“Saving” Anatolian Girls

Abstract Focusing on the girls’ education projects sponsored by the secularist-Kemalist nongovernmental organization Çağdaş Yaşamı Destekleme Derneği (Association to Support Contemporary Life) as a case study, this article examines the productive encounter between neoliberal feminism and secularist-Kemalist nationalism in Turkey. It argues that the convergence of nationalism and neoliberalism was made possible through the shared notion of a gendered community. In contrast to celebratory or dismissive accounts of girls’ education projects, the article explores how Çağdaş Yaşam reframed the nationalist trope of the “Anatolian girl” as a project of individual empowerment. Three contradictory themes of gendered community are at work in Çağdaş Yaşam’s empowerment discourse: first, the portrayal of Anatolian girls as passive victims of patriarchal communities; second, the description of Anatolian girls as free agents who are to be nurtured by an urban, modern, national community; and third, the idea that Anatolian girls are to act as caretakers of the Turkish nation. By examining the production and negotiation of these contradictory notions of gendered community, the article contributes a new understanding of gendered community to scholarship on neoliberalism, secularist nationalism, and state feminism in the Middle East.