The ambivalent meanings of feeling at home: Women in the politics of the common spaces in Turkey

In this article, I explore the ambivalent and recurring theme of feeling at home as it emerged in my doctoral research. I conducted twenty-nine in-depth interviews and four focus group discussions over three years with women involved in nine common spaces that had been established across five cities in Turkey, each shaped by distinct needs and desires and formed within the political enthusiasm sparked by the 2013 Gezi Protests. One of the key insights of my research was that women felt at home within these common spaces insofar as they could authentically be themselves. Firstly, I examine the meaning of being-oneself by exploring how women reclaim common spaces as sites of being-herself through an embodied politics of location. Building on this, I examine how women extend this politics beyond the commons to resist masculine displacement procedures. Drawing on Stavros Stavrides’ concept of threshold spaces, I further argue that these commons also enable encounters with otherness. The emotional complexity of such encounters leads me to explore how these spaces may simultaneously serve as sites of self-dispossession, drawing on the theory of Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou. Through this analysis of the interplay between being-oneself and self-dispossession, I interrogate whether a sense of home can acquire new feminist meanings. In the final section, I illustrate the transformation of communities of common places into closed ones, driven by escalating authoritarianism in Turkey. By discussing their shift from thresholds to shelters, I focus on the self-enclosing aspects of feeling at home for women. The article contributes to feminist literature by reframing home not as a fixed site of identity or constraint but as a dynamic space of selfhood and otherness in women’s practices of commoning.