Kadınların Sokak Sohbetlerinden Kamusal Alana

Abstract

This thesis aims at explaining and evaluating the connection between male dominant public sphere and the subaltern women’s public sphere, the consequences this connection leads to and the distinctions among these different public spheres with a view to concrete practices. We observe the male sex in the relation of the construction of the dominant with the sexual. The thesis is built on the argument that the extension of the dominant public sphere to all the life spaces is an intervention to the very existence of the human beings. The relation between dominance and knowing, and the gendered way the knowing subject is located in the dominant imaginary has been exclusionary. Feminist epistemology has offered significant interventions countering the male construction of both the political and the knowing subject. This thesis, following the feminist epistemology focuses on the epistemologies of women, on understanding women’s (authentic) experiences with a view to their transformative capacities. In this respect, the thesis works through an ethnographic research with thirty-six women to analyze the potential in the women’s conversations on and through the street to reveal women’s public practices. The thesis is constructed to understand women’s public experiences with feminist methods and techniques. The analysis enabled the researcher to assess the way women relate to patriarchal structures, the strategies they develop in this relation and the transformative capacities that these strategies embody. Keywords Public sphere, feminist epistemology, relations of domination, subjectivity