Beyond Headscarf Culture in Turkey’s Retail Sector

Feyda Sayan-Cengiz is Assistant Professor at ?stanbul Bilgi University, Turkey. She received her PhD in Political Science at Bilkent University, Turkey. She taught courses at ?stanbul Bilgi, Bilkent, Mardin Artuklu, and I??k Universities in Turkey. She has published articles in edited collections as well as journals such as Women's Studies International Forum and Health Care for Women International.

• ContentsAcknowledgments1. Introduction2. The Culturalization of the Headscarf3. The World of Retail Sales4. Demarcation Lines in Retail Employment and the Exclusion of the Headscarf5. Great Expectations: The Meanings Loaded on the Headscarf 6. The Desire to Be Unmarked: Distancing from the Essentialized Meanings of the Headscarf7. ConclusionAppendicesNotesBibliographyIndex

After careful review of the manuscript chapters that I've received along with the other materials, I would recommend strong support for this book project. The research framed by this project offers to have wide purchase in the academic realm. It is an excellent piece of original research that is without a doubt addressing a gap in the current literature and providing a great deal of complexity beyond the current approaches to the issue of the headscarf in Turkey. Thus, it would be a great asset to future academic research on the headscarf issue in Turkey. Furthermore, because of the nature of the topic and the quality writing of the author, a book stemming from this project would likely be a desirable text for undergraduate and graduate courses with themes on Turkey, Islam and societies, women in Muslim-majority countries. There is much to be praised about the writing style of the author and the effective way that the text engages a broader audience. In the chapters given, numerous instances exist in which the author very effectively lets the women she is interviewing speak, but also frames this within poignant insight into the issues at stake. Thus, I would argue that a finished product stemming from this project would have broad academic appeal. The author is absolutely correct in arguing for the uniqueness of this study on several accounts. While I agree, also with the author, that previous studies did much to contribute to our knowledge of the headscarf and challenge previously held assumptions, their participant subjects were all typically members of a particular social class-economically speaking, they tended to be women from middle/upper-middle to upper class, and they have tended to be relegated entirely to the educated elite. This has led the discussion of the headscarf and decisions to cover or not cover to be constrained by a limited set of issues. Dr. Sayan-Cengiz provides us with a set of participant subjects-less educated, lower-middle class women-that gives us a whole new range of issues that help us not only understand this underrepresented (in the literature) group of women, but also Turkish urban society in general. What is also particularly valuable in this author's research is both the level of neutrality toward the topic by the author and the particular contexts of the women provide angles to the issue that complicate the more common dichotomies within which previous research has been framed-i.e. that wearing the headscarf means this or that, or that these women are active autonomous subjects or the passive objects upon whose bodies certain agents propel their social agendas. Her research effectively challenges us to conclude that, in many cases, none of these categories might be relevant. For all of these reasons I would strongly recommend moving forward with this project with a view toward publication. With this in mind, I do have suggestions for ways in which this project could be revised/developed to hone further the excellent elements of the study already present. First of all, the planned structure of the work seems to still be too beholden to its previous dissertation structure (in fact, in the existing chapters, the author might want to do a find/replace for the word 'dissertation,' which is still lurking in the text at various spots. I only had access to chapter one and the chapter summaries for 2 and 3, but I would strongly recommend restructuring these more efficiently for the purpose of the book project. Currently, chapter 1 starts out well, but gets bogged down with too many objectives that have to be repeated anyway in future chapters. The introduction to the introduction could be a bit more captivating-why not start with an intriguing anecdote that captures or draws the reader in to the relevance of what you are doing before it gets bogged down with telling us what the book will do. Chapter one should present the problem/context and then the ultimate research question, point out the relevance of this research in terms of the gap that it fills in the headscarf-in-Turkey debate, explain methods used and how interviewees and focus groups were gathered and conducted, and a chapter outline. In the current chapter one, the author tries to both address the literature and the gap in Turkey while also addressing theory relevant to her research. I would leave the discussion and analysis of theory entirely to chapter 2. I think it is going to be overwhelming and redundant otherwise. The chapter on theory needs to provide the readers with the theoretical tools that will be used to analyze what is presented in further chapters, and the author will strengthen what she is doing to the extent that she communicates those linkages, particularly when analyzing in subsequent chapters. In chapter 4, 5, and 6, it appeared that theory was being introduced to help address/frame highlighted elements from the interviews, but if the theory chapter is constructed effectively, such diversions into theory in the following chapter should not be necessary-you would only need to link back. If it's not possible to have a coherent discussion of theory linking the research then I would leave the theory chapter out entirely and deal with the theory uniquely as it comes up. Having a theory chapter at the beginning that isn't really used in the analysis and replacing it with new elements of theory in those chapters is not advisable. Chapter 3-I would recommend-should be a political economy of the retail market in Turkey. This could be a historical overview of the retail market, for example, along with perhaps an ethnographic-style glimpse into retail life in general at major international chains, local retail shops, and tesettur shops. The author has given us glimpses into this life in general a bit in chapter 4, but I think she can separate the general portrait from the specifics related to the women and headscarves in Chapter 4. I think it would be nice to have such a background context. This portrait of the retail world in Turkey should be separate from her explanation of method, which is why I suggested putting the latter in chapter one. As for Chapters 4, 5, and 6, these chapters are strong, but they occasionally have sections where the author's enthusiasm to illustrate what she is communicating through her research appears to lose some steam. In short, she could utilize examples from her research more-particularly in chapters 5 and 6. For example, the section that begins on page 17 of chapter 5 reads like a race to get to the end of the chapter rather than highlight the phenomenon she is bringing up in that section. It would be interesting to include any comments by participants that show some awareness that this sort of marking is occurring. If the women in the interviews and focus groups didn't discuss that at all, the silence is also interesting-i.e. scholars are framing and debating this issue in terms that appear to be totally irrelevant to the life and realm of these participants. I would make this link one way or the other. In the section beginning on page 13 of the same chapter (5), was the idea of veiling for perfection and those expectations within themselves or in specific cevreler not discussed? The author is currently using other literature to discuss this and not her research subjects. I'd like to hear what they had to say related to this. Is this aspect/assumption of veiling perceived by them or not? I like the general structure of chapter 5, but I would also encourage the author to not let her readers lose sight of the retail context of the participant subjects. Chapter 6 implies a relationship with the retail/employment context, but this is also not as strong as it could/should be. Another way of trying to capture the tendencies of the existing literature that this work is speaking to (as highlighted in chapter 5) is that while they disagree on the issue of agency-skeptics see them as objects of male Islamist super-agents, and perfecters and identity markers see them as active subjects-they all force the headscarf into the assumption that, in one way or another, it is worn intentionally for cultural change (hence, the culturalization of the headscarf). I think the author was trying to indicate this throughout the chapter, but this precise assessment was never exactly communicated. Only parts of it at different points, but I think it is a poignant point that she is making that should be highlighted.