Body Unburdened
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Drawing on research that combines an ethnography of a new group of women from popular classes in
today's Turkey and a study of vigilante violence against these women, including interviews and court
files, The Body Unburdened offers a compelling explanation for the surge of hostility against women in
the global era. It chronicles the journey of the New Woman from the neoliberal global era to the
populist moment in the twenty-first century to show how the New Woman has gone from being a
desirable employee in the global service economy to a precarious body that faces the risk of violence in
the right-wing populist moment. The book argues that those emotional and embodied capacities, which
had made the New Woman attractive to service employers, catapulted her into the center of highly
contentious politics as both a feminist icon of resistance and the target of violent hostility during the
reign of Turkey's government.
Esra Sarioglu received her PhD from Binghamton University in 2013 and is currently a researcher at the Center for the History of Emotions, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin. Between 2016 and 2019, she worked as an assistant professor in the Gender Studies Division of the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at Ankara University, where she also served as vice-chair of the Women's Studies Center. Her research interests include gender and globalization, embodiment, emotions, work and labor, and gender politics in Turkey. Her work has appeared in Gender, Work & Organization, Women's Studies International Forum, Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, Kadin/Woman 2000, L'Homme: Europäische Zeitschrift für Feministische Geschichtswissenschaft. She has also published several book chapters and essays in Turkish and English.