Mothers, Fathers, and the State

Zeynep Kurtulu Korkman recieved her PhD in sociology from the University of California Santa Barbara in 2011. Her research interests include gender, law, secularism, religion and occult, cultural politics, commodification of tradition, public space, and women's labor. She has been teaching courses in sociology in Turkey and the U.S. since 2006.

Based on a sociological analysis of child custody trials, this book examines how parenthood is constructed, contested, and gendered in the legal realm in Turkey. Drawing from discursive and narrative analysis of thirty-four child custody cases heard in Istanbul, Turkey in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the study scrutinizes how women and men contest for and are awarded with a gendered set of parental rights and responsibilities in courts. The book, a slightly revised version of my Master s thesis, shows that gendered inequalities are sustained and reproduced within the legal institution through a number of legal discursive tropes that assign unequal gendered expectations and entitlements to mothers and fathers. Situated at the intersection of sociological, socio-legal, and gender studies, this book will be of interest to scholars of gender and law in Turkey and beyond.