Discussions on Migrant Women’s Agency in the Migration Studies on Turkey

Studies carried out by women researchers, especially with a feminist perspective, emphasize both the inevitability and indispensability of talking about the authenticity of the migratory experiences of women. Moreover, the effort is to show maximum attention to do this authenticity without falling into the trap of ‘othering’. For this reason, in these studies the discussions on concepts such as agency/subject, subjectivity and the state of being an agent in the case of migrant women have increasingly come to the fore in recent years. What we want to do in this article is to try to make sense of these concepts that we frequently encounter in the literature (of the post 2015 period) about the phenomenon of migration in general and women immigrants in particular. In this regard, we conduct a critical literature analysis and, in the first dimension of our analysis, we analyze how being a migrant (and) woman look like in migratory processes and we map out the studies that make the originality/authenticty of the situation visible. In this respect, we categorize these power relations and processes as capitalist, legal-institutional and patriarchal. In the second stage, we focus on studies that enable us to develop an understanding of how the subject reacts, what she feels, reacts, creates, in short, how she realizes herself in these migratory processes. With this two-dimensional analysis, we hope to have both mapped the evolution of the literature on migrant women in Turkey so far and identified what the literature needs at the moment. Ultimately, we argue that this need in the literature is to hear/see more of the words and self-evaluations of women migrants about how they experience and/or struggle with the power relations that constitute their conditions, and how they deal with them.