Partners in Patriarchy: Faith-Based Organizations and Neoliberalism in Turkey

Abstract

Faith-based organizations (FBO) have become active vehicles of neoliberal governmentality in the last decade. FBOs have been assuming increasing responsibilities in service delivery and welfare provision. They have also become key actors in cultivating the ideational environment that facilitates the effective functioning of market rationality. The empirical findings of this research demonstrate that faith-based organizations in Turkey equip neoliberal governmentality by facilitating the market logic that externalizes the cost of social reproduction to households. Islamic NGOs, examined in this study, promote a normative and traditional model of social reproduction, which rests upon religious familism, gender complementarity, and pronatalism. Faith-based organizations co-constitute neoliberalism by providing theopolitical legitimacy to neoliberal social welfare systems and, in the process, reinforce the patriarchal gender contract in the public and private spheres.