İHSAN OKTAY ANAR’IN “GALÎZ KAHRAMAN”INDA ERKEKLİKLER

Abstract

Ihsan Oktay Anar s Galiz Kahraman is a novel in which the narrator s criticisms of social life are expressed in an ironic style. In terms of its fiction, its multi-layered structure between reality and dream and the deconstructive attitude of the postmodern narrator sometimes hide the criticism of masculinity in the novel behind ironic discourses. However, besides the social issues highlighted in the novel, the unusualness in the construction of male and female characters indicates that there are issues that the novel wishes to point out to its readers in the context of gender roles. In the novel, the desire of male characters to gain power in social life and to come to power emerges around the anxiety of influencing the women they desire. The narrator ironically criticizes the masculinities enslaved to this desire, and does so by facing them off not only with men but also with women in fraudulent rivalry games. Thus, it is seen that the criticisms of the pleasure and domination-centered promises that ensure the continuity of patriarchal masculinity are also constructed over these areas of encounter. This situation disrupts the structure of masculinity criticism among men and reveals the narrator s attitude that wishes to make women the subject of this criticism. As a matter of fact, despite the scarcity of female characters in the narrative, their appearance and behavior that displaces masculine desire and domination is a critique of patriarchal ideology. In the study, the forms of masculinity in the novel will be analyzed around the fraudulent struggle areas between men on the one hand, and the attitudes of women towards them on the other. In addition, the novel, which includes representations of masculinity in different segments of the society, will focus on the variability of references to masculinity and will try to look closely at the ways of thinking that produce distorted structures.