Hülya Adak

Suffragettes of the empire, daughters of the Republic: Women auto/biographers narrate national history (1918-1935)

This paper explores modes of autobiographical writing by female authors in the early republican period. Women’s autobiographies draw a strict distinction between the narration of the private and the public self, as they promote the narration of the undomestic, professional self at the expense of the private. Ironically, even if the autobiographers in question were politically active in suffrage, women’s autobiographies either do not represent the authors’ involvement in such campaigns, or praise state feminism for granting emancipation. “Personal is political” only becomes a maxim for a later generation of women writers, with autobiographies and autobiographical novels of the post-1970 period underscoring the importance of exploring the subjectivity of the adult woman/narrator. More recent examples of auto/biographical writing blur the boundaries between private and public and narrate gendered accounts of republican history.

From l'Écriture Féminine to Queer Subjectivities: Sevgi Soysal, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, and Perihan Mağden

T his essay examines three works by women writers, Sevgi Soysal, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, and Perihan Mağden, who experiment with feminine writing (l’écriture féminine) in Turkish literature and explore the intersectionality of race, gender, sexuality, and the possibilities of narrating queer sexualities. A brief biography of the individual writer is followed by a discussion of the works in question, that is, TanteRosa (AuntRosa, 1968),DasLeben ist eineKarawanserei: hat zweiTüren, aus einer kam ich rein, aus der anderen ging ich raus (Life Is a Caravansary: Has Two Doors, I Went in One, I Came Out the Other, 1992), and Ali ile Ramazan (Ali and Ramazan, 2010). This essay is not a road map to the last five decades of countless works produced bywomenwriters in Turkey, but it highlights pivotal turning points in the way the particular novels narrate gender and sexuality. Soysal (1936–76) was a journalist, writer, actor, and activist. Tante Rosa was her first novel, followed by Yürümek (Walking, 1970), Yenişehirʾde Bir Öğle Vakti (Midday in Yenişehir, 1973), and Şafak (Dawn, 1975). She received the Orhan Kemal Award in 1974 for Yenişehirʾde Bir Öğle Vakti. During the military coup of March 12, 1971, Soysalwas imprisoned as amember of a left-wing organization, and in 1976 she published her prison memoir, Yıldırım Bölge Kadınlar Koğuşu (Yıldırım Women’s Ward). She also published a collection of short stories, Barış Adlı Çocuk (A Child Named Peace, 1976), and left an unfinished novel,Hoşgeldin Ölüm