`` My mother started to work at 48. Before that she played the woman's role: listening to her husband's word, because her husband made the money. He provided for the household while she worked in the house. Now her voice is heard, and this comes from her economic freedom. She is bringing money into the house, and this also affects the community at the same time. First in the family, and then in the com- munity, people are affected. When a 48-year-old woman is thought of, now she comes to mind as an example.'' The speaker isVahide, a 31-year-old married woman with five children who is currently earning money by doing piecework at home. She shares this narrative of boundary crossing in the context of a group discussion among young women, most of whom are migrants to Istanbul from other parts of Turkey. The transgressions traced through her story take place across delineations of home, work, and community. They slip through circulated meanings of age and gender and, in doing so, they enact transformations that affect everyday practices and discourses of womanhood. It is a story that assembles and challenges dominant gender ideologies, traced here through `the woman's role', the housewife ^ provider model, and the naturalized association between earning money and claiming power in the household. Vahide speaks of acts of subversion and trans- formation, distilled within the persona of a 48-year-old woman who is working for money for the first time in her life and claiming the right to speak and to be heard. Through her everyday labor practices, Vahide's mother comes to represent a way of being a middle-aged woman; she is cited within her community, within Vahide's narrative, and the analysis that I seek to spin out from it. Through these chains of signification, practices of work call forth gendered spaces and identities; to use Butler's (1990) terms, gender identity becomes an effect of work. Drawing on eight focus-group discussions with women migrants to Istanbul, I trace the circulation of discourses of femininity, urbanism, and rurality as they are filtered through the currents and contradictions of Turkish national identity and post-1980 Islamist politics. Instead of asking how gender relations structure work, I begin from Belaboring gender: the spatial practice of work and the politics of `making do' in Istanbul Anna J Secor Department of Geography, University of Kentucky, 1457 Paterson Office Tower, Lexington, KY 40506, USA; e-mail: ajseco2@uky.edu Received 5 February 2003; in revised form 7 May 2003 Environment and Planning A 2003, volume 35, pages 2209^ 2227 Abstract. From focus-group and survey research conducted in Istanbul between 1998 and 2002, I argue that the spatial practice of work is critical to the constitution of what it means to `be a woman' in the Turkish context. My approach to gender and work makes use of Butler's theory of performativity in order to show how discourses and practices of work are not only implicated in the production of male and female gender identities but also provide a variety of routes through which different aspects of masculinity and femininity are performed. In my reading of the discussions and debates assembled by the focus-group texts, I try to show how work compels various performances, such as the `good woman' or the `bad girl' in Istanbul. Further, work not only calls forth different ways of being a woman in relation to the city but also produces differentiated female bodies. Finally, I argue that work is a spatial practice through which belonging, identity, and rights are staked in the urban environment. DOI:10.1068/a3639