Weaving resistance: Gendered labor and solidarity in a rural workshop in Turkey

This ethnographic study examines gendered labor and everyday resistance in a now-defunct carpet weaving workshop in the Anatolian village of Bizim Kız, Turkey. Drawing on Marxist feminist theory and James C. Scott's concept of the “hidden transcript,” the research is based on oral history interviews with two generations of women weavers. While men-controlled profits and market access, women bore the burden of production, yet within this asymmetrical structure, they developed subtle yet potent strategies of resistance. Tactics such as slowing production, inserting intentional weaving mistakes, bodily complaints, ironic nicknames for male supervisors, and the refusal to grant helallik (moral forgiveness) functioned as culturally intelligible acts of dissent. These practices reveal how women navigated patriarchal control not through open confrontation but via silence, humor, and mutual recognition. After the workshop's closure, women continued to resist their erasure from official memory by creating vernacular archives of labor through oral narratives, photographs, and social media testimony. Investment in daughters' education emerged as a form of intergenerational redirection, a quiet but transformative feminist strategy reframing maternal sacrifice as resistance. By revealing how agency is expressed through gestures, memory, and moral refusal, this study contributes to transnational feminist labor scholarship and challenges dominant paradigms of political resistance. It positions women's labor not only as an economic act but as a site of cultural negotiation, ethical protest, and historical meaning-making.