Gendering time and space: Women's coffeehouses and (Women's) right to leisure in Turkey

This thesis examines women's coffeehouses, which constitute a distinctive example of women's common and normative leisure experiences in Turkey, on the axis of feminist leisure and feminist geography literature. The study is based on both newspaper and magazine archival research and field research. Fieldwork was conducted in two women's coffeehouses in Istanbul and in a Central Anatolian district. In the literature, women's relations with the city and their experiences of leisure time are predominantly centered around obstacles and restrictions. However, neither the city nor leisure time are spaces where women are passive recipients of overdetermined structures, where they face only pressure and obstacles, leaving them no space for action, freedom and choice. In this thesis, through women's coffeehouses, the emancipatory aspects of the city and leisure time for women and the possibilities of resistance and empowerment they contain are emphasized. Women are seen as producers of space and active subjects who claim public spaces through various strategies. In this sense, women's coffeehouses are read as a demand for rights based on the concepts of "the right to the city" and "the right to leisure time" in the light of the data obtained from the archive and the field. With women's coffeehouses, women demand the privilege of spending leisure time in a public space owned by men with the desire to have a pleasant time, relax and socialize without getting involved in any work, and have transformed the urban public space in line with these demands. Women's coffeehouses function as an alternative public space where women reverse the gender of a space that is gendered as "masculine" in everyday life, challenging spatial exclusion, traditional gender roles and normative expectations of femininity through discourse and spatial practices, inverting gender stereotypes and relations, and building resistance against gender-related restrictions imposed on them.