Browsing by Subject "Difference"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5

Open Access
Diversifying feminism in Turkey in the 1990s
(2003) Yüksel, Metin
This thesis attempts to diversify feminism in Turkey with a particular reference to Kurdish women’s relationship with the feminist movement in Turkey in the 1990s. The thesis argues that feminism in Turkey, to a large extent, has been ethnicity-blind as it has been implicitly assumed that all women in Turkey are of Turkish ethnic origin. Yet it is claimed that, of a different ethnic origin, Kurdish women undergo a dual oppression and subordination due both to their gender and ethnic origin. In this context, a relationship will be constructed between Black women’s experience in the West and that of Kurdish women in Turkey. These arguments will be based on a review of the relevant literature in addition to in-depth interviews carried out with nine politically active Kurdish women. Furthermore, it will be argued that Kurdish women’s political activism in the 1990s’ Turkey as ‘Kurdish women’ emanates from the fact that they were not recognized as ‘Kurdish’ women by the feminist movement on the one hand, and not as ‘women’ by Kurdish nationalism on the other. Despite these drawbacks of the two movements under consideration, it will be indicated that, Kurdish women’s political activism might be considered as a consequence of the configuration of these two movements. Moreover, this thesis argues that, among the many strands of the feminist theories, Black feminism has important insights in understanding and explaining the specific form of oppression and subordination of Kurdish women in Turkey.
Open Access
Ethics and aesthetics in the philosophy of Alain Badiou
(2005) Yalım, P. Burcu
The supposed impossibility of achieving a form of rational agency for action is the prevailing critique against contemporary theories of representaion. Alain Badiou’s philosophy appears to solve this problem by assigning a subject-form and not a substantial subject as such as rational agency and by filling in the space of truth left empty by the declaration of the end of philosophy with a new universality of truth subject to temporality. Yet this apparent duality of form and content pertaining to subjectivity, and the manner in which time and history are constructed in Badiou’s theory of truth signal the return of a certain transcendence, and the very abolishment of the time which appears to be thus constructed. This thesis aims to make a critical discussion on Alain Badiou’s philosophy through his fifteen theses on art, as the return of classical philosophy and to rise the ethical stakes involved in putting forth a philosophy based upon truth.
Open Access
Problems of ontology in Gilles Deleuze's philosophy
(2008) Öztürk, Haydar
This thesis bases on the examination of Deleuze and Guattari’s some philosophical concepts to argue that existence means connections and we need an ontology of “and” that is able to reflect this meaning. In this thesis, the relations of things are grasped without introducing ontological hierarchy between them and traditional ontological concepts are introduced in order to refer the problem of connection. In that respect, the concept of machine and its correspondences in their philosophy are read in an ontological context, and some aesthetical and political results of ontology of “and” are emphasized.
Open Access
Strolling through Istanbul's Beyoğlu: in-between difference and containment
(SAGE Publications, 2015) Sandıkcı, O.
In this essay, I evaluate Istanbul's Beyoʇlu as a hybrid and negotiated space and investigate how the imaginary and lived experiences of space enable as well as constrain transgressive everyday practices and identity politics. Through analyzing memories, imaginations, and experiences of Beyoʇlu, in particular its drag/transsexual subculture, I explore the ways in which the past and present interact under the dynamic of globalization and (re)produce Beyoʇlu as a space of difference and containment. Beyond the intricacies of Istanbul's sex trade, night life, and queer subculture, I propose that the singular district of Beyoʇlu, given its geographical, historical, and social location, operates as a microcosm of the tensions and negotiations between East and West, local and global, past and present. © The Author(s) 2013.
Open Access
Trying to say what was true': language, divinity, difference in marilynne robinson's gilead
(Routledge, 2016) Ploeg, A. J.
Marilynne Robinson's Gilead is the journal of elderly minister John Ames, written to the seven-year-old son that he knows he will never live to see grow up. Though quite traditional in his conception of God, Ames nevertheless embraces progressive and even atheistic ideas regarding the divine. This article contends that Gilead resists being read strictly as an exploration of language's failure to express the transcendence of divinity, or, conversely, solely as an articulation of language's cryptic capacity to enact such inability. Instead, it seeks to be read as the confluence of these two approaches. In other words, Robinson's novel troubles the distinction between language's ability and inability to express by formulating it as in/expressibility, as the paradoxical simultaneity of the two that makes divinity discernible as difference. This article thus investigates the markedly unorthodox notion of divinity offered in Gilead and its broader implications for theological discourse. © Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association 2016.