Göçmen işçinin bedeninin inşası: Federal Almanya'nın 1961 ve 1973 yılları arasında Türkiye'den gelen göçmen işçilerine uyguladığı sağlık muayenesi

This thesis focuses on a distinct moment of Federal Germany's recruitment of migrant labour in the period from 1961 to 1973: the medical selection examinations of labour migrant applicants from Turkey. These examinations, which aimed at the selection of physically fit and healthy labour migrants for the West German labour market, were conducted by West German health officers in so-called 'German recruitment offices' in Istanbul and Ankara between 1961 and 1973. Drawing on in-depth interviews with former labour migrants and examining physicians as well as on a discourse analysis of primary sources dating from the period in question, I concentrate on the question of how in relation to the requirements of industrial labour and public health politics the body of the labour migrant was shaped and defined in the medical examinations. Combining concepts taken from the work of Foucault, constructionist body theory and disability studies, I trace how certain conceptualisations of the labour migrant's body emerged along the lines of health, disease, bodily ability and disability. Furthermore, I analyse how this construction process of the body overlapped in various ways with notions of race and gender. I argue that these examinations were no neutral scientific endeavour. Rather, in accordance with industrial requirements and national health politics, they served as a selection procedure combining inclusionary and exclusionary power mechanisms with the logic of risk management to rationalise, normalise and commodify the labour migrant's body.