Life experiences of fallen soldier's wives in the context of gender

This study was conducted to understand the experiences of fallen soldier's wives and how these experiences are shaped in the context of gender. In the research, experiences about spousal bereavement, being lone women, the privileges, and oppression of being fallen soldier's wife, benefits and services were scrutinized. The research methodology is feminist qualitative research. Within the research, semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with 21 wives of the fallen soldiers who had been felt counter terrorism operations or terrorist actions during military duty. The data that was created with wives of fallen soldier in the interviews, were thematically analyzed using MAXQDA 12 Analytics Pro software. The analyses indicated that Turkey's patriarchal militarist gender regime placed wives of fallen soldiers into a social position based on the socially constructed martyrdom concept and this position shaped both their world of meaning and life experiences. This social position includes experiences of dignity, liberation, power, and privilege as well as experiences of discrimination, restriction, and oppression arising from societal norms, stereotypes, prejudices. Within this study, moving from the concept of disenfranchised grief, concept of "disenfranchised recovery" has been developed to explain that the wives of fallen soldiers steps for back to normal life after their loss have been disenfranchised by the society. The results of this study point out that a need for change in organization and planning of policy and programs, legislation, social welfare services for wives of fallen soldiers and, education and practice of social work.