The contemporary landscape of migration in Turkey is haunted by a specific historical phantom: the "Natasha." Originating in the post-Soviet migration waves of the 1990s, the Natasha figure—a reductionist, hyper-sexualized archetype of the Slavic woman—constructed a durable discursive archive [1]. This archive did not merely define a moment in time; it established a visual and moral template for how "foreign" women are categorized, monitored, and ultimately misrecognized within the Turkish public sphere. Today, as Syrian refugee women navigate a landscape of precarious legal status and social fragility, the specter of the Natasha archive informs the regimes of visibility that govern their lives.
Regimes of visibility are never neutral; they are deeply imbricated in what Jacques Rancière calls the "distribution of the sensible" [2]. In the Turkish context, the Natasha archive functions as a pre-existing lens that refracts the presence of Syrian women. When a Syrian woman is made visible—whether through news media, social media, or state surveillance—she is often caught between two poles: the victim-subject in need of humanitarian protection or the moral-threat-subject who destabilizes the domestic order. The latter is a direct echo of the Natasha discourse, where the visibility of the foreign woman is synonymous with the subversion of traditional patriarchal structures and economic stability.
This mechanism of misrecognition is a potent tool of biopolitical control. By casting Syrian refugee women through a lens of moral suspicion inherited from the Natasha archive, the state and social actors can justify intrusive forms of monitoring. Biopower, as defined by Michel Foucault, operates on the regulation of populations; here, it functions by identifying certain bodies as "at risk" or "risky" [3]. In times of crisis—whether economic downturns or spikes in nationalism—these regimes of visibility tighten. The Syrian woman is no longer seen in her individual complexity or her specific history of displacement; she is reduced to a category that must be managed, moved, or silenced [4].
Crisis serves as an accelerant for these discursive regimes. During periods of social volatility, the historical archive is weaponized to produce "regimes of truth" that scapegoat the most vulnerable. The Syrian woman becomes a screen onto which national anxieties regarding labor, morality, and sovereignty are projected. Her visibility is thus a trap: to be seen is to be subject to a biopolitical gaze that misrecognizes her humanity in favor of a security-oriented or morality-driven categorization.
Ultimately, the Natasha archive acts as a foundational architecture for the contemporary exclusion of Syrian women. This process of subjectivation—where individuals are constituted as subjects of a specific power-knowledge regime—limits the agency of refugee women [5]. To challenge these regimes of visibility, one must first dismantle the archive that sustains them. Recognition must move beyond the narrow archetypes of the "protegee" or the "provocateur," allowing for a discursive space where the Syrian woman is visible not as a biopolitical problem to be solved, but as a political subject with the right to self-definition. Until this historical haunting is addressed, the visual regime in Turkey will continue to function as a mechanism of control rather than a platform for genuine human encounter.