Defining and living out the interior: the ‘modern’ apartment and the ‘urban’ housewife in Turkey during the 1950s and 1960s
Author
Gürel, M. Ö.
Date
2009-12Source Title
Gender, Place and Culture
Print ISSN
0966-369X
Electronic ISSN
1360-0524
Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Volume
16
Issue
6
Pages
703 - 722
Language
English
Type
ArticleItem Usage Stats
163
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Abstract
This study investigates the interaction of women’s gendered identities and
performances in the modern middle strata with the new apartment, while complicating
the boundary between the legitimizing discourses of modern architecture and ideas
around femininity, during the 1950s and 1960s in Turkey. It conceptualizes domestic
premises as the inhabitant’s space, where gender roles are formed and performed.
Drawing on research concerning the postwar construction of women’s identities and
diverse ideas of feminine space in a global context, I examine how the apartment was a
place for women, who were conceptualized as Western and happy housewives amid
Cold War geopolitics. The study ponders ways in which women negotiated/subverted
conflicting expectations of the modern housewife. The apartment mediated powerful
discourses on structures of patriarchy and identities, while simultaneously allowing
women to define and live out the modern domicile as active agents. It embodied the
intermediate space between the concepts of modern and traditional, Western and non-Western, urban and rural, and masculine and feminine.