Browsing by Subject "Beauty"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4

Open Access
American cinema and popular representations of women in early Republican Turkey
(2013) Karabağ, Müzeyyen
This thesis focuses on the relationship between American cinema and Turkish woman in the 1930s. Along with political reforms, there were cultural transformations in the society in the 1930s in Turkey. One of the dimension of it was movies. It was the American movies which dominated the Turkish screens in the 1930s. I aim to show that American movies and the Turkish movie fan magazines Holivut, Holivut İstanbul Magazin, Yıldız contributed in depicting a new type of woman which represented a role model for Turkish women; through this American cinema discourse, American cinema stars were promoted as a role model for women in terms of beauty, sports, personality traits, gender relations and consumerism. Current historiography focuses on the Americanization of Turkish popular culture and underlining cultural influence of America in the 1940s, especially after Marshall Plan. Examining influence of American movies, American cinema stars, the movie fan magazines Holivut, Holivut İstanbul Magazin, Yıldız, the Turkish press' construction of women in the 1930s, I argue that Turkish popular culture was already becoming Americanized before the Marshall plan. This thesis also explores the discourse of Turkish movie fan magazines construction of women and compare it with "the ideal woman image" presented by Kemalist ideology.
Open Access
The construction of beauty by mobile applications
(2016-09) Baş, Burçak
As a highly complex, intriguing and contested matter incorporating a variety of meanings at different dimensions, beauty has long been of interest to scholars. Prior research that approached beauty as a socially constructed phenomenon has often pointed to the conceptualization of beauty around the normative ideals of whiteness, thinness and youth for the female subject, and mostly focused on and underlined the role of traditional media in reinforcing and disseminating these ideals. As new media constituting a crucial part among the recent developments in digital technologies and characterized by interactivity, mobile applications contemporarily play a role in the construction of beauty with their promise of a novel way to experience beauty. Yet, little interest has been shown in their sociocultural analysis, and both the construction of beauty by mobile applications and the role of interactivity in this construction are yet to be explored. In its aim to redress this gap, this thesis (1) engages in the critical sociocultural analysis of mobile applications by evaluating them as “sociocultural artefacts” and (2) adopts the theoretical framework of The Social Construction of Reality as proposed by Berger and Luckmann (1991) and further follows McLuhan’s (1994) dictum that “the medium is the message” as it focuses on mobile applications in comparison and contrast to the traditional beauty media of magazines and discusses the role and impact of the interactivity of new media as implicated in the construction of beauty by mobile applications.
Open Access
Exploring local and global ideals of beauty in Turkey : discourses and practices of plastic surgery patients and physicians
(2008) Tarı, Berna
Intrigued by an increase in demand for aesthetic operations all over the world, this study offers an in-depth investigation of plastic surgery as a consumption phenomenon. First, it looks at how local and global notions of the beautiful are negotiated in Turkey through consumption and marketing of aesthetic operations. Second, it looks at the nature of a service relationship formed between the surgeon and the patient-consumer, and how this relationship is constructed and maintained. Gazi University Hospital was chosen as the ethnographic research site. Results indicate that beauty is perceived as something that individuals improve, upgrade, and refine through time. Potential patients tend to have one of two ideals: The individual’s own younger appearance or someone else’s appearance. The ideal presented in the media is changing, making the target both difficult to achieve and difficult to catch. Here it is also possible to talk about a marketing process initiated and maintained by doctors and aesthetic medical companies at a global level. Neither the dominant logic nor the new logic of marketing can satisfactorily explain patient-consumers’ behavior in this context, where boundaries for the product cannot be established and there is considerably higher risk compared to other purchasing situations. It is possible to talk about doctor branding in this context, where brand positioning and brand image cannot be static since doctors are also people. Moreover, patient satisfaction has longitudinal and interpersonal characteristics since it involves the approval of others.
Open Access
Soft power in Turkish foreign policy under the AKP governments : 2002-2009
(2010) Alpaydın, Utku Ali Rıza
The concept of soft power has turned out to be one of the agenda-setting terms in the field of international relations upon its inception in the early 1990s. Despite its widespread usage, the inherent nature of the concept could not been grasped to a great extent. The increasing references to soft power in many of the analyses about Turkish foreign policy during the ruling Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP, (Justice and Development Party, JDP) era has created a need to present the notion of soft power as a proper theoretical concept and to discuss the foreign policy of the Turkish state conducted by the AKP governments in the light of such a theoretical background. Therefore, this thesis intends to present a refined theory of soft power embracing all the relevant points of the existing literature on soft power theory in order to make it utilizable for all cases and to implement this proposed theory to the case of Turkish foreign policy in a comparative manner by examining pre-AKP period and the period during the AKP has been in rule. Out of these explanations, the research question of this thesis emerges as such: “To what extent has soft power increased its influence in Turkish foreign policy under the AKP governments?” The main argument of the thesis can be put forward in the following manner: “The soft power of Turkish state has increased during the AKP term, although there has been some degree of soft power culture in the history of Turkish Republic.”