Abstract
Understanding sustainability to be multifaceted and inherently contradictory, this article draws on long-term ethnographic research in the Cappadocia region of central Turkey to explore the gendered manifestations of various tourism-related 'sustainability fluxes'. In particular, I consider the ways in which both change and continuity are legitimized through sustainability and tourism and so manifest in contradictory ways to shape women's lives and practices. I identify four key sustainability fluxes as especially relevant in this tourism context. Firstly, women's empowerment through tourism work and increased gender equality through social and educational reform are discussed in relation to their enabling and legitimizing of change. Secondly, and reacting against these changes, are fears over sustainable food security plus nostalgic concerns over cultural sustainability. These latter sustainability fluxes engage with tourism and heritagization processes to revalue certain gendered food-production practices, and thereby legitimize continuity tying women's lives and practices to a logic of sameness. Contributing a feminist anthropology approach and guided by poststructuralist feminist thought, the article develops nuanced understanding not only of how these contradictory legitmizations "do things" in shaping women's lives and practices, but also of where ambivalences lay between acceptance and resistance to both change and continuity.