The Body Unburdened

Drawing on research that combines an ethnography of a new group of women from popular classes in today's Turkey and a study of vigilante violence against these women, including interviews and court files, The Body Unburdened offers a compelling explanation for the surge of hostility against women in the global era. It chronicles the journey of the New Woman from the neoliberal global era to the populist moment in the twenty-first century to show how the New Woman has gone from being a desirable employee in the global service economy to a precarious body that faces the risk of violence in the right-wing populist moment. The book argues that those emotional and embodied capacities, which had made the New Woman attractive to service employers, catapulted her into the center of highly contentious politics as both a feminist icon of resistance and the target of violent hostility during the reign of Turkey's government.