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Paper short abstract

Based on ethnographic research in Istanbul’s independent theatre scenes, this paper examines how women artists navigate polarized cultural conditions through performative practices of collaboration and vulnerability, treating care not as a theme but as a relational modality of staying together.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how women working within independent theatre scenes in Istanbul negotiate polarized political, moral, and economic conditions through everyday performative practices. Based on long-term ethnographic research conducted for a thesis at KU Leuven, the study draws on sustained engagements with women performers, directors, and cultural workers active in non-institutional theatre spaces characterised by infrastructural fragility, moral regulation, and chronic precarity.

Rather than approaching care as a thematic concern or normative value, the paper conceptualises it as a relational and performative modality—a way of coordinating bodies, temporalities, and affects under conditions of polarization. In a city shaped by neoliberal cultural policies, shrinking public support for the arts, and increasing pressure on women’s presence in public life, theatre emerges as a fragile space where vulnerability, collaboration, and endurance are continuously negotiated.

The analysis foregrounds embodied and temporal practices through which artists sustain collective work, including reorganising rehearsal rhythms around childcare and multiple livelihoods, maintaining horizontal modes of decision-making, and transforming exhaustion and fragility into shared capacities for artistic continuity. These practices do not take the form of overt resistance; instead, they generate entangled modes of being that complicate oppositional logics by enabling artists to remain present and connected within fractured cultural landscapes.

By situating Istanbul as a critical site of polarized cultural production, the paper contributes to anthropological debates on performance in contexts of crisis and constraint. It argues that everyday performative practices function as experimental grounds where alternative ways of staying together are provisionally enacted rather than fully resolved.