From Criticism to Collaboration: Politics of Naturalist Mothering in Turkey.

This article examines the rise of naturalist mothering in urban, affluent, and highly educated middle- and upper-middle-class mothers in Turkey, situating it within the country's neoliberal conservatization under the Justice and Development Party (AKP). It argues that while these mothers adopt naturalist practices—such as natural birth, long-term breastfeeding, organic nutrition, and homeopathic care—as a form of individual risk management and empowerment against perceived health and environmental threats, this trend ultimately reinforces patriarchal gender roles by intensifying women's unpaid care labor within the domestic sphere. Drawing on interviews with eighteen naturalist mothers in Istanbul, the study highlights how their distrust of institutions leads them to assume full responsibility for family well-being, aligning with neoliberal governmentality and feminist political ecology perspectives that link such self-regulation to broader socio-political structures. The article concludes that without structural changes toward gender equality, naturalist mothering perpetuates existing inequalities by shifting accountability away from systemic causes and onto mothers, thus normalizing the gendered division of care labor in Turkey's conservative neoliberal context.