Neoliberalism, welfare, and mass male circumcisions in Turkey

This article explores the neoliberalization of mass male circumcisions, a type of social assistance in Turkey. Male circumcision is a religious and medical practice widely performed in Muslim-majority Turkey, and when this procedure is organised for the poor in large numbers, it is referred to as mass male circumcisions. The article argues that since the 2000s, the AKP (Justice and Development Party) has neoliberalized mass male circumcision by transforming it into an economic and symbolic resource for competing hospitals as well as shaping the ‘deserving’ urban poor families into consumer-like actors. The article further shows the limits and contradictions of this process. In doing so, it challenges the binary between neoliberalism and welfare, and views social assistance as another potential site of neoliberalization that recrafts the society and the state in the image of the market, cutting across economic and non-economic spheres.