regime. In the late 1960s, under a liberal constitu-
tion, the growing student movement, increasingly
disillusioned with the status quo, influenced by
youth movements in Europe and elsewhere in
1968, spurred on by various forces with much to
gain from the rise of extremism, moved outside the
legal terrain, culminating in increased violence fol-
lowed by brutal repression subsequent to the mili-
tary coup of 1971 (and again in 1980). Youth, who
embodied the new nation in the early republican
period, were now reconstructed in the public dis-
course as a threat to the national interest. Youth
themselves, in contrast, claimed it was the govern-
ment itself that was illegitimate. Despite their dif-
ferences, the early republican and youth of the late
1960s shared a modernist construction of youth.
Men tended to dominate the student movement; a
history of women in the politics of this period
remains to be written. The feminist movement of
the 1980s arose as much out of the experience of
1968 as from a critique of it.
The 1980 military coup was an important water-
shed in Turkish politics. A new constitution that
restricted civil liberties was put into effect, and
young people born in the 1980s were raised in a rel-
atively depoliticized environment. In the 1980s and
1990s, in addition to Islamist and Kurdish nation-
alist movements, a variety of subcultures including
environmentalists, human rights activists, femi-
nists, gays, and others entered the public sphere.
Just as it symbolizes a break in Turkish political
culture, the post-1980 period constitutes a rupture
with modernist constructions of youth. Today, con-
structions of youth circulate through the media,
where young people are increasingly represented.
For youth who reject the way they are depicted,
existing categories do not seem to fit. Their indi-
vidualism, denigrated by previous generations,
stems from a hesitancy in linking their subjective
identities and lifestyles to a single collective project.
The feminist movement had an influence on this
subjective turn.Young people are increasingly chal-
lenging their construction in public discourse, the
established hierarchy between elders and juniors,
and the mission imposed on them by adult society.
This suggests that the construction of youth (and of
age) in Turkish society may be changing.
Today, one half of Turkish society is under the age
of 25; these young people are mostly urban. The rise
in educational attendance and age at marriage, cou-
pled with high unemployment, have led to the
extension of youth as a life stage – without, how-
ever, reducing the economic dependence of young
people on the older generation. Growing economic
inequalities threaten to disenfranchise a youthful
the united states 795population from the rights of citizenship. The devel-
opment of a more participatory public sphere is
predicated upon the restructuring of a political sys-
tem that amounts to a gerontocracy. Young people
in Turkey are caught between disillusionment with
the promises of the nation-state and the hope of
greater participation in what has become a trans-
national public sphere requiring new definitions of
citizenship as well as of adulthood and youth. The
issue for young people today is how to achieve (or
maintain) the promises of modernity within condi-
tions of neo-liberal globalization.Bibliography
F. Berktay, Has anything changed in the outlook of the
Turkish left on women?, in Ç. Tekeli (ed.), Women in
modern Turkish society. A reader, Atlantic Highlands,
N.J. 1994, 250–62.
A. Kaya, Ethnic group discourses and German-Turkish
youth, in G. G. Özdo©an and G. Tokay (eds.), Redefin-
ing the nation state and citizen, Istanbul 2000, 233–51.
Ç. Mardin, Youth and violence in Turkey, in International
Journal of Social Science29:2 (1977), 251–89.
——, The mobilization of youth. Western and Eastern, in
J. Kcuzynski et al. (eds.), Perspectives oncontemporary
youth, Tokyo 1988, 235–48.
L. Neyzi, Object or subject? The paradox of “youth”
in Turkey, in International Journal of Middle East
Studies, 33:3 (August 2001), 411–32.
L. Peirce, Seniority, sexuality, and social order, in M. C.
Zilfi (ed.),Women in the Ottoman Empire. The vocab-
ulary of gender in early modern Ottoman society,
Leiden 1997, 169–96.Leyla NeyziThe United StatesYouth cultures are distinct in that peer groups
dominate social relationships. Of notable signifi-
cance to Muslim youth is how interpretations of
Islam influence the socialization of women. How-
ever, much of what is deemed appropriate behavior
for girls in the name of religion stems from select
interpretations of religious teachings in particular
cultural settings. Interpretations of Islam, and the
range of its application to youth behaviors in the
United States, constitute the focus of this entry.
While the topics covered are not necessarily
exhaustive, they illustrate key issues regarding
women and gender among Muslim youth in the
United States, including the matters of dating,
youth movements, and parent-child relations.Dating
Youth culture in the United States centers on rela-
tions between boys and girls, with dating often the
theme of movie plots, music, and school activities