Psychology Program Presents

How Sexual Empowerment Gets in the Way of Liberation: A Listening Guide Analysis of Two Turkish Immigrant Women

In this presentation, Sedef Ozoguz, PhD will examine how contemporary sexual empowerment scripts can paradoxically get in the way of liberation, drawing on a feminist, voice-centered Listening Guide analysis of narratives from two Turkish immigrant women, Leyla and Elvin. Through close attention to shifting “voices” across each account, the analysis traces how culturally available discourses shape what becomes thinkable and sayable about sexuality, vulnerability, and agency. The Listening Guide analysis highlights how both Elvin and Leyla find themselves in binds they want to escape from: to lose her virginity without being vulnerable for Elvin, and to claim sexual empowerment without being categorized as a slut for Leyla. They both find solutions to these dilemmas, in which Elvin narrates taking her own virginity, while Leyla articulates a “subtle” sexuality grounded in ease, play, curiosity, and belonging. Tracing the absence of erotic voice across the interview, I argue that these narratives illuminate the limits of empowerment-as-solution frameworks, showing how dominant, contradictory, and incomplete hegemonic discourses of sexuality can both enable and constrain women’s possibilities for liberation.

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Dr. Sedef Ozoguz is an Assistant Professor at The New School. She earned her PhD in Critical Social Psychology from the City University of New York (CUNY), and holds degrees in Psychology and Cognitive and Decision Sciences from the University of York and University College London (UCL). Her research explores gender and sexuality through transnational, transdisciplinary, and transmodal approaches, and has been published in leading journals such as Qualitative Psychology and Feminism & Psychology. Beyond academia, Sedef is dedicated to public scholarship, using documentary film to make gender and sexuality research accessible to wider audiences. Her film, Wild Women of Anatolia, which centers the freedom dreams of women in Türkiye, has been screened at international festivals including Documentarist, Beyond Borders, and Antioch. She currently serves as co-director of SexTechLab, where she investigates how sexuality, gender, race, culture, technology, and intimacy intersect in contemporary society.

For more information, call 845-758-6822, or e-mail [email protected].

Time: 4:00 pm EST/GMT-5

Location: Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium

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