At the Nexus of Gender and Generational Order: Constructions of Childhood Masculinities and Femininities in Negotiating Individual Privacy in Türkiye

Abstract

This chapter draws on an ethnographic study with children aged 10–14 and their parents from heterogeneous socio-economic backgrounds in Türkiye. Building on a relational approach, it employs parental surveillance and children's individual privacy management in their intrafamilial relationships as a point of entry to reflect on childhood masculinities. From the perspectives of boys, girls and their parents, it illustrates how children's experiences of achieving privacy emerge as a gendered and age-related cultural phenomenon. Looking particularly at family negotiations around personal spaces and time at home and outside, it suggests that privacy regulation is a significant aspect of everyday family lives through which childhood masculinities and femininities are constructed, reproduced and performed. It further argues the ways that Turkish parenting culture may view intergenerational dialogue as a hierarchic category, rather than a relational category, contribute to a generational divide in boys' and girls' access to individual privacy.

Citation

Üzümcü, H.E. (2024), "At the Nexus of Gender and Generational Order: Constructions of Childhood Masculinities and Femininities in Negotiating Individual Privacy in Türkiye", Mukherjee, U. (Ed.) Debating Childhood Masculinities (Emerald Advances in Masculinities), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 151-167. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80455-390-920241010