Abstract
PhD Project: Daily Struggles as Everyday Violence: Narratives of Divorced Mothers with Migration Biographies from Turkey in Germany
The main question of my research is “how do divorced mothers living in Germany with immigration biographies from Turkey build their individual narratives about their daily struggles in the context of everyday violence?" Beyond personal desires, choices and longings that try to define one's everyday life, divorced mothers' daily struggles may also include constant negotiations and limitations around a wide range of elements, e.g., child's well-being, financial problems, time management, deskilling in the job market, racist and/or sexist discrimination. These daily struggles of divorced motherhood are situated among various migranticizing, gendered and heteronormative discourses about divorced families, 'good' mothering, being Muslim or being seen as Muslim, representations of 'Turks being bounded by their families,' 'cultural stigma' on Turkish divorced women, Turkish/Muslim women being violated by their (ex)husbands, and divorce being highly tolerated in Germany and more. Based on narrative interviews with divorced mothers living in Germany with immigration biographies from Turkey, my research tackles the daily struggles of divorced motherhood in a dialogue with the theoretical framework of everyday violence and with the “regime of gender violence" (Weber, 2013). Using a discourse analytic approach influenced by the questions of ethnographically informed research on everyday violence (e.g. Das, Kleinman, Scheper-Hughes, Bourdieu) and of narrative analysis, I scrutinize the fields of daily struggles and the relationality of the self to resources across the narratives of immigrant divorced motherhood.
