The Strategies that Foreign Women Domestic Workers Use to Overcome the Stereotypes They Face in Turkey
The Strategies that Foreign Women Domestic Workers Use to Overcome the Stereotypes They Face in Turkey

Summary/Abstract: This paper questions the stereotypes that foreign domestic workers face and their strategies to overcome these stereotypes, and aims to raise questions about the issues that foreign domestic workers face in Turkey from a feminist perspective. In this respect, the paper summarizes the discussions concerning waged domestic work in Turkey and questions the way that gender is performed in the context of the home by two women, the foreign domestic worker and the host employer. For this paper, 5 foreign women working as domestic workers and four of their employers have been interviewed. All of the informants were found through friendly networks and live in Ankara. The paper supports the idea of Jones that gender matters in migration at the level of ideology, discourse, policy, and in the lived realities created by the migratory experience, and adds an important aspect, that is, how we define gender matters. Culture being an important determinant in the performance of gender has to be studied further in the context of foreign domestic work as the barrier of second language changes the gender performance.

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