Nükhet Sirman
Nükhet Sirman is a Turkish social anthropologist. She earned a doctorate degree from Britain's University College London in 1988, and since 1989, she is a professor of anthropology at the Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, Turkey. She has done academic analysis of the feminist movement in Turkey and introduced the concept of "familial citizenship" in the academic realm.
Education and academic career
Sirman finished high school education at the American Robert College of Istanbul and did a B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. in anthropology at the University College London. She completed her Ph.D. in 1988 with the thesis titled Peasants and Family Farms: The Position of Households in Cotton Production in a Village of Western Turkey. It was an ethnographic study of the production of cotton in Turkey's Söke which detailed "the production and labor processes during the 1980s in terms of household". Since 1989, she is a professor of anthropology at sociology department of Boğaziçi University.Research
Sirman is a social anthropologist. Her research subjects include gender, establishment of gender identity, ethnic conflict, family and kinship, feminist theory, interpretive methods, postcolonial societies, rural sociology, and sociology of emotions. She has also studied "gender construction under nationalist discourses", "honor crimes and violence against women", "Kurdish women's movements", and "settlement of internally displaced persons".Feminism
Sirman is a feminist. Between 1984 and 1991, she participated in Turkey's feminist movement, and she has carried out research on the life of women in Turkey. In her research on the feminist struggle, Sirman pointed out three movements which she considers as "standard reference points" in the study of feminism in Turkey. She views the resistance to the "Ottoman family system" by women "within the framework of proposed reforms to save the empire" during its final decades as the first, the according of numerous rights to women by the "modernizing Turkish state" as the second, and the "reaction" of women in opposition to "the patronizing role of the Turkish state in defining how women's liberation should look" that surfaced as an after-effect of the 1980 Turkish coup d'état as the third historically important movement. Sirman is of the view that the feminist movement in the 1980s was Turkish women's stand against the "Kemalist regime and the limitations of state feminism inspired by Kemalism". Some feminism and social science scholars are of the opinion that the leftist and Kemalist ideologies equally repress women's gender identity. Sirman suggests that though the "integration" of women in "traditional Islamic", "statist Kemalist" and "revolutionary leftist" ideologies made them enter the political arena, the feminist movement will gain momentum only when it would steer clear of these ideologies.In her study on the "discursive and cultural productions" of nation state, Sirman has put forward the idea that "women were made part of the nation through the control of their bodies and, through cultural elaborations of femininity, the definition and control of the cultural boundaries of the nation".