Daily Life Experiences of Conservative Upper-Middle-Class Women in Turkey: Trends and the New Cultural Codes

Abstract

Conservatism is currently a significant political ideology that shapes the political sphere in Turkey. As known, conservative ideology has been represented in the center-right parties in the country. However, the conservative Islamic ideology, which became visible as a political actor in the 1970s, was brought to power first at the local level and then at the national scale in the 1990s. Today, it can be argued that this is why Islamist conservatism directs the central politics. This political alteration has also been reflected in the culture and daily life of the society. After all, Islamist conservatism becomes visible in daily life with transformations that we can refer to as modern popular and consumer culture. Principally conservative women play a notable role in building this synthesis in everyday life. With these concerns, this article tries to find out how the contents of these specific experiences take place, particularly through interviews with upper-middle-class women in 2017, with particular deep interviews that were conducted in a neighbourhood of Istanbul where the upper-middle-classes lived. Then the data obtained from these interviews were divided into themes. This study tries to find out the connections established by upper-middle-class women with new forms of life in Turkey, and their contents. As a result of the examination, it is seen that new lifestyles and character formations of the upper middle class are reproduced with conservative and Islamic signifiers.