Browsing by Subject "Turkish feminism"

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Open Access
Female experience of space: readings from two novels
(2022-08) Erdoğan, İlknur
This thesis aims to reveal the spatial experience of Turkish women throughout time in the light of cultural and political changes in space and society through analysis of novels. The lived spaces are the loci of human beings and individuals’ everyday lives are staged in and around the lived space. The politics of gender difference is one of the most significant variables in one's experience and perception of space. Turkish context, having experienced multiple politics, regimes, and autonomous movements for women's liberation, provides a significant case for the research of gender-space relationships in various periods. By analyzing Hiçbiri (1921) by Suat Derviş and Kadının Adı Yok (1987) by Duygu Asena, the thesis attempts to highlight the multi-layered dimensions of the lived spaces with a feminist perspective. Two novels are chosen to depict the conditions in the first-wave feminist period at the end of the Ottoman Empire and the second-wave feminist period in the Turkish Republic after the 1980s. The research uses narrative analysis to enable a multi-disciplinary viewpoint combining the disciplines of architecture, literature, geography, and sociology. The analysis provides insight into spaces and demonstrations of women's everyday life, as well as into political and cultural influences on women's performance in public and private spaces. The main argument is that internalized socio-cultural norms, regulations and masculine control have an immense impact on women’s experience and perception of space even when the socio-political milieu implies progression in theory.
Open Access
Halide Edib-Adıvar ve feminist yazın
(2001) Aytemiz, Beyhan Uygun
Halide Edib-Adıvar, who is acknowledged to be the first woman novelist of Turkey although she has Fatma Aliye and Emine Semiye as her predecessors, is accepted to be an important figure in Turkish feminism and modernism. It should be admitted that she has played an important role in the War of Turkish Emancipation and represented Turkish womanhood in Turkey and abroad. The fact that she is recognized as a leader of and a spokeswoman for Turkish feminism resulted in the acceptance of her being a feminist novelist. However, a close reexamination of her fiction shows that her strategies of constructing femininity and womanhood are in harmony with the patriarchal modes of literary representation. The well-established roles of women and men in patriarchal societies are recreated instead of being challenged in her early work. In order to idealize her woman characters as powerful, active intellectuals, she creates their opposites as passive, ignorant, and self-sacrificing figures who are continually looked down on and criticized by the male point of view of the narrator in such works as Seviyye Talip and Handan. The images of women as “angels” and/or “monsters” in Halide Edib's early work is replaced by the images of women as “comrades” in The Shirt of Flame and Tatarcık. While determining the conditions of women’s existence in the male-dominated society she deprives them of their womanhood and femininity, and presents them as man-like. Thus, women do not pose a threat to men sexually. Halide Edib-Adıvar’s recreation of the phallocratic representation of women in her three novels, Handan, The Shirt of Flame and Tatarcık, is examined in this thesis and the conclusion reached is that the femininity/womanhood of the idealized female characters Handan, Ayşe and Lâle, is underrepresented.