"Servant Princess" of the modern home : domesticity and femininity in Turkey after electrification, 1923-1950
Author
Şavk, Bahar Emgin
Advisor
Savaş, Özlem
Date
2014Publisher
Bilkent University
Language
English
Type
ThesisItem Usage Stats
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Abstract
This dissertation deals with the question how modern domesticity and modern
femininity were discursively constructed in the advertisements and other promotional
texts of electric appliances published between 1923 and 1950 in popular women’s
and family magazines in Turkey. The issue is framed within socio-historical
technology studies and the feminist histories of the early republican period. Moving
forward from the claim that electricity had to be first domesticated to enter the
homes, the study searches for the gendered connotations of this process. Besides, it
ponders over the ways women are interpellated as modern subjects by the
representations in question. To this end the dissertation carries on a discourse
analysis of the visual and textual representations of electricity and electric powered
domestic appliances. The images are discussed in their potential to bring forth the
ambiguities in the definitions of modern domesticity and femininity. Analysis
revealed that neither the middle-class ethos of domesticity nor the chaste woman of
this family was the only idealized form of domesticity and femininity by the official
discourses. There were rather different modernities defined distinctly based on
various class positions all of which were approved by the republican cadres.