourse on the potential effects of WV on womens rights. The contribution

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of WV both to the exposure of womens status in Turkey and to the spread of womens rights was pointed out by many respondents:
Interviewer:  What do you see on television that tells you something about womens status in Turkey? Mge: Women are subordinated all the time. (21, university student, STR) Ayse:  You asked if we watched Serap Ezg (WV). When you watch that, you see. Who gets subordinated the most? Its women. (38, elementary school graduate, housewife, STR) Mge: Women are the ones who endure all the suffering. Ayse:  It reveals that completely. You dont have to say anything. You watch it and its all about women.

University student Meltem, the daughter of rural-urban migrants, made the following observation: Since the start of the womans voice programs, womens rights have entered the center of Turkeys agenda. Womens rights have spread considerably. This is good. Its beneficial for women (20, university student, STR). Reyhan displayed high levels of feminist awareness, despite her lack of education and considerable level of religiosity. She believed that Yasemin Bozkurts program was cancelled because her feminist agenda made executives uncomfortable: Yasemin Bozkurts show was good, but they did that to her [cancelled her program] because she was really a defender of womens rights (65, elementary school graduate, writer/ folk music performer, STR). During the interviews, when interpreting what they watched, individuals spoke from their subject positions such as mother, father, daughter and daughter-in-law. Televisions coverage of family and marital issues helped these women identify with people in similar positions to them and establish resistance to the structures that confined them. Nur is criticizing the mistreatment of daughters-in-law in the hands of mothers-in-law in the following excerpt:
Nur:  I watched Semra Hanim, I found her behavior towards her future daughter-in-law very wrong.11 (29, high-school graduate, housewife, STR) Halime:  Nur is a daughter-in-law too, thats why she finds it wrong (laughter)! (47, no schooling, domestic worker, STR) Nur:  Instead of looking for a wife for her son, she [Semra Hanim] is acting like shes getting a maid for herself.

In the following examples, Meltem approached the programmes from the perspective of young, unmarried girls such as herself:
I think we young people have to watch womans voice programs. Especially young girls, so they know whats what. They marry at an early age, [WV offers a] lesson, they elope, lesson, they run away to become famous, lesson. At least she sees whats going to happen to her . . . Its important that we know these things. Im saying that we should take it as an example, especially us, young girls. We see it, they were showing this girl earlier, she got married at the age of 13, he engraved his name on her face, arms, body because of his perverse feelings. Its an example, see, youre 13, you havent got your education, why [are you getting married]?

Many women also reported learning about the social environment through these shows. The interviews indicate that during the viewing of the WV programs women
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think about their own places in society, what to expect, what to be afraid of and how they should be raising their children:
I watch Womans Voice and take lessons from it. But I dont choose it as a living standard. I contemplate while watching whats missing from our lives, where we make mistakes, where we do right . . . Its exemplary. In family matters I have a daughter, a daughter-in-law, a son I watch it thinking whats better, whats a behavior I should refrain from? (Tlay, 50, retired blue-collar worker, elementary school graduate, STR)

Ayse conveyed a similar sentiment of fear of a changing, degenerating society:

We watch those programs but the more we watch, we have children you know, were scared of everything now . . . I dont know, while we watch it, we say, the environment has gotten very bad. You dont even dare sending your child outside anymore. The atmosphere has changed so much.

STRs recounted watching the programs with investment and interest. For many STRs, watching WV was a social activity they shared with others either by watching together or discussing later:
Usually we talk about it. It comes up when were chatting. I tell my mom, my mom tells me, our neighbor Aunt Ayse tells us. I talk about it in my circle of friends too, we exchange information. I talk about it with my friend Mge. We do that. I think thats useful. (Meltem, 20, university student, STR)

Zehra took lessons from what she heard on WV:

I tell my children about the things I hear there. I mean, its exemplary. Look, whats happened, whats going on. Marriages and stuff, you should not be fooled by anything. (40, elementary school graduate, housewife, STR)

Hatice was rather uncomfortable with the events WV revealed, but could not resist her friends who were ardent fans of WV:
Sometimes when I get together with friends in my home, they say, lets watch Womans Voice. I mean nothing remains closed, a secret. Everything gets poured out, bad or good. (40, elementary school graduate, housewife, STR)

During one of my interviews, a group of women tuned into WV and in my presence talked throughout the program, exchanging thoughts about what they were watching and exclaiming criticisms. The following is an excerpt from the conversation that occurred while WV was playing in the background:
Aysel:  I like these shows. Now they made these people uncomfortable. [This guy] abducted a 16-year-old girl. They sell her from place to place, and moreover they threaten her family. (45, housewife, STR) Glten: Did they find that girl? (42, housewife, STR) Aysel:  That guy called Krsat has her. He says, I found her but I wont give her over. Why wouldnt you? This is a 16-year-old girl. Some powerless families get some
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power here, thats why I like this program. They tremble; they get uncomfortable thinking, what if they go on TV, what if we fall in the hands of the media? Now these people [who abducted her] are scared. They revealed many things [like this]. Yesterday I watched one, her husband gave this woman a black eye, shes bleeding, and the police say, hes your husband, he can beat you. She asks for help there [on television] saying, my husbands moving my house somewhere else. She saved her house. They gave her a right [to speak]. Nowadays you go to the police but nothing can be done without bribing.

During this participant observation, upon my question whether or not they would consider appearing on a WV program Zehra and Buket made the following point indicating their critique of society and their isolated status in general:
Zehra:  If something bad happened to me why would I go on that show? Theres the city hall, prosecutors, judges, womens organizations. I would take refuge in those, and see if I can get some help from them. (42, elementary school graduate, housewife, STR) Interviewer: Do you know of any organizations in this area that help women? Zehra:  I mean, these programs have tied us to the home, until the evening [we watch these]. Buket:  There must be some. An aid organization or something that helps. But as Zehra says, were in front of the TV all the time, we dont know. (28, college graduate, unemployed, STR) Zehra:  We dont have anything like that. If we had some leadership, we could also help women, do something, get some knowledge. But no, we wake up in the morning, we watch series, we watch series in the evening. Weve degenerated with television. It doesnt give us anything. None of them are educating programs.

Women engaged in critical discussions of WV, indicating both their level of investment and interest, and their critical stance vis--vis WV and their lives, which they perceived as restricted to the private sphere accompanied by television.

Conclusion
I have argued that while Jrgen Habermass theories continue to occupy a central position in the sociological study of media and the public sphere, Habermass approach also needs to be extended to include popular forms of media as venues where political deliberation takes place and the consumers of such media forms as deliberative political agents. In this regard, the study contributes to a growing literature of critiques of Habermas emerging from feminist and cultural studies perspectives where his limited take on the political and public sphere is scrutinized (Benhabib, 1992; Brunsdon, 2000; Dillon, 2004; Fraser, 1985; Hermes, 1997; Lara, 1998; Van Zoonen et al., 2007). In addition, along with scholars such as Stevenson (2003) and Miller (2007), the study also aims to use the newly emerging concept of cultural citizenship to address the private and cultural elements that are largely excluded from the consideration of politics, power and political participation. The WV programs are popular cultural products with a seemingly apolitical agenda of finding missing persons. However, they open an unprecedented window on the private problems of a large segment of the Turkish population and

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publicize their previously unfamiliar realities to the rest of society. By the same token, the cultural consumption of WV programs opens up roads for critical deliberation among a disadvantaged, thus-far silent and invisible group of female rural-urban migrants about the circumstances in which they live. Although STR women are citizens in the strict political sense of the term, they are not cultural citizens of the Turkish Republic. They have been marginalized through historical modernization processes and the cultural practices stemming from the honour code. Their limited representation in the public sphere has also been instrumental in this marginalization. Thus far, the Turkish ruling elite have neglected the needs of women who continue to live under the patriarchal authority of the honour code. Womans Voice programs provide a sphere where these needs are revealed with clarity and urgency, and are therefore highly political. Notes
1. This term is borrowed from Nisbet (1994). 2. See Bourdieu (1996) for his theory of the field of power. 3. For more on republican capital see Sanli (2005). 4.  mraniye is a rapidly growing district in Istanbul which receives high levels of rural-urban migration. 5. I borrow this term from Ayse Inal (19945: 73). 6. See Foucault (1984) and Bourdieus (1990) Lecture on the Lecture. 7.  Indeed, a powerful feminist discourse entered the Turkish public sphere following the publication of Duygu Asenas bestselling autobiographical novel Kadnn Ad Yok (The Woman Has No Name) (1987). 8.  All excerpts and interviews were originally in Turkish. All translations of such material are mine. 9. Being bad here refers to leading a dishonourable life, such as prostitution. 10.  Part of Yasemin Bozkurts Womans Voice is dedicated to men and women searching for partners through television. Here, Dilek is making an open call to potential candidates. 11.  Relations between mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law can be very problematic.

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Saktanber, A. (1995) Women in the Media in Turkey, in S. Tekeli (ed.) Women in Modern Turkish Society, pp. 15369. London: Zed Books. Sanli, S. (2005) Veiling as Identity Politics: The Case of Turkey, Discourse of Sociological Practice 7: 295308. Stevenson, N. (2003) Cultural Citizenship: Cosmopolitan Questions. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Van Zoonen, L., Muller, F. Alinead, D., Dekker, M. Duits, L., van Romondt Vis, P. and Wittenberg, W. (2007) Dr. Phil Meets the Candidates: How Family Life and Personal Experience Produce Political Discussions, Critical Studies in Media Communication 24: 32238. White, J. (2002) Islamist Mobilization in Turkey: A Study in Vernacular Politics. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press. WWHR-New Ways (2005) Turkish Civil and Penal Code Reforms from a Gender Perspective: The Sucess of two Nationwide Campaigns. Istanbul: Women for Womens Human Rights. Young, I.M. (1996) Communication and the Other: Beyond Deliberative Democracy, in S. Benhabib (ed.) Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, pp. 12035. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Solen Sanli received her Ph.D. in Sociology from The New School for Social Research in 2009. She has a masters degree in Political Sociology from the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is currently Affiliate Faculty at the Metropolitan State College of Denver and Regis University. Her current research interests include the study of cultural citizenship, public sphere, domestic violence, and the rise of a new middle class in Turkey. Address: Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Behavioral Science Metropolitan State College of Denver P.O. Box 173362 Denver, CO 80217-3362. Email: ssanli@mscd.edu

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