M.A. Theses

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Village close enough : a study of the changing character of rural space in Turkey
(Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in Social Sciences, 2022., 2022) Taşyürek, Elif Hatice.; Özselçuk, Ceren.
This thesis aims to investigate movements occurring at a close distance between rural and urban areas and the changing character of the rural space in Turkey. Within the scope of the ethnographic field research I conducted in three villages of Çubuk District of Ankara, I interviewed people who migrated from the village to the city with various motivations and have continued to commute between the village and the city in changing routines and manners, people who returned to their village permanently and people who never left their village. Focusing on participants’ narratives, I examine forms of movements between the village and the city, the effects of these forms on the relationship between the rural and the urban, and suggest that movements between the village and other places have become a constituent of the rural space in Turkey. Based on the participants’ experience of the village, I argue that the village as a place contains conflicting aspects. I discuss the intricacy of memory, landscape, and work as the dimensions of the spatial reorganization of the rural space and argue that the balance between work and non work has shifted to the extent that the village has become a space to enjoy, among other things. Lastly, through the material and the verbal culture of the village and conflict- ridden commensal relations, I discuss how the idea of familial and communal attachments are dissolving is tied with how the village is remembered and its future is feared.
Educational strategies of the conservative bourgeoisie: Cultural capital, family and schooling
(Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences, 2016., 2016.) Anbar, Ahenk.; Candan, Ayfer Bartu.
Over the past decades, the rise of the conservative bourgeoisie has been discussed in many aspects; however, the relation between such upward social mobility and education has not been problematized. This study is concerned with the conservative bourgeois families’ cultural capital formation process and the educational strategies being developed in this respect. The findings of the study are based on a field work composed of twelve semi-structured interviews and participant observation. Plus, to observe these emerging groups’ impact on the private education sector, the websites of private schools in Istanbul has been browsed and schools with a conservative identity have been identified. Within this scope, it can be said that AKP has pursued a neo-conservative educational policy in recent years by articulating neoliberal values such as competition, competence and creativity with religious and national ones. Secondly, it is seen that the number of conservative private schools has increased since the second half of 1990s, many of them having affiliations with conservative investment groups, associations and foundations. Thirdly, a significant intergenerational difference has been observed regarding families’ engagement with the cultural capital in terms of their rising educational levels and increasing involvement in their children’s educational life. This transformation of parenting, or more precisely mothering, can be accepted as an important basis on which the interviewees construct their subjectivities as “good mothers”. Finally, it is examined that aesthetics and religion-based morality are two main grounds through which families distinguish themselves both from lower class conservative families and from the secular bourgeoisie.
Post-fordist affects, times and images: An ethnography of circulation in a digital advertising agency in Istanbul
(Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences, 2016., 2016.) Atıcı, Selim Gökçe.; Sirman, Nükhet, 1953-.
This thesis follows the making and unmaking of commodity images, boundaries of embodied selves and emotional investments to work: cultivations regarding desiring and laboring, in relation to spatial-temporal dynamics between humans, things and affects. The discussion is set up against the backdrop of faster rates of commodity circulation, blurring boundaries between work and leisure and labor and play, and the augmentation (pervasiveness) of software, tools and possibilities of digital communication. It draws on my participant observation as a 'digital strategist' in a digital advertising company in Istanbul for four months. The Introduction defines several tensions that run throughout the thesis, which makes it more conceptual. In Chapter 2, I situate my ethnographic work in wider discussions on commodity fetishism and branding, attending to the practices of interpolation, tabulation and calculation as they reflect the making of novelty and fantasies of an automated society. Chapters 3 and 4 deal with the temporal self-understandings of digital media workers, and their relation to the workplace and the infrastructures of digital work. The final chapter plays with a working definition of 'genuineness' as an ambivalent affect that maps workplace authenticities and positions for self-fashioning in the workplace. The aim of this thesis is to situate digital/behavioral advertising work in a broader scale of global capitalism, informational networks, economic rationalities and space-time conundrums by engaging in dialogues with temporal self-understandings, affects and emotions, memory and anticipation, abstraction and embodiment, space and place, production and reproduction, and the ways in which working selves configure power relations.
Governing Turkey's internet: Cyber security as a strategy of power
(Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences, 2016., 2016.) Zerin, Deniz.; Yenal, Zafer.
This study investigates expansion of the field of cyber security in relation to governing of the Internet in Turkey within the last decade. It argues that security rationality is becoming the dominant diagrmn in evaluating problems and solutions associated with the Internet. It shows that cyber security is instrumental in expansion of forms of power associated with security objective through a discourse of risk and danger, institutional restructuring, law making, and most importantly, technical practices. Technical practices, for they have a indirect relation with the infrastructure of internet cmnmunications, represents a reflexive quality, which makes cyber security field eletnent of a distinct strategy of power, in the intersection of govermnent, technology and security.
Unmaking and remaking everyday life in Diyarbakır: free schools as a decolonizing practice
(Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences, 2016., 2016.) Dölek, Hazal Ilgaz.; Dubuisson, Eva-Marie.
This thesis is grounded on my fieldwork in Diyarbakır carried out between October 2015 and April 2016. Considering the city as a space of colonial occupation, it examines the broad scale dynamics of the ongoing war as well as the unmakings and remakings of everyday life under siege. It traces the ethnographic sentiments and sensibilities of war and the intimate sites of power production and insurgency. In addition, it also focuses on the mother tongue-based education practices in one of the Free Schools. Free Schools provide a counter space where the already existing colonial ways of learning, knowing and being introduced by the Turkish education system can be decolonized. Therefore, I argue that the alternative philosophy of education they provide to struggle against the assimilationist, capitalist and patriarchal way of life is itself a decolonizing practice.
Shifting geographies of subversive politics in Istanbul
(Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences, 2016., 2016.) Gül, Zeynel.; Üstündağ, Nazan.
This thesis aims to understand the shifts in the spaces of radical left politics and the effects of these shifts on the discourses and modalities of political actions in Istanbul since the mid-1990s. In order to achieve this aim, it draws on an analysis of spatial distribution of political actions in central city sites and urban margins. It also focuses on the temporal mapping of critical events that shape political processes. It demonstrates that there exists a mobility of concentration of the political actions from urban margins to central spaces in the city. Based on records of radical left publications and ethnographic research in the left-stronghold Gazi and Okmeydanı neighborhoods, the thesis argues that the radical left employs different idioms and space-making practices, which in turn shape the modalities of their political actions. On the one side, the violent sacrificial practices by radical left subjects vis-à-vis the state contribute to the making of subversive neighborhood spaces – via walls, corners, parks, squares, barricades. On the other side, the human rights discourse based on victimhood converges with the spatial vector oriented to spaces of visibility in city centers. In the spaces of visibility, the material, economic, sensual and bodily dimensions of political actions are erased; the violently targeted body of the political subject is reduced to spectacle and voice. The thesis proposes to add action and visibility to the set of defining characteristics of space-complex, which is mostly discussed along the axis of materiality, memory, belonging and narrativity.
The dilemma of amnesty politics in the AKP era: balancing the questions of legitimacy and instrumentality
(Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences, 2016., 2016.) Yıldırım, İrem.; Kuyucu, Tuna.
The Ankara Bar Association Human Rights Commission (Ankara Barosu İnsan Hakları Komisyonu) underlines that 158 amnesties in total, except for the 1999 Conditional Release Law, were legislated in Turkey before the AKP period, and 12 of these laws were general amnesties. Regarding the content of these laws, the Turkish state has tended to release the prisoners who commit petty crimes having a non-political character. However, the continuity in the use of amnesty mechanism in Turkey was broken at a certain historical moment: the beginning of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) era. For the first time, the ruling party has officially declared its disapproval of general amnesty, especially for crimes against individuals. This thesis aims to examine why general amnesty, as a long-term phenomenon in Turkey, has not been applied during the AKP period. Following the introductory Chapter One, Chapter Two looks into how three premises of neoliberal penality are used in the AKP era for an effective struggle against crime: punitiveness, responsibilization and managerialism. Chapter Three examines the ways in which the AKP government copes with the problems facing the judicial system of Turkey, i.e. high incarceration rates, and the high workload of the judiciary, without the amnesty option. Chapter Four explores the controversial debate on the legitimacy of amnesty by interrogating the AKP’s alternative moral stance on amnesty, whereas Chapter Five concludes the thesis. Briefly, this thesis develops insight into the AKP’s policy on amnesty circumscribed by both the questions of legitimacy and instrumentality, as well as by the dynamics of political conjuncture.
A comparative study on the reputational trajectories of Turkish women intellectuals from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic
(Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences, 2015., 2015.) Şaşmaz, Hale.; Büyükokutan, Barış.
How do woman intellectuals go beyond the sexism of intellectual field and achieve fame? To answer this question, this thesis examines the reputational trajectories of Turkish woman intellectuals from the late nineteenth century Ottoman Empire to the early Republican era through biographical and archival material. It focuses on five intellectual women who have been called the Great Women: Fatma Aliye, Emine Semiye, Nigar bint-i Osman, Halide Edib and Nezihe Muhiddin. Analysing women’s reputational trajectories in three periods -the Hamidian Era, the Second Constitutional Era and the Early Republican Era-, this study identifies four strategies the Great Women employed while negotiating patriarchal practices in intellectual milieus: collaboration, acquiescence, subversion and defiance. The findings show a) that strategy is indeed decisive in fighting patriarchy and what determines success is one’s resources and how she puts them into use and b) that the proper evaluation of changing resources in historical and political transitions is crucial both in making reputations and furthering them.
The spatial imaginary and politics of democratic autonomy: a neighborhood assembly experience in Beyoğlu
(Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences, 2015., 2015.) Bakar, Cansu.; Özselçuk, Ceren.
This thesis studies Kurdish Movement’s Democratic Autonomy Project both in the ways that it is articulated in textual materials and materialized in the organizational forms of the movement, as well as in the manner in which it is undertaken and put into action in Hacıahmet neighborhood, Beyoğlu. I argue that the neighborhood assembly experiment/experience in a western city of Turkey differs from the ones in Kurdish cities particularly due to different relations with the space. Migration stories, longing for place of origin, relations with the city space, and attachments to the Kurdish community define the frames of local politics and bring about conflicting forms of engagements with the space. These conflicts lead the emergence of a space of struggle for both nation state and the Kurdish movement. I trace the implementations of the self-governmental project in Hacıahmet on the basis of daily encounters with the apparatuses of nation state. I also explore the shifts in discourse of the Kurdish Movement with a textual analysis. While the movement de-centralizes and transforms itself into a complex unity of organizations via horizontal interactions with other movements (left, gender, ecological, or geographically; Syria, Iran, Iraq) it also de-centralizes and localizes mode of politics with the inauguration of assemblies. The assembly proposes new forms of attachments with space, Kurdish community and also non-Kurdish communities by deconstructing existing centralized and vertical mode of doing politics and reconstructing new ones.
Masculinities at night in the provinces
(Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences, 2015., 2015.) Özarslan, Osman.; Yenal, Zafer.
This thesis seeks to analyze the provincial nightlife and the relationalities that are attached to it. With this aim, firstly, I analyze the theme of ‘distance' that constitutes the province as a historical geography and an administrative unit, and the theme of ‘boredom' that constitutes the province as a sociological phenomenon. Based on these themes, I explain how the province, beyond a rural production unit and social relations surrounding it, is intertwined with the city. On the other hand, the province and its nightlife that promises a modern experience, leads to authentic masculinity experiences within its own social relations. The reproduction and continuity of masculinity is analyzed here in terms of nightlife typologies that each reproduce its own masculinity. At the same time, hostess women are regarded as major actors in nightlife in this study. I analyze the socioeconomic and sociocultural background that has led to their formation in nightlife through Turkey’s neoliberal transformation, and through the themes of indebtedness and poverty. The way hostesses try to survive in nightlife is analyzed in terms of passive resistance forms and their relations with the local community and the costumers. Hence, this study is about what constitutes the province rather than where it is constituted. It is about how nightlife relations are formed and to what kind of masculinities and femininities this leads to.
Hilmi Ziya's life and thought from 1928 to 1960, in relation to the political and religious developments in the republic of Turkey
(Thesis (M.A.)- Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in Social Scieences, 1986., 1986.) Özberki, Ayşe R.; Mardin, Şerif,
This is the study of Hilmi Ziya tllken's (1901-1974) thought in relation to the political and religious development in the Republic of Turkey. Hilmi Ziya Ulken is a representative example of the very first intellectuals of the young Turkish Nation. Much weight was given to his ideas about religion as religion is the core of the paradigma of his sociological views. On the other hand empasis was also given to men of ideas who have been influencial on Hilmi Ziya Ulken's thought or intellectual development. Finally the study exposes the continiuty of his ideas which changed in appearence only.
Living waste: making a life in wasted spaces
(Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences, 2015., 2015.) Kutlu, Yusuf.; Sirman, Nükhet,
This thesis traces a case of how internally displaced Kurds make a life after being forced to migrate to the cities of western Turkey. The research was conducted with internally displaced Kurdish waste pickers living in the Tarlabaşı district of İstanbul and takes their working processes, their life practices, politics, intellectuality and aesthetics as a significant research framework. Since the aim is the making of a life in the informal space of Tarlabaşı, I examine how they produce space, time, and practices through their labor process, political practices, writings and intellectual, artistic and aesthetic products. My thesis argument is that the informal space of Tarlabaşı provides opportunities for internally displaced Kurds to make a life outside of modern state grounds, i.e. in a space of autonomy. Existing in this autonomous space produces practices of transgressing state power permanently for the purpose of making a life, despite intentionally emerged political aims and agendas that target state power. In so doing, life itself consists of perpetual practices of violating not only state power (by illegally obtaining its amenities), but also capitalist market relationships, modern urban life’s established normativity, and notions of regulated time and space in the city. Furthermore, I show how waste pickers apprehend and sense the world, and distinguish the common, structured and hegemonic way of the sensible. It is an attempt to find how internally displaced Kurdish waste pickers escape from the formal, the constituted, the normative and create a new way of living and being in the informal space.
The show in the restaurant: performing affective labor through culinary fantasies in Istanbul
(Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences, 2014., 2014.) Özdemir, Didem Derya.; Özselçuk, Ceren.
In this thesis, I aim to make a contribution to the post-Fordist literature by exploring the neo-liberal transformation in the fine-dining sector in 2000s in Istanbul in order to rethink the concepts of immaterialization of labor and affective labor through Lacan. I psychoanalytically investigate the blurring of the boundary between work and enjoyment, a phenomenon explored in different terms in the post-Fordist literature, as immaterialization. Based on my ethnographic research in Istanbul, I offer a psychoanalytically informed analysis of this transformation, which refers to the blurring of the boundary between work and enjoyment. I suggest that this blurring emanates from the restructuring of the social imaginary with the fantasy of culinary work as art that constructs work as the primary object of desire. This research also investigates incorporation of a new architectural space called the show kitchen in the dining room, which provides the material conditions for cooks to perform their job as a form of art and identify with their representation as artists. To conclude, this thesis, which is in pursuit of enjoyment in the Lacanian sense of the term, claims that the key to understand both reproduction and displacement of post-Fordism is to conceptualize enjoyment as a dimension of affective labor as well as taking affective investments into consideration, as they are constitutive of the laborer subjectivity.
The organization of white-collars in Istanbul: intimacy, labor and politics
(Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences, 2014., 2014.) Tatari, Mehmet Fatih.; Özselçuk, Ceren.
This thesis aims to analyze the recent mobilization of white-collars in Istanbul after the 2008 economic crisis, by placing it within the context of the institutionalization of a precarious labor regime for lower level managerial workers. Following the organization of white-collars around Plaza Eylem Platformu (Plaza Action Platform), I analyze the production of knowledge about corporations by and among lower level managers; together with the managerial tools and mechanisms, which attempt to count, accumulate and/or manage affective economy of laboring in corporations. By depicting the managerial control mechanisms in corporations and their interventions in the affective states of workers, I argue that the managerial mechanisms (Human Resources Management apparatus in particular) displacing the control in corporations onto the social relations at work, attempt to capture affective investments of workers in their labor through penetrating the intimate relation they establish with their work. Finally, I analyze the formation of white-collars’ political subjectivity in the meetings and workshops of the platform which are taken to be a new channel in the affective economy of laboring where workers publicize the hidden working conditions, share their intimate relations to laboring mediated by the human resources techniques and construct a new ‘intimate’ space among workers against the management.
Patrimonial governing and community formation: power relations within and without the Süryani Orthodox community in İstanbul
(Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences, 2014., 2014.) Kırılmaz, Selim.; Sirman, Nükhet,
By critically examining the parameters of the relative visibility of the Süryani community in Turkey within the past two decades, this thesis attempts to problematize the power relations regulating the community today. It analyzes the narratives of community representatives, as well as the state/mainstream media/liberal multiculturalist/nationalist discourse on minorities in Turkey and aims to develop an understanding of the Süryani community in Turkey that goes beyond its conceptualizations as a closed and homogeneous community with an ancient culture. It argues that such homogenous representations of the community reproduce the modern Turkish nation. Focusing on the relations structured around the church and the administrative bodies of the community, in this thesis, I examine the patrimonial governance of the community. I demonstrate that as a response to the state’s mechanisms of governing the minority subjectivities, continuous reproduction of a discourse on a “threatening outside” by the community leaders becomes a technology of governmentality within the community. I specifically focus on endogamy as a crucial site of reproduction as a community and a mechanism of governmentality. I trace the line of critique in the narratives of Süryanis that belong to the younger generation, with regard to expectation of endogamy and the norms regulating their lives. Thus, this study seeks to reveal the conditions that lead the Süryani community to become an entity that deals with issues pertaining to its own survival on the one hand, and problems that the Süryani youth face as members of a minoritised community on the other.
Living with the specters of the past: an insight into identity, subjectivity, and memory in Trabzon
(Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences, 2013., 2013.) Sağlam, Erol.; Ahıska, Meltem.
This thesis aims at comprehending the dynamics of identity in Romeika-speaking locals of Akyayla, Trabzon, through focusing on the status of Romeika as a living memory. My analysis depicts the language as a private and intimate element of communal identity that fuels the investment in and performance of Turkishness in the area. Public private discussion is reassessed to understand the complexities of the (in)visibility of Romeika in the public sphere. This research also touches upon how Romeika-speaking locals relate to official discourses and other communities who raise political demands that are based-on their socio-cultural distinctions. The staunch allegiance of locals to nationalist ideals is analyzed in relation to their haunting heritage and memories. Finally, dynamics of local identity and how it affected by the continuity of Romeika is discussed in relation to psychoanalytic theory to get a better grasp of subjectivity, identity, and remembrance in Akyayla.
Gated communities and the “Middle Class” in Istanbul
(Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in Social Sciences, 2012., 2012.) Aydın, Seda.; Candan, Ayfer Bartu.
This study deals with the expansion of the once-exclusive gated community market in Istanbul to the large segments of the middle class especially following the 2008 economic crisis. It analyses how the characteristics of this housing form and its meaning for the city change with the inclusion of new segments of the middle class to the target mass. It also examines what the discourses of the residents about their gated communities, their fellow residents and the city reveal about the category of “middle class”. Firstly, the political economic dimensions of the expansion of the gated community market are discussed within the context of neoliberal urbanization. This is followed by a discourse analysis of the marketing language of the gated communities, showing what the new representations of this housing type mean for the city and its dwellers. Moreover, based on 20 in-depth interviews with the residents of the gated communities addressing larger segments of the society, along with the advertisement material, the study shows how the ideal types of neoliberal housing and the neoliberal middle class urbanite are drawn in the gated communities. It argues that the category of “middle class” is a political one with malleable boundaries (re)drawn according to the present regime of capital accumulation with these ideal types. Keywords: middle class, new middle class, gated communities, neoliberal urbanization,|Keywords: middle class, new middle class, gated communities, neoliberal urbanization, housing.
The student centered education and knowledge economy
(Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in Social Sciences, 2012., 2012.) Canlı, Gamze.; Kolluoğlu, Biray.
This thesis investigates the implications and assumptions of the student-centered education model, which was embarked at the primary school level in 2005. The reforms and policies regarding the education models attempt to cultivate a specific model of self as the educated subject, which is envisioned as to contribute to the socio-economic development being adapted and productive. This thesis aims at analyzing the student centered education model from such a view point, acknowledging that it promotes an ideal image of self. It asks the questions what the idealized qualities of self are; who the educated subject is; how these correlate with the current political economy settlement; and, what kind of a rationality of government do all of these establish. Through these questions, it targets to investigate the correlations of the idealized subjectivity in the student-centered education model with the assumptions and requirements of knowledge economy and the neoliberal regime of government. In this framework, the promoted skills and attainments of learners in the curriculum are scrutinized and they are compared with the idealized qualities of a knowledge economy worker which are mentioned in the international sources. Here, the importance and implications of the abilities such as problem solving, learning to learn, creativity, flexibility, entrepreneurship, and communication are discussed. It is also argued that the qualities of self responsibility, self actualization and self consciousness are promoted in the student centered education as the underlying features of subjectivity and government of self. In this respect, this thesis makes the claim that student-centered education model expects to produce self-governing individuals, attempting to establish the neoliberal regime of government in schools. From a more general aspect, this pedagogical arrangement targets to produce ideal subjects for the development and well-functioning of knowledge economy; and, for this purpose, it employs the neoliberal regime of government.
Ülkücü community in Zeytinburnu: violence around words and encounters
(Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences, 2013., 2013.) Atalay, Fırat Ulaş.; Üstündağ, Nazan.
This thesis aims at comprehending the dynamics of hostility and violence against Kurds in ülkücü community in Zeytinburnu, Istanbul, through focusing on the violent attacks against Kurds that took place in Zeytinburnu. My analysis depicts the violence as an outcome of both macro relations of nationalist politics and micro dynamics of the ülkücü community and the locale. A discussion of the conventional perspectives on ethnic violence is reassessed to provide an insightful analysis on hostility and violence from the perspective of anthropology focusing on the details of everyday life. This thesis attempts to compare various experiences of nationalism and to reveal how radical nationalism (ülkücülük) differs from them. Ülkücü community is analyzed through their discourses that inscribe certain affects on their bodies, which constitutes them as a distinct political group on the urban space. Then, it is argued that the hostility against the Kurds in Zeytinburnu is constructed through encounters on the local topography. Finally, violence is both conceptualized as an outcome of heterogeneous micro-dynamics of power and as a passionate performance constituting the ülkücü community in certain forms.
Political vigilance in court rooms: feminist interventions in the field of law
(Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in Social Sciences, 2012., 2012.) Baytok, Cemre.; Kolluoğlu, Biray.
This thesis scrutinizes feminist activism in the field of law in Turkey. Focusing on the litigation of court cases of male crimes against women, I aim, in this thesis, to figure out how the feminist movement challenges the reproduction of women’s subordination in the practice of law. Based on interviews with feminist activists and on my observations throughout litigation processes, I attempt first to reveal how women encounter in different stages of law with multiple forms of male domination while trying to escape battering, publicize sexual assault or expose rape experiences, and secondly, how feminist interventions in law are of significance to contest patriarchy by and large. Relying on a comprehensive observation of litigation processes in women killing and sexual assault cases, I convey how law deals with these crimes around the notions of women’s sexuality and family, and accordingly maintains men’s domination over women. In so doing, dwelling on the notions of testimony, evidence, medical reports that figure in complaint, trial and decision processes, I show the structural content of patriarchy that is reified in the field of law. With a careful inquiry about organized litigation of cases, I expose what is not been appended to court records but has vital consequences on women’s daily lives. In this thesis, thus, by narrating stories of battering, rape, and murder, I highlight the contribution of law in the perpetration of male violence and how it is reproduced at the ground level, and argue, for that very reason, it is a political space of intervention for feminists that they challenge and change.

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