Having “The Voice” and Gaining Agency

Abstract

This study delineates on the conceptual interplay between political empowerment, agency, and gendered interest by drawing the contextual limits of how empowerment, agency, and women's voice are intertwined within the experiences of women in local politics. Most of the studies on women's political empowerment employing a critical perspective focus on non-Western contexts. In these contexts, women are depicted as agents employing unconventional ways of becoming political through different strategies. The narratives of ‘neo-liberal Western subject' are not being read through this critical framework. So as to observe to what extent the binary of Western vs. non-Western is transgressed in distinct socio-political contexts, this study employs the conceptual framework created by the narratives and experiences of women in local politics in Turkey to read the experiences of women in local politics in the US.