In this paper, I will focus on a particular debate, which was a hot topic in Turkish media in the summer of 2005. The debate was about the leisure time activities of lower class inhabitants of Istanbul, who were blamed to spoil the Istanbul panorama. Their leisure time habits, like swimming with underwear, were identified as a problem of “incivility” in accordance with the interchangeable use of “civilized” with “modern”, “Westernized” and/or “contemporary” in Turkey. Once cited as a problem to tackle, a variety of positions, propositions, classifications, and also solutions were put forward in media, through which I will interpret certain claims on the Turkish Nation, culture, poverty, and modernity. These claims, I will argue, are bound with disciplining of certain populations in line with the middle class aspirations. Throughout, certain practices, objects and bodies are considered to be a “problem”. They are put on view as to be corrected and fit the dominant representations of “proper citizen”. Hence, I will discuss that the problem about “non-modern” is a problem of governance. So, this paper is an attempt to bring objects and practices marked as “backward” and “non-civilized” back “‘into touch’ with the larger, less tangible and less coherent network of relationships” (Hebdidge, 1988).
My short discussion will not cover all the claims, and for that matter, all the parties involved. I have to exert from the beginning that the maneuvers, complicities, appropriations or rejections that lower class inhabitants of the city take on, are beyond the scope of this paper. My analysis is not about how power is assumed or subverted by lower classes; rather, I will focus on the desires and aspirations of middle classes in respect to their taste for leisure time. That is to say that although the subject matter of this paper seems as the practices of lower class people, it is actually about the normative framework of middle classes.
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