Ayşe Gül Altınay

The Myth of the Military-Nation

As the utterances of Turkey’s legendary leader, most famous historian, and the most celebrated (and remembered) Minister of Education make clear, the idea that the Turkish nation is a military-nation (ordu-millet or asker-ulus)1 is one of the foundational myths of Turkish nationalism. The popular saying, “Her Turk asker dogar” (every Turk is born a soldier) is repeated in daily conversations, school textbooks, the speeches of public officials and intellectuals, and is used as a drill slogan during military service. Its legitimacy goes without saying. In this chapter, my aim is to attempt a genealogy of the term military-nation and discuss the making of the myth that “the Turkish nation is a military-nation.”

A cross-disciplinary roundtable on the feminist politics of translation

Feminist Translation Studies: Local and Transnational Perspectives situates feminist translation as political activism. Chapters highlight the multiple agendas and visions of feminist translation and the different political voices and cultural heritages through which it speaks across times and places, addressing the question of how both literary and nonliterary discourses migrate and contribute to local and transnational processes of feminist knowledge building and political activism. This collection does not pursue a narrow, fixed definition of feminism that is based solely on (Eurocentric or West-centric) gender politics—rather, Feminist Translation Studies: Local and Transnational Perspectives seeks to expand our understanding of feminist action not only to include feminist translation as resistance against multiple forms of domination, but also to rethink feminist translation through feminist theories and practices developed in different geohistorical and disciplinary contexts. In so doing, the collection expands the geopolitical, sociocultural and historical scope of the field from different disciplinary perspectives, pointing towards a more transnational, interdisciplinary and overtly political conceptualization of translation studies.

Europe and the century of genocides: New directions in the feminist theorizing of genocide:

There’s a tremendous kind of hesitation in the scholarship on genocide to highlight gender because such a totalizing form of annihilation makes it very difficult to make differentiations among victims. And yet, once you raise the question of gender, your very terms of analysis are sharpened, certain structures of perpetration, of experience, memory and transmission come into sharper focus. (Marianne Hirsch, this issue)

Feminist questions at the centennial of the First World War

Special Open Forum on the anniversary of the First World War with contributions by Cynthia Enloe, Joane Nagel, Andrea Peto and Ayse Gul Altinay