Diary or Notebook: Secular Morality and the Gendered Ambiguities of Legal Personhood in an Istanbul Family Courthouse

Unlike the majority of Muslim countries in which family disputes are resolved either through personal status laws or in the wider sphere of sharia courts, Turkey commits to a secular civil code in its conduct with the family. The daily operation of Turkish secular law, however, is just as predicated as religion-based laws upon morally charged ideas of personhood and their gendered ambivalences. Contrary to analyses that approach this phenomenon as an aberration from or an alternative to Western secular order (and its idealized bounded individualism), this article examines indeterminacies about the definition and limits of legal personhood as produced through entangled histories of secularization in Western and non-Western contexts. This process is most identifiable in family courts, which were introduced to the Turkish judiciary as a specialized tribunal by the governing Justice and Development Party in 2003 in response to increasing pressure from women’s movements, international legal obligations, and the European Union gender directives that formed part of the negotiations for Turkey’s accession. Through an ethnographic study in one such family courthouse in Istanbul, this article examines how legal actors deploy gender-based moral hierarchies and public and hidden sentiments to construct the family as an intimate realm of state intervention. I trace the contradictory ways in which familial stories and moral discourses find their way into the highly bureaucratized “impersonal” space of the courtroom and become authorized, tolerated, silenced, and typified through the extralegal involvement of psychologists and other court personnel. By simultaneously invoking privacy and public order, relational personhood in modern legal contexts disrupts secular myths of the public-private divide, self-possessed individual, and equal citizenship, with broader implications for critical secularity studies and anthropological analyses of family law and gender in Muslim majority contexts.