Gendered Geographies of Displacement: Asylum-Seeker Women’s Living Experiences in Van, Turkey

The massive mobility of Syrian people that continues to exist heavily due to the internal conflicts in Syria has placed the issue of asylum-seekers and refugees in the focus of politics and academia again. Turkey is historically a transitional zone between various geographies; according to the 2016 statistics, two thousand asylum-seekers per day are trying to enter Europe illegally from Turkey. Owing largely to gendered processes of war and displacement and also to consequences of immigration legislation, refugees and asylum-seekers in Turkey had to face many different kinds of violence, discrimination, and exclusion in their journeys to a new destination. The experiences of the women who had to escape from their home countries are particularly troubling, because, as commonly argued; refugee/asylum-seeker experience is heavily gendered in its impact. Asylum-seeker women from various ethnic and religious backgrounds came to stay temporarily in Turkey; however, it should be noted that their transitory locations never be a place where asylum-seeker women are simply newcomers who stay temporarily, but one in which their identities and livelihoods (re)make the places in which they come to live for an unknown given period. Therefore, it is important to examine how and in what ways women have located within these spaces in the Turkish context; in which spaces and why they are excluded and/or included; and, what kinds of means and forms of struggles and strategies are developed by asylum seeker women. Accordingly, this research aims to explore the gendering of displacement experiences based on the research conducted in the city of Van, a border city of Iran, which is heavily populated by Kurdish people and became a crossroad for Afghan, Iranian, and Syrian asylum-seekers.