"This research is an attempt to gain an insight into the women's mobilisation and labour movements in Export-Processing Zones (EPZs). It addresses questions around feminisation of labour and changing forms of resistance within global capitalism by means of a case study. Taking the Novamed strike which occurred at the Antalya Free Zone in Turkey as an empirical entry point, the analysis highlights a gap in the literature on feminisation of labour and EPZs. The fact that the predominantly female strikers at Novamed were supported by feminists and women's groups in Turkey as well as by their formal representative, the workers' union, gave rise to forms of politics, i.e. body politics, which are arguably different from conventional class-based movements. The research is based on a critical reading of existing literature on feminisation of labour and labour movements in EPZs in relation to the analysis of information derived from primary sources on the strike period. The empirical research is based on the critical discourse analysis of media items, official documents, declarations/correspondences that came about during the fifteen-month-long strike period. Interviews conducted with people involved in the movement formed another basis for empirical analysis. Relying on the Women and the Politics of Place (WPP) framework, informed by poststructuralist conceptualisation of power, discourse and the body, the research seeks to understand opportunities and tensions arising from coalition between class-based and gender-based politics. The analysis of multiple forms and sites of resistance during the strike aims at extending and gendering the conceptualisation of the resistance within global capitalism. This study, in arguing that resistance is shaped within existing power relations, provides an empirically grounded definition for what I will call “feminisation of resistance"."

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