Yasemin Ece Örmeci
Dissertation Project
"Domestic Work, Dirt and Identities: A study of Invectivity within a Turkish context in Germany"
What it means to be a woman today still defines itself through domesticity. Whether a woman outsources domestic work to another woman or not her subjectivity is redefined through direct or indirect relation to it. When a woman hires a domestic worker, the household changes meaning and it becomes a social space in which multiple systems of domination like class, gender and race impact the relationship between the domestic worker and her employer.
In this study I want to understand how the potential invective character of encounters between the participants of a domestic work may bring about the possibilities for negotiation of identities and eventful resolution of differential societal forces. How invective communication allows its participants to position each other in multiple, intersecting identity categories and whether as a result social order is reproduced, challenged or transformed.
For this aim I have chosen to study Turkish domestic workers in Germany who are working for Turkish families.
The methodological focus of my research project is analyzing what kind of membership categories in the theme of domestic work context are brought forward by the participants of this social situation, what attributes are given to each of the categories, and what kind of self and other positioning takes place with regards to the categories used. In my work, identity will be considered as an indirect product of positioning through membership categories and not as ‘a priori’ given entity but ‘in situ’ emergent in the narration of the interviewee. My research data is based on interviews.