Contested Belongings: Identity Negotiations among Multilingual Turkish Returnee Women in a Digital Community

Date

2025-7

Author

Erdoğan Öztürk, Yasemin

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This study explores the discursive construction and negotiation of belonging, authentic membership and identity stances in a digital community of Turkish returnee women with diasporic upbringings in different Western European countries with a particular attention on their communicative practices through a sociolinguistic lens. Concentrating on the interactions in returnee women’s everyday online socialities, this project addresses the question of how return-migrant women construct and navigate their multilayered identity positions with respect to diasporic and migration experiences, and multilingualism as two profound sociocultural factors shaping returnee identities. The study is designed as a discourse-centred online ethnography (Androutsopoulos, 2008), and adopts a stancetaking approach (Du Bois, 2007; Jaffe, 2009) as its main analytical tool. The dataset includes social media interactions within the digital space and semi-structured interviews. The findings broadly reveal that interactions in the digital space are heavily stance-saturated and invoke ideological positionings on the basis of a strong discursive contrast and difference between local Turkish community and returnees with a diasporic background. Participants were observed to strategically employ stancetaking to construct, contest, and reframe multiple identity positions vis-à-vis the digital community and the wider sociocultural context. These stance acts are shaped by multiple voices and perspectives, often invoking and negotiating hegemonic discourses surrounding migration, belonging, cultural authenticity, and gender. The findings show that returnee women construct multiple, and at times conflicting, (trans)national identity positions by drawing symbolic boundaries between Europe and Turkey, engaging in metapragmatic negotiations of exclusionary social labels, and positioning themselves as both culturally authentic and transnationally distinct. They also reveal that multilingualism serves as an affective, stratified, and gendered terrain of identity negotiation, where returnee women use their linguistic repertoires to assert social and moral difference, and perform cultural roles shaped by transnational mobility such as multilingual mothers and transnational wives.

Subject Keywords

identity, social media, return migration, stancetaking, multilingualism

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/115404

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis