Exploring the everyday cohabitations of humans and urban animals through the ecodocumentaries of Istanbul

Abstract

This thesis examines three documentaries about street animals of Istanbul—Taşkafa: Stories of the Street (2013), Kedi (2016), Stray (2020)—belonging to the ecodocumentary genre. With particular emphasis on critical posthumanist and new materialist theories and concepts—especially Donna Haraway’s “companion species,” “naturecultures,” and the “Chthulucene,” Jane Bennett’s “vibrant matter,” Rosi Braidotti’s “nomadic ethics,” as well as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s “becoming-animal”—it employs a close reading of the narratives and aesthetics of the chosen documentaries in terms of the human-urban animal relations and interactions depicted in them. Through the selected theoretical lenses, this study identifies the ways in which the distinctive and entangled lives of humans and urban felines-canines are played out in the cultural and historical contexts of Istanbul, as well as how and to what extent the dominant human gaze towards animals in visual culture is subverted in these documentaries. This thesis concludes that the modernist urge to gentrify urban cities by removing the urban street animals has been challenged in these documentaries, by portraying Istanbul as a composite zoe-centered terrain.