Gender and Biopolitics: The Changing Patterns of Womanhood in Post-2002 Turkey

In Gender and Biopolitics, Pinar Sarigoel sheds new light on the life spheres of the woman as a means of examining neoliberal Islamic thinking about individuals and populations. Sarigoel’s exploration of the governmental rationality of post-2002 Turkey’s Islamic neoliberalism is especially informed by Michel Foucault’s critical perspective. The tenets and merits of Islamic neoliberalism bring moral and religious practices into the discussion regarding ‘how’ the social order should be in general, and ‘how’ the ideal woman should be in particular. Discussions of Islam and neoliberalism are here productively undertaken in concert, in part because Islam takes society as a social body in which hierarchies and roles are divinely normalised. This book uniquely brings this point to the fore and draws attention to the interplay between the rational and moral values constituting Islamic neoliberal female subjects.